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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

The article thoroughly fails to prove its claim. They had two separate divisions working on competing projects, sure. Was that bad? Did that actually hurt them? The idea that they would have built something better if they'd been on friendlier terms, if they'd talked to each other more, seems to just be blindly assumed.

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It gets even more interesting when you think that by definition, our economy is supposed to be a long term win by having completely separated companies building the same thing competitively.

If its poor allocation for the company, why is it a good allocation method for our economy as a whole?

If its a good allocation of resources for our economy, then what makes it bad for a company to do it internally?

Competition in an economy works because the market picks the winners and allocates resources to them. Often that means several winners because different competitors have complementary strengths and weaknesses. Nobody knows their requirements and price tolerance better than the customer. Incentives of the producer and customer are aligned.

Inside an organisation there’s no real mechanism equivalent to a market within which these alternatives can compete. It almost entirely comes down to politics, not relative cost, features and technical suitability. If a team’s solution is adopted by another department does their revenue go up? Do they get extra resources? How do they advertise their product? What’s their incentive to provide customer service and support? If they get a new project or strategic direction and this ‘product’ doesn’t fit their vision anymore what’s to stop them just dropping it? After all none of their budget actually comes from this ‘product’ no matter how many other teams use it.

It’s not that these problems can’t be solved, but there’s no real market or real revenue stream there so market forces have to be consciously emulated by management fiat. If enough layers of management lose focus on that, or management changes, it all breaks down.

It’s basically the same problem as with planned economies.

With internal completion aren’t there internal customers, or even external customers too? I think you bring up some interesting points, but think there’s some deeper considerations than market vs planned.

For instance at a macro scale, China has a hybrid approach and for many planned industrial growth areas have been successful from furniture to solar to being on their way with chips.

Planned investment is arguably how many companies work very successfully.

I’m not arguing for all planned control, but suspect some set of features that make some competitive approaches work well and some planned approaches work well.

> With internal completion aren’t there internal customers, or even external customers too?

Internal "customers" are generally spending someone else's "money" and their own success or failure is often more dependent on politics than their merits.

Competition works if your success metrics are measuring the right thing. But internal popularity often isn't.

It’s risk vs. efficiency. Duplicating work lowers risk at the cost of efficiency. Without redundancy, the market is unstable.

Look at the pipeline shortages of the past year. A chip shortage screws up many industries because all eggs are in one basket. Farmers have government incentives to overproduce for to prevent food instability.

A company always has competition due to promotions, by the way. Competing at a team level makes sense for R&D, since products can end up different. But I’m not sure how it makes sense for a big, resource heavy project.

Yep. If they had all coordinated their efforts then they might have settled on some inferior design and stuck with it for longer than necessary. That third group might not have been around to look into that CMOS stuff

Coordination and consensus can have non linear costs, and will vary with the amount complexity of the decisions that need to be made.

I hear you, but I don't think the article is that specific.. It's an internal article.. I happen to agree. Along the lines of Era, a greek, you could put stoicism in there. But writing about it wouldnt be stoic.

Are you looking for a 'proof' of his claim ?

When the title is "Internal competition can often be the most dangerous kind", I would expect some sort of support for the idea that internal competition is dangerous. I didn't find it. They had internal competition, their product failed, but there's only the vaguest handwave towards relating these two facts together.

What I see when I look back at things is often product lines only partly overlap. Other times with mass produced products the NRE is actually a small percentage of the unit cost. This is even more true when in markets where technology gets amortized over long periods.

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