I first observed this in my first job at Amdocs, where we were building systems for AT&T. Inadvertently, the software would mimic how the organization was structured — who had decision rights over what, who reported to whom, how the teams were structured, etc. This unnecessarily made the software complex and ineffective but solved that particular manager's problems.
Turns out, there is a law for this called — Conway's law.
Now, lets look at hard evidence. Let's compare the patent maps of Google and Apple. You will notice that Apple's patent map is focused like it's structure (from the meme) and Google's is dispersed.
