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Comment by dporan | Hacker News Reader

Battelle asked about the highly critical memo from a Google engineer that was mistakenly made public. . . . Brin was less diplomatic about the memo. "I stopped reading it after the first 1,000 pages or so," he said. "If you want to get a point across, limit it to a paragraph or so."

Considering that Yegge seemed to make a compelling case, that peremptory response doesn't reflect well on the Google executive team.

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Brin doesn't come off well. He criticises a well received and thought provoking article calling it too long. How the hell would the guy squeeze what he wrote into one paragraph?

He could have made it shorter but I agree. Maybe someone should write an executive summary of it and send it to Brin, because there is no doubt Google (and many other companies) should be paying attention to the key points that are made.

"We need to start building Google into a platform. This piecemeal approach is not going to work in the long run." And then a short anecdote about his experience at Amazon and a short explanation of how it guides his views. Maybe not one paragraph, but not more than three or four.

Short pieces of 3-4 paragraphs are useless, unless the guy writing it holds enough power within a company. People should also start taking medication for their ADHD symptoms, if nothing else works ;)

     This piecemeal approach is not going to work 
     in the long run

Yeah, whatever, have you filled your time-sheets yet?

He could have done it by cutting off all the material at the beginning about Amazon and Jeff Bezos. It was interesting but not relevant to his point. He certainly could have cut down the article to a more manageable length - he just chose not to because it's not his style.

The Amazon part was a very good bait though. Without it I think a lot fewer people would have read the entire thing.

I have a feeling that people who invent entire sectors of he economy and accumulate billions of dollars don't do it by taking "bait".

That kind of hubris always presages the fall. The failure of Wave, Google+, and things like this: Brin's flippant, cocky response to a valid criticism means that if I had Google stock, I would slowly start to sell.

Failure of Google+? What?

I'd give my left nut to fail as hard as G+ has. 70M users in a couple months is the kind of failure I can get behind.

They aren't new users though. None of them are new to google.com, and most already have Google accounts. They are simply activating another Google service.

It's a whole different thing if you launch a startup like Dropbox and get people to use it.

So by that metric, if every gmail user used G+ it would still be a failure? If it captured 70% of the online population, it wouldn't be that impressive because those people originally used search?

Wave was a failure, and it had plenty of Docs and Gmail users to draw from. G+ strikes me as a very different beast, and one that has already found its niche. It may not displace facebook, but it certainly seems to have eaten into Twitter's niche.

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