Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Running through quicksand

MegaCOrp moves slooooooooooowwwwwwly. After years working as an independent, working at MegaCorp is like running through quicksand. Paul Graham was right. Large Companies are incapable of moving fast (and thus, incapable of certain kinds of innovation).

2 comments:

Kunid said...

Hi Ravi,

Interesting. Can you elaborate a bit?

In your opinion

- Why do 'MegaCorp' companies suffer this problem? Is it sheer size? Difficulties in maintaining consistency across the organisation? What can these companies do to fix it? (surely as a hacker, you must have some ideas!)

- Am I parsing that implication correctly? (moves slowly -> Can't innovate). I don't quite agree with this. It would have made more sense if you said that any effort to innovate happens so slowly (having to get buy-in /sign-off from various parties) that, by that time something is agreed upon they find that others (possibly competitors) have eaten their lunch. Sun lost the NFS market share in this similar way to much smaller companies. However through a 'skunkworks' project, they were able to put a very compelling product line on the market (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaLfFhEZdqM&feature=relmfu)

Appreciate if you could shed more light on what you intended to say.

Ravi said...

if you read carefully what I said was,

"Large Companies are incapable of moving fast (and thus, incapable of *** certain kinds of**** innovation)" ,which seems to be what you are saying too.