Slashdot Mirror
Google Employee Accidentally Shares Rant About Google+
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."
I think that it's got a lot of good information, and this guy desperately wants Google to embrace different ideals than they've held in the past. That said, I think rant is an inappropriate word for this. It's very interesting.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Sceptics will eat it up in no time :)
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
that we'll see some changes to G+ shortly which (make it more clear)/(ask for confirmation) when posting publicly.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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+(?).
Insightful is not the first word I think of when it comes to rants. If it's insightful, is it really a rant?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Quit making fun of quantumplacet, this is hi's or hers first story.
But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.
Also the most insightful section...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From the original post:
***UPDATE #2***
This post has received a lot of attention. For anyone here who arrived from The Greater Internet - I stand ready to remove this post if asked. As I mentioned before, I was given permission to keep it up.
Google's openness to allow us to keep this message posted on its own social network is, in my opinion, a far greater asset than any SaS platform. In the end, a company's greatest asset is its culture, and here, Google is one of the strongest companies on the planet.
-----
May I strongly suggest making your own copy of this now before it does disappear.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Stevey's Google Platforms Rant
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. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.
I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding - though again this varies by group, so it's luck of the draw. They don't give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don't have any of our perks or extras -- they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that's the end of it. Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place.
To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have a bunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases. We wouldn't take most of it even if it were free.
I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google.
I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it's given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it's created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk.
But there's one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.
Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn't list it as a strength or anything. I'm just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We're talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies wi
Visit the
Hey, you work at Google. Nobody has your perks or extras, guy.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Period inside the quote. "Grammar" capitalized, as it is a part of your proper noun. "Own" is arguably redundant, since you start with "your."
You're welcome.
I love the smell of irony in a grammar Nazis post.
Google's openness to allow us to keep this message posted on its own social network is, in my opinion, a far greater asset than any SaS platform
Doesn't this very dismissal of S&S as less than the simple ability to allow a slightly embarrassing post to remain provide a head-slapping moment?
I mean, either platforms are a top priority or they are not... this attitude of "look how awesome we are because we can publish material which reveals some internal dispute" strikes me as either being irrelevant or missing the point. Culture alone is NOT ENOUGH. Lots of places have great culture and then fail eventually (not that Google is in danger of failing anytime soon mind you!).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Grammar" capitalized, as it is a part of your proper noun.
Full sentences please.
"Own" is arguably redundant, since you start with "your."
That comma is arguably redundant.
They will move this guy up. He has a clue. In addition, they would post that all over Google and make that a priority.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Period inside the quote.
Not in proper English, no. In American English, perhaps, but that's almost an oxymoron at this point. :p
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
There's a lot of good stuff there, and I hope the Big Boys are listening because the guy really gets it. But I must say I loved this:
head over to developers.google.com and browse a little. Pretty big difference, eh? It's like what your fifth-grade nephew might mock up if he were doing an assignment to demonstrate what a big powerful platform company might be building if all they had, resource-wise, was one fifth grader.
#DeleteChrome
Too bad Facebook doesn't realize that 3rd party developers are important, because their API is probably the worst thing I've ever seen in computing. If Google could deliver a consistent and unchanging API (unlike facebook), they would have a winner.. but Steve was right, google just doesn't see the light where APIs are concerned. I've used a few google APIs, for google earth and google maps, and their documentation is piss poor compared to MSDN. Not just that, but there are many things that are ridiculously convoluted to attempt in those APIs. They don't even include mercator-to-cartesian in their API, which is a HUGE miss in that arena. It's a pitiful attempt at an API really. Wake up Google! You aren't too big to fail!
It's about Google as a whole.
-- we're here you're not
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.
Google used to be more platform oriented. There was a Google SOAP search interface and a Google Web Search API. 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.
But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.
Heh.
Dear Google, please start by making Youtube a platform.
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..
If Steve Yegge were at Apple, he probably would have been walked out by security by now.
(Although, once they build the new Steve Job's Memorial Spacebase, I assume they will have some sort of traction beam to remove employees more efficiently at the push of a button - why wait for and pay for a security officer.)
