But why should we take Google seriously as an example of good software development practice? For an organisation with effectively unlimited dev resources, it breaks things pretty often and kills off a lot of products outside of the star performers that support everything else. And thanks to the dominance of Chrome and Android, when Google does break things, the pain is shared by countless other developers as well. No-one can deny that Google has been a wildly successful business, but whether its current software development practices have anything to do with that or make it a worthy role model to emulate is a different matter.