Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

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I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at
Google for that long. 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.
Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one.
It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred
different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior
in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a
spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone,
even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process
is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their
hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various
efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess;
they don't really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do
everything, which leaves almost no time for coding - though again this
varies by group, so it's luck of the draw. They don't give a single
shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or
anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about
it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent
on decor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although
much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook.
But they don't have any of our perks or extras -- they just try to match
the offer-letter numbers, and that's the end of it. Their code base
is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what
individual teams choose to put in place.

To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really
ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also
have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have a bunch
of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into
relational databases. We wouldn't take most of it even if it were free.

I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of
the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google.

I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early
and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue
it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else,
including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other
stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it's
given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it's created
enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk.

But there's one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes
up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single
pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief
Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer
interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn
thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left
the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate
beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging
website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those
millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like
millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and
Larry is not.

Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazon does better than us,
by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn't
list it as a strength or anything. I'm just trying to set the context
here, to help you understand what happened. We're talking about a guy
who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people
should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow
stickies with his name on them, reminding people "who runs the company"
when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular... well, Steve Jobs, I
guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart;
don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like
stoned hippies.

So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of
course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet
whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think,
plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so
huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates
look like unsolicited peer bonuses.

His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through
service interfaces.

2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed:
no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no
shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication
allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub,
custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.

5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the
ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and
design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside
world. No exceptions.

6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.

7) Thank you; have a nice day!

Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize
immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most
definitely does not give a shit about your day.

#6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned
a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward
progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell. Rick is
an ex-Armgy Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-Chief
Torturer slash CIO at Wal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who
used the word "hardened interface" a lot. Rick was a walking, talking
hardened interface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of
forward progress and made sure Rick knew about it.

Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a
service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendous amount while
effecting this transformation. There was lots of existing documentation
and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon's vast scale it was about as useful
as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street.
Amazon's dev staff made a lot of discoveries along the way. A teeny tiny
sampling of these discoveries included:

- pager escalation gets way harder, because a ticket might bounce
through 20 service calls before the real owner is identified. If each
bounce goes through a team with a 15-minute response time, it can be
hours before the right team finally finds out, unless you build a lot of
scaffolding and metrics and reporting.

- every single one of your peer teams suddenly becomes a potential DOS
attacker. Nobody can make any real forward progress until very serious
quotas and throttling are put in place in every single service.

- monitoring and QA are the same thing. You'd never think so until you
try doing a big SOA. But when your service says "oh yes, I'm fine",
it may well be the case that the only thing still functioning in the
server is the little component that knows how to say "I'm fine, roger
roger, over and out" in a cheery droid voice. In order to tell whether
the service is actually responding, you have to make individual calls.
The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing
comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and
data, at which point it's indistinguishable from automated QA. So
they're a continuum.

- if you have hundreds of services, and your code MUST communicate with
other groups' code via these services, then you won't be able to find
any of them without a service-discovery mechanism. And you can't have
that without a service registration mechanism, which itself is another
service. So Amazon has a universal service registry where you can find
out reflectively (programmatically) about every service, what its APIs
are, and also whether it is currently up, and where.

- debugging problems with someone else's code gets a LOT harder, and is
basically impossible unless there is a universal standard way to run
every service in a debuggable sandbox.

That's just a very small sample. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of
individual learnings like these that Amazon had to discover organically.
There were a lot of wacky ones around externalizing services, but not as
many as you might think. Organizing into services taught teams not to
trust each other in most of the same ways they're not supposed to trust
external developers.

This effort was still underway when I left to join Google in mid-2005,
but it was pretty far advanced. From the time Bezos issued his edict
through the time I left, Amazon had transformed culturally into a
company that thinks about everything in a services-first fashion. It is
now fundamental to how they approach all designs, including internal
designs for stuff that might never see the light of day externally.

At this point they don't even do it out of fear of being fired. I mean,
they're still afraid of that; it's pretty much part of daily life there,
working for the Dread Pirate Bezos and all. But they do services because
they've come to understand that it's the Right Thing. There are without
question pros and cons to the SOA approach, and some of the cons are
pretty long. But overall it's the right thing because SOA-driven design
enables Platforms.

That's what Bezos was up to with his edict, of course. He didn't (and
doesn't) care even a tiny bit about the well-being of the teams, nor
about what technologies they use, nor in fact any detail whatsoever
about how they go about their business unless they happen to be screwing
up. But Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that
Amazon needs to be a platform.

You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an
extensible, programmable platform. Would you?

Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure
they'd built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be
transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. 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. These services host the backends
for some pretty successful companies, reddit being my personal favorite
of the bunch.

The other big realization he had was that he can't always build the
right thing. I think Larry Tesler might have struck some kind of chord
in Bezos when he said his mom couldn't use the goddamn website. It's
not even super clear whose mom he was talking about, and doesn't really
matter, because nobody's mom can use the goddamn website. In fact I
myself find the website disturbingly daunting, and I worked there for
over half a decade. I've just learned to kinda defocus my eyes and
concentrate on the million or so pixels near the center of the page
above the fold.

