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+.
Context & Ripple Effects
The rant lands four months after Google fumbled the launch of Google+ brand pages, an episode that already had analysts asking whether the company thought about Google+ as a product or a platform. Steve Yegge's accidentally public post answers that question from inside: he praises Amazon's platform discipline while calling Google+ a prime example of Google's failure to understand platforms.
The timing sharpens the sting. The same week, Google announced Cloud SQL in limited preview and moved Cloud Storage out of Labs, explicitly targeting Amazon Web Services — so an internal critique of Google's platform culture surfaces just as the company is courting developers against Amazon, whose Comscore traffic growth and Kindle Fire demand signals have made it the quarter's standout.
First-order effects
- Yegge's critique hands Google a public relations problem on its own social network, forcing executives to respond to a platform argument made by their own engineer rather than an outside critic.
Second-order effects
- Amazon emerges as the reference model in the debate: with AWS under direct attack from Google's new storage and App Engine offerings, Yegge's praise of Bezos' platform approach gives Amazon's side of the cloud contest an unforced credibility boost.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large consumer web companies face pressure to treat third-party developer platforms as core products rather than features attached to social or competitive projects — with hiring, retention, and engineering culture becoming visible competitive variables when internal candor leaks.
The trend: Consumer web giants are increasingly judged by whether they open genuine developer platforms, with Amazon's playbook serving as the standard against which Google's efforts are measured.