The Founders' List: Steve Yegge's Famous Rant on 'Google vs Amazon' (Famous Memos)
Nov 20, 2020
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Discussing Steve Yegge's insightful rant on Google's platform failures and his experiences at Amazon working for Jeff Bezos. Exploring the differences in company cultures, operations, and leadership styles between Google and Amazon. Delving into the significance of platforms and accessibility in tech, highlighting the challenges and transformations faced by Amazon in transitioning to a service-driven company under Bezos' leadership.
Steve Yegge emphasized Google's lack of platform focus, highlighting Amazon's success in fostering a platform-driven mindset.
Amazon's transition to a service-oriented architecture under Bezos promoted a service-first approach, enabling platforms and emphasizing externalization.
Deep dives
Comparison between Amazon and Google
Amazon and Google are compared in various aspects, with Amazon being criticized for its flawed recruiting process, operations, lack of focus on charity, poor facilities, and subpar pay and benefits. In contrast, Google is highlighted for doing most things right, such as having consistent hiring standards, good operations including having engineers focus on coding, a concern for charity work, better facilities, and improved pay and benefits.
The podcast discusses how Amazon transitioned internally into a service-oriented architecture, emphasizing the importance of having service interfaces, inter-process communication restrictions, and the design for externalization. The transformation under Bezos' mandate led to Amazon becoming a company that values a service-first approach in all designs, fostering a platform-driven mindset and enabling platforms.
Google's Lack of Understanding Platforms
The episode critiques Google for its failure to grasp platforms, contrasting it with competitors like Microsoft and Amazon. It points out Google's inadequate API offerings and a cultural resistance to creating external service-oriented platforms. The speaker advocates for a shift towards platform-focused thinking and building extensible platforms from the outset, citing the need for a cultural change within Google to catch up with industry standards.
This is The Founders' List - audio versions of essays from technology’s most important leaders, selected by the founder community.
Longtime Googler Steve Yegge posted an insightful rant on his Google+ page about how Google is failing to make platforms for its products. He also shares some interesting little tidbits about his six-year stint at Amazon working for the 'Dread Pirate Bezos'. The rant was intended to be shared only with his Google coworkers, but was accidentally made public.