I'm not really sure how Bezos came to this realization -- the insight
that he can't build one product and have it be right for everyone.
But it doesn't matter, because he gets it. There's actually a formal
name for this phenomenon. It's called Accessibility, and it's the most
important thing in the computing world.

The. Most. Important. Thing.

If you're sorta thinking, "huh? You mean like, blind and deaf people
Accessibility?" then you're not alone, because I've come to understand
that there are lots and LOTS of people just like you: people for
whom this idea does not have the right Accessibility, so it hasn't
been able to get through to you yet. It's not your fault for not
understanding, any more than it would be your fault for being blind or
deaf or motion-restricted or living with any other disability. When
software -- or idea-ware for that matter -- fails to be accessible
to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software or of the
messaging of the idea. It is an Accessibility failure.

Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil
twin who, jilted by the unbalanced affection displayed by their parents
in their youth, has grown into an equally powerful Arch-Nemesis (yes,
there's more than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security. And boy
howdy are the two ever at odds.

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.

So yeah. In case you hadn't noticed, I could actually write a book on
this topic. A fat one, filled with amusing anecdotes about ants and
rubber mallets at companies I've worked at. But I will never get this
little rant published, and you'll never get it read, unless I start to
wrap up.

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. This has become painfully clear to me over the
past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from
Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up
collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of
ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it:
all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority
from now on.

But no. No, it's like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I
don't know. It's pretty low. There are a few teams who treat the idea
very seriously, but most teams either don't think about it all, ever, or
only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way.

It's a big stretch even to get most teams to offer a stubby service
to get programmatic access to their data and computations. Most of
them think they're building products. And a stubby service is a pretty
pathetic service. Go back and look at that partial list of learnings
from Amazon, and tell me which ones Stubby gives you out of the box. As
far as I'm concerned, it's none of them. Stubby's great, but it's like
parts when you need a car.

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.

Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand
platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi
Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf
workers (hey yo). We all don't get it. The Golden Rule of platforms
is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic
afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we
had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me
about it when they launched, and I asked: "So is it the Stalker API?"
She got all glum and said "Yeah." I mean, I was joking, but no... the
only API call we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess the joke
was on me.

Microsoft has known about the Dogfood rule for at least twenty years.
It's been part of their culture for a whole generation now. You don't
eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food. Doing that is
simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes.
Platforms are all about long-term thinking.

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking,
predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because
they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful.
Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation
of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is
different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars.
Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe
thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there's
something there for everyone.

Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: "Gosh, it
looks like we need some games. Let's go contract someone to, um, write
some games for us." Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that
thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what
people want and deliver it for them.

You can't do that. Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious
few people in the world, over the entire history of computing, who have
been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them. We don't have a
Steve Jobs here. I'm sorry, but we don't.

Larry Tesler may have convinced Bezos that he was no Steve Jobs, but
Bezos realized that he didn't need to be a Steve Jobs in order to
provide everyone with the right products: interfaces and workflows that
they liked and felt at ease with. He just needed to enable third-party
developers to do it, and it would happen automatically.

I apologize to those (many) of you for whom all this stuff I'm saying
is incredibly obvious, because yeah. It's incredibly frigging obvious.
Except we're not doing it. We don't get Platforms, and we don't get
Accessibility. The two are basically the same thing, because platforms
solve accessibility. A platform is accessibility.

So yeah, Microsoft gets it. And you know as well as I do how surprising
that is, because they don't "get" much of anything, really. But they
understand platforms as a purely accidental outgrowth of having started
life in the business of providing platforms. So they have thirty-plus
years of learning in this space. And if you go to msdn.com, and spend
some time browsing, and you've never seen it before, prepare to be
amazed. Because it's staggeringly huge. They have thousands, and
thousands, and THOUSANDS of API calls. They have a HUGE platform. Too
big in fact, because they can't design for squat, but at least they're
doing it.

Amazon gets it. Amazon's AWS (aws.amazon.com) is incredible. Just go
look at it. Click around. It's embarrassing. We don't have any of that
stuff.

Apple gets it, obviously. They've made some fundamentally non-open
choices, particularly around their mobile platform. But they understand
accessibility and they understand the power of third-party development
and they eat their dogfood. And you know what? They make pretty good
dogfood. Their APIs are a hell of a lot cleaner than Microsoft's, and
have been since time immemorial.

Facebook gets it. That's what really worries me. That's what got me off
my lazy butt to write this thing. I hate blogging. I hate... plussing,
or whatever it's called when you do a massive rant in Google+ even
though it's a terrible venue for it but you do it anyway because in
the end you really do want Google to be successful. And I do! I mean,
Facebook wants me there, and it'd be pretty easy to just go. But Google
is home, so I'm insisting that we have this little family intervention,
uncomfortable as it might be.

