Bloomberg Businessweek has a fascinating long piece about the current state of Google, which has somehow become split up into a loosely knit confederation of duchies. Top Google brass has started hosting meetings between the heads of the various departments in hopes of streamlining the organization.

The unstated goal is to save the search giant from the ossification that can paralyze large corporations. It won't be easy, because Google is a tech conglomerate, an assemblage of parts that sometimes work at cross-purposes. Among the most important barons at the meeting: Andy Rubin, who oversees the Android operating system for mobile phones; Salar Kamangar, who runs the video-sharing site YouTube; and Vic Gundotra, who heads up Google's secret project to combat the social network Facebook.

You should read the whole thing if you're at all interested in Google's future and who the primary players are. Speaking of Google's schisms: After a month of using the Cr-48, I still think it's a fine very limited-purpose laptop with excellent battery life, but these shots of Android's launching-in-March Honeycomb tablet operating system seem to suggest Android will be outperforming Chrome OS in just a few months. Android doesn't have Chrome's instant-on capability, but it's still a relatively lightweight OS. I'm starting to wonder if Chrome OS will be murdered in the crib.