That&#x27;s not actually true, at all.  The tightest bonds of collaboration are usually within a team, and the next tightest are between a product team and its users.  It&#x27;s not unusual for a department to take its users&#x27; side <i>against the rest of the same corporation</i>, like for example when Google Search levied an SEO penalty against Google Chrome, or how Google PageSpeed marks many Google sites as slow.<p>It&#x27;s also not unusual for organizations to collaborate on one aspect and compete on another.  On one hand, Google is in fairly tight with the Obama administration, with the HealthCare.gov rescue &amp; USDS being largely led by ex-Google and ex-Twitter engineers on temporary leave.  On the other, all the tech companies banded together to encrypt everything when they found out the NSA was snooping on their wire links.<p>I used to believe as you did, dividing big entities up into &quot;government&quot; and &quot;corporations&quot;, but then personal experience in a big corporation and a lot of friends in government showed me that this is not at all how the world operates.  Ultimately it&#x27;s a lot more chaotic, and the default state in most relationships is &quot;frenemy&quot;.