Microsoft execs on Apple's music store (2003)
>Both teams on both sides wanted this to come together>It takes apple to make a move for us to break through communication issues and get anything doneImagine paying millions of dollars for "the best" developers, designers, managers, yet they can't even communicate with each other properly to align with common interests. FAANG culture is becoming so slow and ineffective that I'm not surprised they are cutting tens of thousands of employees.Where I'm from we have an expression - "many grandmas, lazy/spoiled child" - and it's especially rings true in creative work.For something truly brilliant to be created, you need someone with a vision and freedom to implement it. It's extremely rare for something brilliant to come from committee or top-down designed by managers delegating work to a bunch of teams.
It's one of the reasons even open-source struggles with design - you need one or a tiny team of aligned brilliant people to work together, and you need to give them freedom to do it. Not constrain them with meetings, micromanaging the product and letting everyone express their opinion. That's how you get a terrible, bland, uninspiring design.Recently I had a chance to work at a theatre production that ended up suffering from the same issue - the director had no vision but only an idea, so he delegated
different work to everyone, then micromanaged people and intersected into every attempt at collaboration with his own opinions and ideas. As new people were coming in, their ideas were added into the mix, creating a show that ended up being even worse than mediocre.