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Wow: Google insider explains why Big G may lose the Internet wars

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JavaJones:
This is a really amazing post by a Google employee, supposedly intended originally for a private Google audience but "accidentally" posted publicly and now, apparently, allowed to remain public. Read it while it lasts!
https://plus.google.com/112678702228711889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX
Some choice quotes:
I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right... But there's one thing [Amazon] do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.
--- End quote ---
That one last thing that Google doesn't do well is Platforms. We don't understand platforms. We don't "get" platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on. But no. No, it's like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don't know. It's pretty low.
--- End quote ---

It's a long write-up but well worth reading all of it. Please do!

I don't really have much to add except to say that I've never really understood this issue as clearly as he states it here. I've had some sense of it, but the way he lays it out makes it blindingly obvious. I hope Google learns from this because I like their products and the general way they do things, but it's true that they are slowly losing the platform wars. I honestly thought G+ must have had a strong platform vision internally that was slowly being exposed to the outside world, but it sounds like maybe that's not the case. Eek!

- Oshyan

mahesh2k:
Internet is much better if no single brand manipulates it in one profitable direction. Dominance makes internet experience monotonous no matter how good they offer services. If you look at their *new* minimalistic layouts for every product (blogger, adsense and other sites) you'll realize that they suck at minimalistic interface and usability these days. Google fonts and blogger for example are big FAIL and not just that take a look at google adsense mobile interface, it sucks badly in reporting.

I think only way i can sum this up - stop pleasing everyone. Stop being perfect for everyone. Stop competing for market share by creating clone of every popular service out there. They're acting like amateurs these days. Closing google labs was a bad move. When you stop innovating, you end up emulating. Good luck google for such deceptive vision.

ecaradec:
Steve Yegge is actually a well known blogger here : http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/

The old stuff is awesome, the new stuff is less good. He slowly stopped blogging as he got immersed in google.

zridling:
Yegge makes some very good points, and while many journalists thought this inflammatory, I thought it was helpful. In any company/corp./organization big enough, you're going to have large differences, and this is a good one. That he felt secure enough to air this out and not get fired tells me something about the company. Now only if they'd listen. Essentially he's saying, let's build a foundation and stop with all the neat new widgets we're throwing at the wall and seeing what sticks. You want an 'ecosystem'? Then you need a proper platform on which to build it.

40hz:
It is amazing that the problem of "never being given enough time to do it right, but always being assigned unlimited hours to do it over" continues to be the bane of so many American businesses.

Woulda thought Google would be above that. Especially since G.P. Zachary's 1994 book Show Stopper, which documented Microsoft's crash program to develop Windows NT under the directorship of Dave Cutler (of VAX/VMS fame) is a working blueprint for what a massive and fundamental platform dev project is about  - and for.

(Note: this was also the book that popularized the phrase "Eat your own dog food." and helped embed it into the collective subconscious of the tech world.) 8)

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