This is such a great “what if” that I couldn’t pass it by, having worked for both companies.
In the beginning…
Google employees waking up at Microsoft: Hey, none of these tools work together! And our codebases are all fragmented and in different styles. This is going to take forever to fix! Let’s get started. Wait, where are the snacks?
Microsoft employees waking up at Google: Wow, everything here just works! I’ll freeze my little bit so our team can achieve our goals. "repeated across the company" Wait, where’s my office?
Weeks later…
At Microsoft: Windows is now open source. Office has DeepMind Clippy that writes your documents for you. It doesn’t really work but it’s a cool idea. XBox games run on Android, if your phone is the right model (it isn’t).
At Google: GMail has been rebranded to Google Mail Inbox for Enterprise Cloud Live. Google.com keeps going down but they’ve figured out how to put up an ad for Google Cloud in its place, and 7 Fortune 100 companies have closed Cloud deals, possibly as a result.
Months later…
At Microsoft: DeepMind Clippy is now deprecated. DeepMind Messenger, Microsoft Chat, and an app named CallMe have all launched and are mutually incompatible. Several Googlers have starved to death due to the lack of snacks. The postmortem has conclusively identified the root cause and a program created to deliver snacks by unicycle when a Googler appears on the verge of starvation.
At Google: Android has been rebranded to Windows for Phones. It’s 20% slower but nothing else has changed (and never will). All of the GBikes have been locked inside the building that houses the most influential VP. Absolutely no product decisions have been made. Google Cloud now has 60% of the Fortune 500 as customers.
Shortly thereafter…
Microsoft changes its name to Google. Google changes its name to Microsoft. And balance is restored to the universe.
