Another formulation of Conway's Law is that communication problems in an organization will be manifested in their finished products. One example of this is from Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" has a scene where Tom West, the leader of the Data General effort to develop a 32 bit mini gets a look at the VAX, DEC's competing machine:
"Looking into the VAX, West had imagined he
saw a diagram of DEC’s corporate organization.
He felt that the VAX was too complicated.
He did not like, for instance, the system by
which various parts of the machine communicated
with each other; for his taste, there
was too much protocol involved. He decided
that VAX embodied flaws in DEC’s corporate
organization. The machine expressed that
phenomenally successful company’s cautious,
bureaucratic style. Was this true? West said it
didn’t matter, it was a useful theory."
"Looking into the VAX, West had imagined he saw a diagram of DEC’s corporate organization. He felt that the VAX was too complicated. He did not like, for instance, the system by which various parts of the machine communicated with each other; for his taste, there was too much protocol involved. He decided that VAX embodied flaws in DEC’s corporate organization. The machine expressed that phenomenally successful company’s cautious, bureaucratic style. Was this true? West said it didn’t matter, it was a useful theory."
(See http://www.computer.org/portal/cms_docs_annals/annals/mahone... for more background )