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Re:Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division by nradov on Wednesday October 22, 2025 @10:13PM (#45677426)
Setting up a separate insulated internal organization to pursue disruptive innovations is basically what Clayton Christensen recommended in "The Innovator's Dilemma" back in 1997. It's what IBM did to successfully develop the original PC.

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=46

Every tech industry executive has read that book and most large companies have at least tried to put it into practice. For example, Google has "X" (the moonshot factory, not the social media platform formerly known as Twitter).

https://x.company/

Re:Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division by dekhn on Wednesday October 22, 2025 @11:46PM (#45677960)
but X isn't really an insulated org... it has close ties with other parts of Google. It shares the corporate infra and it's not hard to get inside and poke around. it has to be, because it's intended to create new products that get commercialized through Google or other Alphabet companies.

A better example would be Calico, which faced significant struggles getting access to internal Google resources, while also being very secretive and closed off (the term used was typically an "all-in bet" or an "all-out bet", or something in between. Verily just underwent a decoupling from Google because Alphabet wants to sell it.

I think if you really want to survive cycles of the innovator's dilemma, you make external orgs that still share lines of communications back to the mothership, maintaining partial ownership, and occasionally acquiring these external startups.

I work in Pharma and there's a common pattern of acquiring external companies and drugs to stay relevant. I've definitely seen multiple external acquisitions "transform" the company that acquires them, if for no other reason than the startup employees have a lot more gumption and solved problems the big org was struggling with.

Re:Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division by nradov on Thursday October 23, 2025 @01:05AM (#45678320)
There are varying degrees of insulation. I'm not convinced that Calico is a good example of Christensen's recommendations. It seems like a vanity research project sponsored by a Google founder rather than an internal startup intended to bring a disruptive innovation to market.
Re:Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division by com2kid on Thursday October 23, 2025 @03:23AM (#45679149)
MSFT were the masters of this technique (spin off a startup, acquire it after it proves viable) for decades, but sadly they stopped.

Even internal to MS I worked on 2 teams that were 95% independent from the mothership, on one of them (Microsoft Band) we even went to IKEA and bought our own desks.

Pretty successful in regards to getting a product to market (Band 1 and 2 all up had iirc $50M in funding compared to Apple Watch's billion), but the big company politics still got us in the end.

Of course Xbox is the most famous example of MS pulling off an internal skunk works project leading to massive success.