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Hey, you work at Google. Nobody has your perks or extras, guy.
I'm not your guy, buddy.
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.
Well, duh. I've worked for a bunch of tech companies, and when they decided that spending a ton of money on a fancy office was better than spending the money on hardware and employees, that was always a pretty good sign that it was going downhill.
The writer goes to great lengths to discuss how Amazon does almost nothing right. He went on to state that Amazon's interface sucks (because of Bezos, natch), and how awful it was that the Apple human interface guy that was brought in was ignored.
Looking at the money Amazon is bringing in, looking at the way Amazon absolutely dominates their field... I don't think Jeff Bezos gives a rat's tail what one of his ex-coders thinks. Plus, Google's storybook offices are indeed the exception and not the rule. He paints this picture of Amazon's offices like they're something out of a Charles Dickens novel, and then goes on to savage Amazon and Bezos for not giving to charities (wonder what he thought of Apple?) and "political" matters (What political matters, Google guy? Did he not support your favored candidate or something?).
Methinks this fella has an axe to grind. He might have some points, but the Amazon rants come off as bitter, and frankly, just how bad are they doing things if they're that successful? Bezos may indeed be a tyrant, but... so what? So was Jobs and Larry Ellison and Ted Turner and most other driven business visionaries. Again, Google is the exception, not the rule here. And yet, for as great as he says they are, he sure seems to be unhappy about how they do things in the end.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I don't have to say anything about this post. All I have to do is lean back and grin.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Hey pal, he's not your buddy!
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
His post was more about a overall philosophy of development building blocks than about Google+ specifically. Google+ and some other Google products were examples of why.
Very good article.
I feel that these "problems" with google are common to all successful companies. When a company has a lot of success in one area, it seems to prefer to find similar innovations in the future. Google says they want to be more innovative but having worked there I don't see them being able to avoid their blind spot. For example, when they tried to launch a second-life clone, there were long threads (mostly negative) about it because that kind of product is so very different from google's successes.
Obviously, "success" is not a bad problem to have but I think the conflict is that google wants to believe it is not blinded by its success. The Steve Jobs analogy is most interesting because I think Apple's second wave was due to the fact that it wasn't dominant any more and I suspect their weakness made that it possible for Apple to consider innovation outside its core business model. It also helps that Steve would tell people what to do and didn't need a committee to set the direction. Google is more like several really smart committees each charting conflicting courses (e.g. android, gwt, chrome os, dart, etc).
I think google's "problem" is also their greatest strength. Google wants to hire engineers who are pretty much the same A-type personality. They want the "googley" employee. They are awesome employees but it is fundamentally flawed to think that hiring some many similarly minded people wouldn't make a company blind. You would expect this blindness when the average google employee's views differs from the general population (i.e. "they don't get it").
At this point, some of google's success has to come from acquisitions. Youtube is a good example. They can't get there any other way.
So have we /.'ed Google yet?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
FTFY
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Period inside the quote.
Minor quibble, but this is one of the many US-UK differences -- UK style tends to put final punctuation outside the quotation marks, unless that punctuation is part of the quote. US style tends to include the final punctuation inside the quotation marks all the time, which can cause confusion when quoting things like code, where a stray punctuation mark can cause all kinds of fun mayhem.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
as if they have enough cash to get away with stupid for an indefinite period of time.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
iGoogle is already a Google service.... http://www.google.com/ig
There's a lot of truth to what he said but I would argue that a complete set of APIs is maybe the 2nd or 3rd most important thing, - not the first. There's been some arguably very good platforms with excellent developer tools that failed in the marketplace because they offered nothing to the USER that was compelling enough to get them to change platforms.
Along with creating a good platform, in order to attract developers you need to be able to deliver a user base. Facebook can do that. Amazon can do that. Microsoft can do that. Apple can do that on the iPhone, it's been harder on the Mac. NeXT couldn't. OS/2 couldn't.
Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft all got into the market early enough with PRODUCTS that were compelling enough. It's a lot tougher for the followers. Just look at the iPad vs. Zoom vs. Touchpad. When your platform/product's usefulness actually depends on a critical mass of other people using it, - like a social network (Google+) it has to offer something so much better it gets people to switch in huge numbers. Google+ hasn't done that. Lot's of people have tried it but when you're whole reason for going there is social networking and everybody else is on Facebook, well, let's just say a good platform isn't going to save you.
He covers that:
His point is that Google is less competitive when they make products that are not backed by platforms, while their competitors offer both.
It really depends on what you are trying to do with Facebook. The newish Graph API is an absolute DREAM compared to the cobbled together mess that was the old API. Nearly everything you could ever care to pull from/post to Facebook is available via a fairly well thought out RESTful-ish interface. The only thing you need to pass into them is an access token which you can get with another simple call to the Graph API. The Graph API also has a push notification service so you can subscribe to events and Facebook will ping you when there are changes. I cannot believe I just posted something defending Facebook, but their API is FAR from the worst API out there.
iGoogle for the eventual Apple acquisition of the hegemonic Google. Imagine a hedgemon consuming a hedgemon.
Cheers.
Yours In Marxism,
K. Trout,
Is hedgemon a pokemon who lives in a bush?
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
In soviet russia, serious googlers hire YOU.
#include bier;
And so we wind up with a browser that doesn't let you set the default font size. Talk about an affront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get older I'm actually going blind. For real. I've been nearsighted all my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close. So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing: it can lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they're quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you're blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life.
New stuff is fine; just let me have the old way (i.e. status bar, menu, View>Page Source) and don't send me to about:config
FTA : "In fact I myself find the website disturbingly daunting, and I worked there for over half a decade. I've just learned to kinda defocus my eyes and concentrate on the million or so pixels near the center of the page above the fold."
Huh? we are talking about the e-commerce site?. Just type in what you want and hit search. Add to cart. submit, done. How hard is that? Retail usuallly isn't about big empty spaces. Unless you have large profit margins or physically large products (think Apple stores, 'phone' stores, car dealerships, high end audio etc)
Google does have a compelling product, it's called search. If they start a platform initiative on search, they at least stand a fighting chance.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
I believe he stressed that it should be their top priority from now on.
A good platform is a wonderful thing but when you're new to a market a compelling product is far and away more important. The API can come later. It's good to know that's where you're going when you start but a complete API doesn't necessarily need to be ready at launch. The iPhone SDK wasn't available at launch. Facebook's API also came later and Amazon's services came well after it had established itself as a dominant online retailer.
Google+ is not compelling enough to get enough people to make it their main social networking site. It has nothing to do with a lack of an underlying platform.
I agree that the platform can be a major, even critical factor, in a product's long term success.
ad hoc rant... about how amazon is wrong about ALMOST everything and google is right about ALMOST everything. totally unplanned. it's even been removed from the site... which is why i got this thing emailed to me 3 times today. no planning went into it at all... promise
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Agreed. I'd say Gmail is also compelling and maybe even Google Docs. A consistent set of APIs and a single platform that supported all of these products would be an awesome thing.
However that lack of a platform is maybe more of a symptom than an underlying problem. From a user perspective, the problem I struggle with when it comes to Google is that they seem to lack focus and an easily identified direction. Maybe the higher ups at Google know where they are going, but they seem to be just trying a bunch of different stuff and abandoning what doesn't catch on or leaving it to fester.
This is a big problem. Am I going to even bother to try the next thing that comes out of Google if it's not something that clearly builds on something they already have? How do I know it's going to be around?
Googles claim to fame,No graphical ads When all the others were serving tons of mind numbing graphical ads. Why are people so surprised at the many failures Google has made? Its an advertising company And they came to the scene way too late to become a MS,Apple.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I quit developing for facebook before the graph API came out, so I can't comment on it. It was atrocious before, and I still hear tales of facebook removing API functions or changing them and breaking a ton of 3rd party apps. It's stuff like that that will keep me away from facebook for as long as I can. Oh, and I hate their CIAesque creepy data mining of it's users.
