For now. This is a kind of cultural shift that happens when companies grow. It doesn't happen overnight, nor does anyone actually want it to happen. But in practice it seems to nearly inevitably creep in. I'd love to read more about reasons why, and what can be done about it.
Part of it is about changing the incentives and how people are "paid" for their work in large organizations.
What drives performance for individuals or groups within an organization, isn't necessarily going to ensure that the organization as whole operates without friction. For me, this fits under the topic of "alignment" that leadership teams in large organizations talk about, but many people are ignorant to, especially when coming from acquired startups.
If you decide that identity (user management, directory services or whatever broad feature) is a core service and put a group in ownership of that then every other team may end up with a dependency on that group. Initially, pooling resources seems like a good idea, but it becomes the critical path and they end up taking more and more incongruent feature requests as the rest of the organization grows.
Eventually identity are a bottleneck, but are challenged with feature request brokering between other teams. Relative to other groups in the org identity becomes this monster team and you are left wondering if it should really be one group, or include leadership from other parts of your organization to ensure it can account for all requests and more effectively broker.
And then you, as a high level manager, throw the rudder entirely the other way. Now every department, or even every team has their own account database, their own chat, their own ticket system, their own crm, their own docs, and everyone else gets locked out of all of those.
Maybe these orgs are just too damn big. Google is 75k people, MS 124k. Those are on the small side, I can't remember which tech company, but they're at 600k. They're also chained to stock prices and earnings. They can't commit to any product for any sizable length of time.
I'm gonna preach it until I try it or die and figure out it doesn't work, but my genuine belief is these companies are too big to effectively function or to counter threats. If your company population is a small town, how many middle managers do you have? Tens of thousands?
Not necessarily a tech company, but I worked at Disney for a few years. They have about 500K employees. It's such a large company that their own companies sue each other. Like, our team couldn't use some Disney IP because we had to have our legal team clear with their legal team. That's when you know a company is too big.
Edit: by "their own companies" I mean all of their subsidiaries.
If they are too big to effectively function or counter threats then how did they get that big in the first place?
Clearly size has benefits that compensate for some of the undeniable downsides. It's almost a tautology.
Also, look at the great organisational and cultural variety among big companies. Size is not the only thing that defines organisational complexity and effectiveness.
