Branding and Conway’s Law

A few nitpicks:

    “Your team should work like an open-source project.” Funny, because that’s exactly what
    GitHub (the product) is.

No it's not. Sure, it's used by a lot of open-source projects, and it's built on quite a few open-source technologies, but if you were to ask someone at Github to give you the source code for the whole product at all (let alone under an "open-source" (read: free software) license), you'd probably be laughed at.

This is like saying that Windows is an "open-source product" because some people happen to use it to write open-source software.

    Even their Error 404 page keeps with the “freedom” branding — you land on the design team’s
    interpretation of MC Escher’s house of stairs.

It's actually more likely to be an interpretation of Escher's "Impossible Cube" [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_cube

An interesting read. Hopefully I'll remember to keep an eye out for symmetries between branding, culture and product in the future. It would be fun to find and document more instances of such symmetries, especially with respect to troubled products or companies. What can we learn from looking at successful (or unsuccessful) attempts to turn products/brands around from this angle?