He's not your pal, friend!
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
Also, he thinks G+, a privacy nightmare and corporate well-of-shame, is nonetheless something worthy of support, and Facebook, the same thing -- only worse -- is something to emulate. Pitiful. Simply pitiful.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This explains a great deal about why Google has always seemed like it has a massive case of ADHD, starting lots of projects, then dumping them a couple of years later. None of them got enough attention by any single person for a long enough period of time to evolve from being a pet project into being something that's actually good before it became somebody else's problem.
Keeping a single job only one or two years means that you can't build up any level of institutional knowledge. Admittedly, on the plus side, this means everything gets written down, but on the minus side, it almost invariably leads to an environment in which nobody knows what the h*** they're doing because nobody who is working on a project has any real memory of why critical design decisions were made (unless stuff is documented so thoroughly that those details are all written down, in which case the engineers might finish reading the design specs by the time they're expected to move on to the next project).
Fully learning the architecture of a complex piece of software sufficient to do any real design work (above the level of a basic code monkey) can easily take the better part of a year. If you change jobs every two years, I don't see how you could get anything done; you'd never have time to fully get comfortable with a product before you got yanked off to do something else. That's quite possibly the worst possible way to build quality products; it's like you're still getting your feet wet in the pool when you get unceremoniously yanked out of the pool and tossed onto the basketball court.
A good software company needs to mostly hire people with the expectation that they will be involved in all aspects of the design, not just in the day-to-day coding. Sure, there's sometimes a senior engineer on top who makes the final decisions, but everybody should be contributing at every design phase, redesign phase, etc., which means that everybody needs a fundamental grasp of the overall architecture. That's just not possible if you're changing jobs every couple of years.
More importantly, working on the same project over an extended period of time gives you a sense of ownership, which means you're more likely to take care of the code and improve it. And even if you jump into a project that has been around a while, after a time, you'll get used to it and will take ownership of it. By contrast, if the project gets handed off to somebody else after a year or two, they have no real desire to continue maintaining your code; they have different ideas about how it should be designed. The result is a series of non-stop rewrites, and nothing ever comes out of it except a lot of unfinished code.
Such a short work cycle is just plain bad engineering practice. If it works at all for even one project, it's almost purely luck. Like I said, it explains a lot.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Now that's what I call a career limiting maneuver.
There should be a Career Darwin Award...
I have a Google Apps account, for email addresses for my business.
Naturally when Google+ came out, like others I was somewhat curious what it was about so I tried to sign up.
Nope. You see, if you are stupid enough to pay Google for email accounts, you cannot sign up for Google+. Even though they are very big on verifying identity and what better way than through a paid account?
This holds true even today, if you pay for Google Apps you cannot use that email address for Google+.
Frankly at this point I think I'll scrub both, and let Google+ follow Wave into the inky depths. But it points to a huge problem at Google if one kind of account holder cannot work the same way across anyone they provide email for.... that is the business killer right there, when you want to create new products but your own internal complexity prevents them from succeeding.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've worked hard to master a writing style able to bump marbles out of their customary grooves. It's a lot more work that flipping open an ideological switchblade.
I'm shocked at the number of responses here by middle manager types whose life motto is to fly comfortably under the radar. The culture of considerate memos with broad input from every desk in the company is what Bill hung upside down by its ankles in the early 1980s.
When you start reading the literature on leadership and change, the lesson is that you have to shake some trees, and communicate communicate communicate and communicate some more.
If you tone it down to the level of Indiana Jones in the classroom at the beginning of Raiders, does anyone actually listen?
What he's saying about Bezos rung a bell from a distance era:
Story about Sun Tzu and the kings' concubines:
Sun Tzu's response: Sorry boss, conflicting orders, does not compute, off with their heads.
It's a fact: beheading favorite concubines gets results. I think Steve would like to see Google achieve the same results using more modern methods.
