[dekhn]

I am not sure Google could survive splitting prod. The enormous value of internal vertical integration that enabled them to grow ads & search traffic would be hard to replicate if there wasn't one signal source of truth that you could contact directly when there is an infrastructure problem.

I think "colossal pain in the ass" underestimates the order of magnitude of pain it would involve (borne by the hapless engineers, no doubt). Divesting the Cloud part of Google (IE moving Cloud into its own independent "prod2") is also somethinig interesting to think about.

[andromeduck]

They already have silos so might not be so bad if a separate tools & infrw team can be formed/shared between the resultant companies.