Google Employee Wrote a Rant

It seems that a rant that had been penned by one of the Google employees about new social network Google+ became viral. At the same time, it turned out that the author is not in hot water with his boss.

An individual named Steve Yegge penned the rant with the approval of his boss, promising that he would take it offline if asked. The question is why would Google allow such a thing? The experts see two options: either Google is a very friendly-balanced firm accepting free speech, even the one going against Google’s image, or the whole affair is just a sly marketing trick for the new social network.

Steve Yegge claimed he was ranting only because he wanted the company to succeed. He admitted that Google’s rival, Facebook, offered him a job, but Yegge considered Google home and so he was having a rant. According to it, Google is better than his previous employer Amazon in many ways. Nevertheless, he pointed out that Jeff Bezos, also called Dread Pirate Bezos, can be considered a much better manager than any person at Google.

In result, Amazon had turned into an organization that thinks about everything in a services-first way, making it basic to the way they approach all designs, and even internal designs for things that will never be seen by anyone. They somehow worked out that Amazon needed to become a platform, while Google isn’t very good in platforms – it simply doesn’t understand them, and if someone does they are left in a minority.

Yegge hoped that competitive pressure from such giants as Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook would have made them cooperate and start creating universal services. However, platforms are the search giant’s 10th or 15th priority, which is undoubtedly pretty low, and there are only a couple of teams treating the idea. The Google+ was cited as an excellent example of the company’s total failure to understand platforms.

Yegge believes that Google+ was a kind of a knee-jerk reaction that depends on the wrong notion that Facebook became successful thanks to building a great product. In reality, Facebook became successful due to building a whole constellation of products by providing other people with the opportunity to do their work. After the team of developers for Google+ investigated the after-market, it agreed the network needed games. Meanwhile, Facebook proved that people cannot predict what people want.