This was less about a memo showing up one day out of the blue and more like an attempt to bring resolution to a series of long, heated, and not terribly productive debates that took raged through the development teams over many months. It's worth knowing that the "before" state was that almost every team exposed their functionality via bespoke C/C++ libraries that everybody else linked to, and this resulted in enormous (for the time) spaghetti binaries. Want to write a little script that needs one piece of information from the database with customer information in it? No problem, just link the customer team's client library, and its 100MB of direct dependencies and 800MB of indirect dependencies. A handful of teams (notably those that already had to interface with third parties) were trying a different way (like http services written in Java) but they got a lot of side eye (or even more direct "you're doing it wrong" remarks) from the "core" developers.