Yegge Golfing: Shorten Steve's "1,000 pages or so" rant for Sergey Brin

10 points·johnzabroski··5 comments

Maybe I was the only one who laughed at Sergey Brin's remarks about Steve Yegge's Google+ Platforms rant.

In the spirit of Code Golf, what's the shortest summary you can come up with for Steve's "1,000 pages or so" rant?

Using www.bookshrink.com to pick out the important sentences, it would have to be Platforms.

Top 4 Sentences:

1 (1.000000): So now they have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o' other services browsable at aws.amazon.com.

2 (0.909058): One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right.

3 (0.893197): That one last thing that Google doesn't do well is Platforms. We don't understand platforms. We don't "get" platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority.

4 (0.873655): A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.

I think an important piece left out was how Amazon ostensibly built the platforms first, and then built their services on top of them to make sure they were robust and viable.

"Amazon is a platform, Google is not. Make Google a platform."

Platforms! Platforms! Platforms! Platforms!

Think Platforms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com