This is a good read… and points to the important distinction which I think is important — whether you have processes or not, whether you can scale the projects or not, and most important — whether the software you are producing is aimed at being ‘cool’ or being ‘useful to business’. ..

Working at Google vs. Working at Microsoft @ WEB 2.0 JOURNAL

Google software business is divided between producing the “eye candy” - web properties that are designed to amuse and attract people - and the infrastructure required to support them. Some of the web properties are useful (some extremely useful - search), but most of them primarily help people waste time online (blogger, youtube, orkut, etc)
…
This orientation towards cool, but not necessarilly useful or essential software really affects the way the software engineering is done. Everything is pretty much run by the engineering - PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. While they do exist in theory, there are too few of them to matter.