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Comment by tav | Hacker News Reader

Great article, but I'd like to contest a few points.

4. Google forces its developers to use its infrastructure, which wasn’t developed for small social projects

One of the advantages of working for Google is that you get access to this infrastructure. At times I wish Google would start offering a raw BigTable service alongside/instead of the richer, but, limited App Engine services.

6. Google’s engineers can’t use any Facebook integration or dependencies like Instagram does.

I don't know if such a policy exists, but it certainly doesn't seem to apply to projects like YouTube which integrate fine with YouTube.

7. Google can’t iterate in semi-public.

If anything, Google have proven that a large company can iterate publicly. I can't think of a single other company that has had as many perpetual betas as Google...

P.S. Corrected link to Instagram: http://instagr.am/

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4 is particularly interesting to me. When I worked at Yahoo! back in 2005 I was constantly jealous of Google's infrastructure stuff - Yahoo! stuff was all replicated MySQL, PHP, memcached and Java while Google appeared to be creating infrastructure that totally changed the way you approached large scale development.

In the past five years, it feels like the world outside Google has mostly caught up - in part through open source equivalents of Google's secret sauce. Hadoop, EC2, S3, the various NoSQL engines, RabbitMQ, Thrift, Scribe... access to the Google stack may not be as big an advantage.

I spoke to a Google engineer recently who complained that the Google stack was actually something of a pain to build agains, with a very steep learning curve and a great deal of innertia to work around.

Totally agreed that the world outside Google has mostly caught up. An equivalent for BigTable and associated libraries is still missing though. Hypertable, HBase, KDI and even Cassandra are extremely poor substitutes. I often end up resorting to App Engine for many projects but wish that there was a true open source substitute.

Another one:

5. Google’s services need to support every platform

Google services need to support every platform eventually, but nothing stops them from releasing something working on a single platform first. As I recall, Google Chrome was available only for Windows when it was first released.

I think this article suffers from hindsight bias. No, Google is not going to come with with every successful app or web service in the industry, and no, not every product it releases is going to be wildly successful. But saying Google has an innovation problem because it can't build an app like Instagram is like saying Warren Buffet has an investing problem because he didn't buy stock in Apple right before the iPhone was released.

Google's process isn't geared to create novelty hits in the app store, and Buffet's method doesn't lead him to pick high flying tech stocks. But Google and Buffet are still doing fine.

Agree that #7 is off. Scoble mentions bug testing and engagement from the outside community and says that "Google can't do this", but the fact is that they do. Just the other day here on HN there was a post by a Google engineer on the Chromium project asking for code commits from outside, and asking junior programmers to build Chrome and start committing bug fixes: http://www.aaronboodman.com/2010/10/wherein-i-help-you-get-g...

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