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Comment by mmahemoff | Hacker News Reader

Always worth reading Yegge's insider take on this - https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611.

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.

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Background - Oct 12, 2011:

> Google engineer Steve Yegge was trying to start a robust internal discussion, not post a viral hit, when he published a 4,570-word self-styled rant about what he sees as the company’s greatest flaw to Google+. Unfortunately for Yegge, he didn’t check the settings and shared his view on Google’s failure to grasp platforms over products — including Google+ — with everyone.

> He later pulled it down on his own accord but he and Google aren’t asking that the copies already spread across the net be deleted. You can read the full post here and here, among other locations — and you should to get the real flavor about why Yegge thinks the company that does nearly everything right gets this fundamental so wrong. But a large chunk is also about his former employer Amazon, what it does wrong and how Jeff Bezos — Steve Jobs “without the fashion or design sense” — got it so right.

Source: https://gigaom.com/2011/10/12/419-the-biggest-thing-amazon-g... (Note, I think the post I'm citing might be incomplete as on my screen it stops at "Playstation Network" while the Gist continues...)

Tangentially, a great lesson to Google UX designers.

I kind of remember reading this shortly after joining Google in 2015 (have since left), and thinking yeah he's got a point, esp. regarding point 1: "All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces." and point 5: "All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable."

It's like, if we hit upon something useful, it better be available as a network service with a well defined interface from the start. And I do remember looking around at how things were, and thinking, yeah, Google could definitely use some of that philosophy (without, all these years later being able to cite any specific examples). It definitely felt like it hit home at the time.

That Gist is the source of the "email": #7 is fake and was added by Yegge as a joke.

"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."

This is gold :D

“Jeff Bezos doesn’t give a f*ck about your day”. I still laugh at that.

> But making something a platform is not going to make you an instant success. A platform needs a killer app.

Which is a big ask, since

> The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them. You can't do that.

Pretty much the hardest part about SaaS as a business, described in just two sentences.

So is this still correct in regards to the Google doesn't get platforms stuff? I sort of have the feeling it is, but I mean they have significantly more stuff now than they did when Yegge wrote it but maybe that is not good enough.

Hey do these other platforms have developer support? Developer support is sort of the accessibility for developers - Google doesn't have it. MS definitely has it. I'm thinking Amazon does too but I try to avoid them.

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