Google engineer accidentally posts rant vs Google+
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| GMA News |
Not all is well at Google's upcoming social network Google+, with no less than a Google engineer airing his rants, and accidentally posting them in public.
Engineer Steve Yegge admitted posting the "long opinionated" rant on how Google could be doing a "much better job" on Google+.
"Sadly, it was intended to be an internal post, visible to everybody at Google, but not externally. But as it was midnight and I am not what you might call an experienced Google+ user, by the time I figured out how to actually post something I had somehow switched accounts," he said in his Google+ account.
While Yegge hinted he may re-post his rants internally at Google, he has taken the post down for now, "at my own discretion."
Besides, he said his post was meant to be a "private conversation between me and my peers and co-workers at Google."
"I love working at Google, and I especially love the fact that I'm comfortable posting something as inflammatory as my post may have been. The company is super open internally, and as I said several times in my post, they really try hard to do everything right. That includes being open to strongly differing opinions, and that has certainly not been true at every company I've worked at," he said.
A separate article on tech site Mashable said the rant came in the wake of reports that Google’s top management are not big users of Google+
Rant vs Google+
While Yegge pulled out his rant, it was re-posted elsewhere on the Internet, including other Google+ members' accounts.
After ranting about his former employer Amazon, he proceeded to score Google for not doing well on 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," he said.
"But no. No, it's like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don't know. It's pretty low. There are a few teams who treat the idea very seriously, but most teams either don't think about it all, ever, or only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way," he added.
He said Google+ is a prime example of Google's "complete failure" to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership.
Yegge particularly questioned Google's not giving developers enough privileges, saying even Microsoft is aware of what he called the "Dogfood rule."
"Microsoft has known about the Dogfood rule for at least twenty years. 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," he said.
He added 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.
Yegge said Facebook is successful because it built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work.
"I apologize to those (many) of you for whom all this stuff I'm saying is incredibly obvious, because yeah. It's incredibly frigging obvious. Except we're not doing it. We don't get Platforms, and we don't get Accessibility. The two are basically the same thing, because platforms solve accessibility. A platform is accessibility," he said.
"I'm not saying it's too late for us, but the longer we wait, the closer we get to being Too Late," he adde
