While it's interesting to advocate companies like Yahoo, instead of being sucked up into the Microsoft fold, break themselves up into smaller, more agile firms, it seems to me that perhaps the better action for Yahoo to take would simply be to emulate the practices internally that afford these smaller groups their agility instead of breaking up. There's a certain resilience that a larger company has due to the pooling of funds and resources which each of these groups within the company can harness. Then again, one area's leeching of resources can hinder the others beyond a certain point too...<p>This is a similar argument to what PG makes here about how ideal group sizes (for members' happiness) ought to be kept small:<p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/boss.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/boss.html</a><p>From an outsider's perspective, it looks like this is exactly what Google tries to do internally, and what may be their biggest advantage over Yahoo et al. Maintaining an agile (aka fragmented) internal structure (or lack of structure) over a time though may prove to be quite the challenge...