“The best article I’ve ever read about architecture and the management of IT.”
A rant by Googler Steve Yegge was accidentally shared publicly on Google+ last night. He eventually decided to delete the post and he explains those reasons in a separate post this morning.
I’ve taken the post down at my own discretion. It was kind of a tough call, since obviously there will be copies. And everyone who commented was nice and supportive.
I contacted our internal PR folks and asked what to do, and they were also nice and supportive. But they didn’t want me to think that they were even hinting at censoring me — they went out of their way to help me understand that we’re an opinionated company, and not one of the kinds of companies that censors their employees. That was cool and all, but I still didn’t know what to do.
So I made the call myself and deleted it.
However, as he says, there will be copies and it is a worth-while read. You can find one such copy shared to another Google+ account. The article is 4 pages long and covers Google’s platform approach and is based off of Steve’s history with Amazon and now with Google. It’s an interesting insight into the perspectives from an employee inside some of these hugely successful companies.
The Golden Rule of Platforms, “Eat Your Own Dogfood”, can be rephrased as “Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything.” You can’t just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate — ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If you delay it, it’ll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can’t cheat. You can’t have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the hard problems up front.
Read the full article here for an editorial across Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft services becoming platforms.