Wave and Google+ are worrying setbacks should their ad revenue business model falter. His message might be wrong, but it needs to be vigorously debated ASAP. If Google is the company I think it is, there will be a lot more heated discussion about the import of this menu than the context of its divulgence.
Leadership is dangerous business. The image seared in my mind is Confederate General Lewis A. Armistead leading the charge of the Battle of Gettysburg hat upon sword.
Amazon can use a platform-based service because Amazon sells things for money.
When did google start selling ad for bitcoin?
This guy is spot on with pretty much everything he discussed. I have never understood why Google does the things it does. They create some fantastic products, but they their products never overlap; meaning you do not get access to many other applications within other applications.
Look at reCaptcha. Quite easily one of the best, if not the best captcha system around. Google bought it like 2 years ago; and yet they do not use it within any of their sites. They use their horrible, out-dated and unreadable captcha system.
Also look at dodgeball. It was a fantastic service that google killed off like 3 years ago. And now facebook has this exact feature that is insanely popular.
Their user account system is just awful too. Yes at least you can link your webmaster, analyst, gmail, home page, etc together, but its just done so poorly that this is very little reason to have 1 single account. Its about as continent as having several accounts.
Google was onto something with gears and with gadgets but with gears gone and gadgets basically having zero development done in 5+ years they have pretty much killed off any really cool way to share, use or access cool or useful tools.
Hopefully this changes because I would hate to see facebook continue to get bigger.
TruePunk | Games
I want to do just one thing with this rant: have the Firefox dev team read it.
Especially about the usability part, where Firefox has constantly removed functionalities it shipped with when it wasn't even version 1.0.
What he's saying is the Google + platform is an afterthought. The word is right there; it's the third one in your quote, after 'Google+'. Nowhere does he criticise Google+ itself or its features, or say that it failed, only that it's not API-centric like a platform service should be.
He makes it very clear that the whole rant is about Google's (lack of) approach to platforms. His comments about Google+ (and Facebook too) need to be viewed in that context. You, Forbes and a fair number of other people are totally (deliberately?) reading the wrong message from it.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Free food and soda? I'd rather take an extra week of vacation a year and an office with an actual door I can close when I need to concentrate. And yes, I do work there, and I like working there, but let's put things in perspective a little bit here.
Seems to me as thought this holds a valuable lesson for Slashdot. With the management asking about the future what better time for a story like this to surface! Platformize Slashdot!
He also makes it quite clear that facebook is successful because of its platform, and G+ doesn't have that platform. The reader is left to infer that G+ will not be successful. If he is a competent speaker of English and has even a slight grasp on logic, he will do so.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Making fun of quantumplacet? No, it's a typo, everyone makes them, but samzepus should have caught it (yeah, I know) since he's the editor. I wouldn't have commented if the typo had been in a comment, but there should no more be typos in /. summaries than in a newspaper. And yeah, you see typos in newspapers, too.
Free Martian Whores!
Damn, try to do someone a favor and get modded "flamebait". Offtopic, yes, but flamebait? Slashdotters used to like learning, I wonder what happened?
Free Martian Whores!
Google for where the period ought to be (inside or outside the quote) and you'll find quite a bit of disagreement among writers and editors. As someone else pointed out, it's a UK vs US thing. Read a book by Asimov and the period will likely be inside the quote, read a book by Pratchett and it will likely be outside the quote.
Free Martian Whores!
Have you just called the Jews "gremlins"?
(+1, Disagree)
Colonel Korn uses Sarcasm. It's not very effective...
Hey, you work at Google. Nobody has your perks or extras, guy.
I'm not your guy, buddy.
I'm not your buddy, pal.
Multifox?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"Failure" < "Success" < "Successful as Facebook". I do agree that without a solid platform it won't approach Facebook's level, probably not close.
But to borrow one of Steve's analogies, if you dial the product down to zero, you'll have no users either, but you can have zero platform and still have a product as popular as, say, Gmail.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I think they aren't changing this because they can't: their systems are hugely complex, intricately coupled, and optimized for speed. Rapid prototyping of easy-to-use user interfaces is kind of hard to do in that kind of system.