Google Employee Accidentally Shares Rant About Google+ 354
First time accepted submitter quantumplacet writes "Longtime Googler Steve Yegge posted an insightful rant on his Google+ page about how Google is failing to make platforms of its products. He also shares some interesting little tidbits about his six year stint at Amazon working for the 'Dread Pirate Bezos'. The rant was intended to be shared only with his Google coworkers, but was accidentally made public. Steve has since removed it from his page, but it has been reposted elsewhere."
Amazon & Google (Score:5, Interesting)
I interviewed at Amazon once, what he says is true about the offices, they didn't look very clean and impressive. That's a bad impression right there.
Getting back to the topic, Google does get the outside contributors thing. Look at their search engine (leverage webmasters content and make them do the work of optimizing their site for your search engine), Android (app developers) just like his examples of Facebook, MS and Amazon.
But yes, Google is getting into a troubling mess with Wave, Buzz and now Google+(?).
Re:It's not a rant, it's a plea for change.. (Score:4, Interesting)
The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we 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 we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess the joke was on me.
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.
Facebook gets it. That's what really worries me. That's what got me off my lazy butt to write this thing. I hate blogging. I hate... plussing, or whatever it's called when you do a massive rant in Google+ even though it's a terrible venue for it but you do it anyway because in the end you really do want Google to be successful. And I do! I mean, Facebook wants me there, and it'd be pretty easy to just go. But Google is home, so I'm insisting that we have this little family intervention, uncomfortable as it might be.
It's just much harder to back out of it now as it's integrated to Google search.. Google really shot itself to foot here.
Re:It's not a rant, it's a plea for change.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Facebook gets it.
(blink)
(blink blink)
Wow. If what Facebook gets is what he just said, then I don't want Google+ to get the same thing.
Sure, upgrade the API. Convince devs they will have a willing herd of eyeballs to cadge. But please, do not let it turn into a crashing avalanche of sorry crap in the process.
Take the Facebook openness, and apply a little Apple App Store QA.
Oh, and become your own Zynga. Because letting them take down the primary dollar stream is dopey.
Amazon sells products, not ads. (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazon can use a platform-based service because Amazon sells things for money. Allowing programs to find out about things Amazon has for sale is profitable, t Amazon's marketing info gets redistributed. Amazon's "cloud" is a pay service, and making pay services available makes money. So Amazon's platform is a win for Amazon.
Google, on the other hand, is entirely ad-based. (Yes, they get about 3%-7% of their revenue from actual products they sell. So what?) So they don't want their data repurposed, especially if repurposing deletes the ads.
Facebook is quite platform-oriented internally, with internal services making heavy use of interprocess communication. But little of that is exposed to the outside world. What is exposed is heavily restricted. Facebook games have to accept payment only in Facebook's private money, with a 30% take. [facebook.com]
Google used to be more platform oriented. There was a Google SOAP search interface [google.com] and a Google Web Search API. [google.com] Both have been discontinued. They didn't push ads.
Google's priority is to return search results in under 100ms. That requires tight integration. It's all about cache management, not platform APIs. Some data has to be pushed to clients, rather than pulled through APIs, or performance will suffer badly.
Given Google's business model, they don't seem to be doing their infrastructure wrong.
Please start by platforming youtube. (Score:4, Interesting)
If I want to embed a youtube video on a page optimized to mobile phones, I am fucked. There is for example no way to have youtube show a screenshot of the video, and when the user click it, have it play fullscreen.
But m.youtube.com does it, so it can be done, just as long as you don't want to do it on your own page. (So they have an internal api to do it, but there is no way for me to access it).
And just try to watch this thread: https://groups.google.com/forum/embed/?place=forum/youtube-api-gdata&showsearch=true&showpopout=true&parenturl=http%3A%2F%2Fcode.google.com%2Fapis%2Fyoutube%2Fforum%2Fdiscussion.html#!searchin/youtube-api-gdata/embed$20youtube/youtube-api-gdata/VSk5vQFULts/sddOXH4wXTAJ and look at the response from the youtube team. The best answer is something like: "Use the following hack, which may work. And I can't say if it break the platform agreement, so it might even be allowed..
Re:Amazon & Google (Score:4, Interesting)
They don't have any idea how to create a successful business
Does Google ? That's sort of the crux of the rant, that they can't build successful platforms and use those to expand their business into new areas. Google in some ways bears a resemblance to the Microsoft of the late 90's: one cash cow and a lot of money pits they throw money in to avoid competitors gaining a foothold anywhere where it can threaten their core business. What are Google making from products like Google+ and Android except the benefit of using them as a hedge against Facebook and Apple moving in on their business ? To me those look a lot like what MS did with the Xbox as a hedge against Playstation (and consoles in general) and products like Internet Explorer, created to prevent Netscape from becoming dominant. Ultimately this has been a losing strategy for Microsoft, which has stagnated, and for its stockholders because the stock has been flat. So I think Google stockholders might rightfully be worried about reports like the rant posted.
Re:It's not a rant, it's a plea for change.. (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know what people are praising this idiot for.
First you do not openly "publicly" speak ill of current or former employees, and I don't mean his gaffe. I mean even if he did limit his words to Google employees. He could have had a frank discussion with his managers, certainly but this is over the top. In any case if he's so sure about what is and isn't right, why isn't he running his own company.
Secondly a lot of what this guy is saying is complete rubbish. You already mentioned his praise of the mess that Facebook is. Among other things he seems to
- approve of Bezo's approach which he characterises 'Do this or you'll get fired. I don't care about you at all'. In fact he seems not to care about employee morale at all.
- believe there is only one way for a company to succeed. Clearly not true.
- think that tradeoffs of SOA like difficulty debugging are always appropriate. Adds to the last point but is a specific technical failing
The way he writes I wonder if he was drunk when he wrote it. More likely he's just another socially inept geek who's not learned to turn their intelligence on the problem of playing well with others.
He should at least be reprimanded.
Re:It's not a rant, it's a plea for change.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Senior engineers have to address cultural problems at companies. You don't do that by being nice, or respectful.
YES YOU DO. It's called being a professional. There is absolutely no need nor excuse for bullying, or being disrespectful in a professional workplace. And if you don't want to do it for idealistic reasons, remember that in the modern age you're more likely to end up with a lawsuit if that sort of behaviour occurs.
If I see a problem at work I discuss it with my managers or in an open forum. I do not act like a jerk about it, and I NEVER get personal. It's unlikely this guy will get his way and he certainly wouldn't have if it had not gone viral.
Re:It's not a rant, it's a plea for change.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed. I do most of my online shopping at Amazon, and when I use other shopping websites -- or especially the iTunes store -- I wonder how they get shit so wrong that Amazon's had running well for a decade. Both their search function and their personalized recommendations are way ahead of any other site I've tried. Their music recommendations have introduced me to some of my favorite bands, which is impressive considering my obscure and varied tastes, although their personalized Gold Box items seem to now mostly consist of shit they want to push that's completely unrelated to my prior purchases (whereas before they were highly correlated to recent purchases).
Re:I'm guessing... (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing that most of the sibling comments to the parent post don't seem to get is that the parent post is quoting NEARLY VERBATIM an ACTUAL prompt in the Google+ app.
Re:Amazon sells products, not ads. (Score:2, Interesting)
The company I work for added maps to one of the tools in our platform. We went with Bing because their API set was... just better. Politically speaking everyone on the team preferred Google but no one could justify using their product from a technical standpoint.