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Comment by samratjp | Hacker News Reader

The scalability of their cohesive culture shows in their apps too. The Google account is so much more valuable than MSN/Hotmail or Yahoo ever did. It's almost as if their hiring process seems to translate to their apps itself i.e. each app is smart enough to play along nicely with other smart apps.

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Conway's Law: "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

If you create a corporate culture that encourages developers to talk to anyone in the company to get their job done, regardless of orgchart, you get a system that re-uses other systems whenever appropriate.

There're some downsides too: if anyone can talk to anybody, then the software starts looking like everyone's been talking to everyone. This leads to some real WTF dependencies, eg. why does websearch depend upon GMail?

in what way does websearch depend on gmail?

I think that he was just using that as an example. I hope it's not true in any way.

I actually find that tying aspect pretty annoying, especially as it relates to Google Groups. Yahoo Groups makes it much easier to subscribe to Yahoo lists with non-Yahoo email addresses and manage the subscriptions and what goes to which address from a control panel. With Google Groups, I had to make a separate Google Account for my .edu email address just so I could subscribe to a GG mailing list with it, so now I'm juggling multiple Google Accounts.

That's strange; I don't remember how I did it (maybe by starting out without a Google account???), but I have only one account with as far as Groups is concerned two associated email addresses (the Google one I never use and my real one) and it works just fine, whenever I join a Group I'm given the option of which to use.

I don't like juggling multiple Google accounts either. At my company several of us use the webmaster tools - but that can only be linked to one google account. So whenever any of us checks it, there's a lot of signing out & signing in again. It is indeed annoying.

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