After you've marveled at the platform offerings of Microsoft and
Amazon, and Facebook I guess (I didn't look because I didn't want to
get too depressed), head over to developers.google.com and browse a
little. Pretty big difference, eh? It's like what your fifth-grade
nephew might mock up if he were doing an assignment to demonstrate what
a big powerful platform company might be building if all they had,
resource-wise, was one fifth grader.

Please don't get me wrong here -- I know for a fact that the dev-rel
team has had to FIGHT to get even this much available externally.
They're kicking ass as far as I'm concerned, because they DO get
platforms, and they are struggling heroically to try to create one in
an environment that is at best platform-apathetic, and at worst often
openly hostile to the idea.

I'm just frankly describing what developers.google.com looks like to an
outsider. It looks childish. Where's the Maps APIs in there for Christ's
sake? Some of the things in there are labs projects. And the APIs for
everything I clicked were... they were paltry. They were obviously dog
food. Not even good organic stuff. Compared to our internal APIs it's
all snouts and horse hooves.

And also don't get me wrong about Google+. They're far from the only
offenders. This is a cultural thing. What we have going on internally is
basically a war, with the underdog minority Platformers fighting a more
or less losing battle against the Mighty Funded Confident Producters.

Any teams that have successfully internalized the notion that they
should be externally programmable platforms from the ground up are
underdogs -- Maps and Docs come to mind, and I know GMail is making
overtures in that direction. But it's hard for them to get funding
for it because it's not part of our culture. Maestro's funding is a
feeble thing compared to the gargantuan Microsoft Office programming
platform: it's a fluffy rabbit versus a T-Rex. The Docs team knows
they'll never be competitive with Office until they can match its
scripting facilities, but they're not getting any resource love. I mean,
I assume they're not, given that Apps Script only works in Spreadsheet
right now, and it doesn't even have keyboard shortcuts as part of its
API. That team looks pretty unloved to me.

Ironically enough, Wave was a great platform, may they rest in peace.
But making something a platform is not going to make you an instant
success. A platform needs a killer app. Facebook -- that is, the stock
service they offer with walls and friends and such -- is the killer app
for the Facebook Platform. And it is a very serious mistake to conclude
that the Facebook App could have been anywhere near as successful
without the Facebook Platform.

You know how people are always saying Google is arrogant? I'm a Googler,
so I get as irritated as you do when people say that. We're not
arrogant, by and large. We're, like, 99% Arrogance-Free. I did start
this post -- if you'll reach back into distant memory -- by describing
Google as "doing everything right". We do mean well, and for the most
part when people say we're arrogant it's because we didn't hire them,
or they're unhappy with our policies, or something along those lines.
They're inferring arrogance because it makes them feel better.

But when we take the stance that we know how to design the perfect
product for everyone, and believe you me, I hear that a lot, then we're
being fools. You can attribute it to arrogance, or naivete, or whatever
-- it doesn't matter in the end, because it's foolishness. There IS no
perfect product for everyone.

And so we wind up with a browser that doesn't let you set the default
font size. Talk about an affront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get
older I'm actually going blind. For real. I've been nearsighted all my
life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things
up close. So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing: it can
lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrome team is flat-out
arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and
they're quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you're blind or deaf or
whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your
life.

It's not just them. It's everyone. The problem is that we're a Product
Company through and through. We built a successful product with broad
appeal -- our search, that is -- and that wild success has biased us.

Amazon was a product company too, so it took an out-of-band force to
make Bezos understand the need for a platform. That force was their
evaporating margins; he was cornered and had to think of a way out. But
all he had was a bunch of engineers and all these computers... if only
they could be monetized somehow... you can see how he arrived at AWS, in
hindsight.

Microsoft started out as a platform, so they've just had lots of
practice at it.

Facebook, though: they worry me. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure they
started off as a Product and they rode that success pretty far. So I'm
not sure exactly how they made the transition to a platform. It was a
relatively long time ago, since they had to be a platform before (now
very old) things like Mafia Wars could come along.

Maybe they just looked at us and asked: "How can we beat Google? What
are they missing?"

The problem we face is pretty huge, because it will take a dramatic
cultural change in order for us to start catching up. We don't do
internal service-oriented platforms, and we just as equally don't do
external ones. This means that the "not getting it" is endemic across
the company: the PMs don't get it, the engineers don't get it, the
product teams don't get it, nobody gets it. Even if individuals do,
even if YOU do, it doesn't matter one bit unless we're treating it as
an all-hands-on-deck emergency. We can't keep launching products and
pretending we'll turn them into magical beautiful extensible platforms
later. We've tried that and it's not working.

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.

I'm not saying it's too late for us, but the longer we wait, the closer
we get to being Too Late.

I honestly don't know how to wrap this up. I've said pretty much
everything I came here to say today. This post has been six years in the
making. I'm sorry if I wasn't gentle enough, or if I misrepresented some
product or team or person, or if we're actually doing LOTS of platform
stuff and it just so happens that I and everyone I ever talk to has just
never heard about it. I'm sorry.

But we've gotta start doing this right.