[freedomben]

Yes, this tendency of people drives me absolutely insane. I don't know why people so strongly default to thinking of large organizations as a monolith, but it is one of the largest fallacies that I see repeated continuously here.

I kind of wonder if it is spill-over from Apple. Apple is notoriously tight, controlled from the center, or at least was during Steve Job's reign. I wonder if that brush doesn't get applied to every company, even if it is a very different type of company.

[deely3]

But this fallacy make sense. Even the smallest part of the large oranization can't go against organization course/directions.

[freedomben]

Yes definitely, if the top says "we're doing it this way" then the smallest parts will have to do it that way. But in a company like Google (and IME most large companies) the top doesn't get that specific. They give broad strategic objectives and let the departments figure out the best way to achieve them. It's possible of course, but seems unlikely to me that the top would say something like, "remove RSS feed support for the developer blog." And if they did, I would expect either complete silence on the issue, or some corporatey Newspeak about it. Since they said "Unfortunately, we don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're actively working on a solution" that to me seems like a top-down direction is extremely unlikely.

[joepie91_]

I don't think most of the criticisms towards Google literally assert that the top brass demanded specific technical decisions. Rather, "the top brass demanded it" or variations thereof is meant as shorthand for "the top brass set objectives and operational constraints that ultimately led to this choice being made, and this type of consequence was foreseen by said top brass but deemed an acceptable tradeoff".

The workings are much more indirect, the intentions slightly different, but the outcome is the same.