
A VC: The Declining Power Of The Firm - toffer
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/04/the-declining-p.html
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lux
While it's interesting to advocate companies like Yahoo, instead of being
sucked up into the Microsoft fold, break themselves up into smaller, more
agile firms, it seems to me that perhaps the better action for Yahoo to take
would simply be to emulate the practices internally that afford these smaller
groups their agility instead of breaking up. There's a certain resilience that
a larger company has due to the pooling of funds and resources which each of
these groups within the company can harness. Then again, one area's leeching
of resources can hinder the others beyond a certain point too...

This is a similar argument to what PG makes here about how ideal group sizes
(for members' happiness) ought to be kept small:

<http://paulgraham.com/boss.html>

From an outsider's perspective, it looks like this is exactly what Google
tries to do internally, and what may be their biggest advantage over Yahoo et
al. Maintaining an agile (aka fragmented) internal structure (or lack of
structure) over a time though may prove to be quite the challenge...

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extantproject
Here's the original post this is based on, which is much better:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156547>

