Google+ is easily the most competitive social network available right now against Facebook. However, staff software engineer Steve Yegge argues that they’ve made strategic errors with Google+ even while he praised the company’s internal culture.
“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. But that’s not why they are successful,” said Yegge. “Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville.”
“Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: ‘Gosh, it looks like we need some games. Let’s go contract someone to, um, write some games for us,’” he added. “Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that thinking is now The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them.”
Yegge was also critical of the company’s decision to make Google+ more open after the fact, saying it will be “ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. Ask anyone who worked on platformising MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformising Amazon… I’m not saying it’s too late for us, but the longer we wait, the closer we get to being Too Late.”
Source: plus.google.com
