> Why do you think there was such a clash between departments? There's always some friction because different divisions have different interests, but EA seems to sound particularly bad at this.
A distinct lack of an internal single threat to unify against, like a Steve Jobs style figure. I think the closest I saw to this was Peter Moore, who was a nice guy, but (thankfully) does not tolerate assholes at all. The result was the only serious threats were external, so when playing the PR war the handful of problematic studio heads would blame everything bad on EA, while trying to take credit for everything good. Because of their public positions no one has the power to remove those problems (that would be evil EA being evil), so they would steadily float upwards to positions from which they can then terrorize the well meaning studio and department heads.
There were various initiatives I saw (clear billion+ dollar opportunities) that couldn't get going because it required three departments to align in such a way that someone (one of the leaders of the three departments) would get the credit, and the war over who would get the credit would get so intense that the initiative could never happen. (I have heard stories out of Google that suggest this has been even worse there going back to a similar timeframe - some of the VP and above level offsites sounded quite fun).
Similarly I saw people with whole production units they knew were trainwrecks publicly align with another department they secretly hated so when their high profile project crashed and burned they would blame it on the other department. This would be worked out before the project even entered production, and was even well known by third parties that tried to exploit it.
By far the most successful projects there were born from some historic trauma, such as the EA spouse or a giant technical fubar. Those situations provided the impetus to grow up, and they really did. A consequence of this is the FIFA org, in my era, remains one of the most professional software organizations I ever saw, and I was liasing with most of the big tech companies. This also explains why the prevailing EA view was the PS3 hack saved the Playstation by forcing Sony to grow up or go home.
Repairing and recovering from that outage required the Playstation org at Sony to adopt a degree of professionalism wrt all tech dev and operations that started paying off remarkably quickly.
At the time a good number of people thought as a result of all this Sony would be pushed out of the console business.
A distinct lack of an internal single threat to unify against, like a Steve Jobs style figure. I think the closest I saw to this was Peter Moore, who was a nice guy, but (thankfully) does not tolerate assholes at all. The result was the only serious threats were external, so when playing the PR war the handful of problematic studio heads would blame everything bad on EA, while trying to take credit for everything good. Because of their public positions no one has the power to remove those problems (that would be evil EA being evil), so they would steadily float upwards to positions from which they can then terrorize the well meaning studio and department heads.
There were various initiatives I saw (clear billion+ dollar opportunities) that couldn't get going because it required three departments to align in such a way that someone (one of the leaders of the three departments) would get the credit, and the war over who would get the credit would get so intense that the initiative could never happen. (I have heard stories out of Google that suggest this has been even worse there going back to a similar timeframe - some of the VP and above level offsites sounded quite fun).
Similarly I saw people with whole production units they knew were trainwrecks publicly align with another department they secretly hated so when their high profile project crashed and burned they would blame it on the other department. This would be worked out before the project even entered production, and was even well known by third parties that tried to exploit it.
By far the most successful projects there were born from some historic trauma, such as the EA spouse or a giant technical fubar. Those situations provided the impetus to grow up, and they really did. A consequence of this is the FIFA org, in my era, remains one of the most professional software organizations I ever saw, and I was liasing with most of the big tech companies. This also explains why the prevailing EA view was the PS3 hack saved the Playstation by forcing Sony to grow up or go home.