Steve Yegge Quits, Saying Google Is 100% Competitor Focused

Automatic real-time text translation from videos, on your phone. You point your phone at a sign in Thailand and it changes the words to English.

Computer vision systems that index the themes of your photographs. You can search your Google photos for "dog" and it finds all the photos with dogs.

A computer that beats all living humans at board games.

Cars that drive themselves. Not the ones that kill their drivers, like Tesla's, or that can't see stop lights, like Uber's, or that run into people all the time, like GM's. Actual self-driving cars that will pick your ass up and take you to Taco Bell.

An airborne internet service that can be deployed anywhere in the world on short notice.

And, under all of that, a service platform that remains fast, reliable, and economical to operate even after two decades of exponential user growth, which provides free services such as searching all documents ever written, delivering the majority of the world's email, etc, all free of charge.

No. But I'm not so sure that Google knows how to get the new thing to successfully cannibalize the current product line.

And for the rank and file employees who aren't working in R&D or on super-secret disruptions, things will seem fairly pedestrian.

You are telling me this as if I disagreed with it? Why?

Yegge's claim that Google is 100% focused on competitors is a vast exaggeration.

From what you've written, it would seem that you think it's 99.9% true, so missing that 0.1% is a huge exaggeration.

Some of the APIs are superbly documented with a lot of obvious effort put into them. Google sheets sounds like it isn't. I think one major problem is that there is a unified interface and docsets for both the good APIs and the bad APIs - while there are starkly different teams maintaining them with different interests and motivations. APIs that make a ton of money for Google are naturally going to get more love, the reverse will likely be abandoned, inaccurate, etc.

The bottom line we have to remember as developers is that we use Google's API at their own discretion. Many popular used APIs are "FREE".

If you want to create a stable, long-term, software product, you need to think long and hard about incorporating third party APIs, no matter if it's provided by a large well-respected organization like Google, or the teenager down the street.

[1]: "https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/v2/auth", "https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v4/token",

Do I believe it? No. There are large numbers of people working on completely new, crazy ideas, and just like the startup community, 97% of them will fail utterly. The number of new machine learning oriented things has grown exponentially. But how much innovation do you need in order to prove you're company is innovating? Justin the last 2 years:

Google Photos, clearly innovative, bringing ConvNet's to everyone to reduce the pain of photo management.

Tensorflow, now the dominant platform for ML

Kubernetes, now the dominant platform for container management, and from experience of systems invented internally

SmartReply system (first launched on Inbox, now ending up in many Google products)

Tango, eventually rolled into ARCore

Neural Machine Translation launched on Google Translate

Loads of Google Maps stuff, mostly invisible to people, except for the keen eye (https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/)

GCam in Pixel2. A ton of research and innovation is behind the low light and portrait segmentation in this

Waymo

Cloud TPUs

AutoML

WaveNet/Tacotron2

Instant Apps

Spanner

Those are just the small list of public ones. Yegge worked on internal dev infrastructure, I work on Gmail. Both are maintaining important needs. Someone has to do it. I'd say Google has the opposite problem than what Yegge posed, and that's not enough focus on excellence in maintaining what people are already using.

The thing is, if you want to work on disruptive stuff, with maximum risk taking, and no politics, you go found a small startup and get seed capital. And even then, a huge number of startups are merely clones of existing businesses. "Uber for X", "Slack for Y", "Blockchain for Z".

Innovation, disruption, and copying are a continuum, and all too often rants take an extremist position and try categorize things in one of the other.