Quote:

"Google Engineer: “Google+ is a Prime Example of Our Complete Failure to Understand Platforms”

Last night, high-profile Google engineer Steve Yegge mistakenly posted a long rant about working at Amazon and Google’s own issues with creating platforms on Google+. Apparently, he only wanted to share it internally with everybody at Google, but mistaken shared it publicly. For the most part, Yegge’s post focusses on the horrors of working at Amazon, a company that is notorious for its political infighting. The most interesting part to me, though, is Yegge’s blunt assessment of what he perceives to be Google’s inability to understand platforms and how this could endanger the company in the long run.

The post itself has now been deleted, but given Google+’s reshare function, multiple copies exist on Google’s own social network and elsewhere on the web.
Google+ Is a Knee-Jerk Reaction

Here is the meat of his argument:

“Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there’s something there for everyone.”

While Yegge doesn’t have a lot of good things to say about Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos, he does note that Bezos – unlike Google – understands that its not just about developing interesting products, but that it takes a platform to create a great product.

Besides Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft understand this, says Yegge: “It’s been part of their culture for a whole generation now. You don’t eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food. Doing that is simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes. Platforms are all about long-term thinking.”
“The Google+ Platform is a Pathetic Afterthought”

He especially criticizes the Google+ team for launching a product without an API:

“The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. Wee had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, wee had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: “So is it the Stalker API?” She got all glum and said “Yeah.” I mean, I was joking, but no… the only API call wee offer is to get someone’s stream. So I guess the joke was on me.”

Looking at the long term, Yegge implores Google to move away from being a pure product company to becoming more of a platform player:

“The Golden Rule of Platforms, “Eat Your Own Dogfood”, can be rephrased as “Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything.” You can’t just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate — ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If you delay it, it’ll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can’t cheat. You can’t have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the hard problems up front.

I’m not saying it’s too late for us, but the longer wee wait, the closer wee get to being Too Late.”

Overall, of course, I’ve been quite positive about Google+ and see it as a step in the right direction for Google. For the most part, Yegge’s arguments do ring true, though. It was quite a surprise to me that Google+ didn’t launch with a fully-baked API right away, for example, but I can also see why the team wanted to get the basic product out and see how people would react to it.

I assume Yegge’s post will kick off some major internal discussion about this at Google. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out over the coming months.