It's more than a little sad that Steve appears to have been largely ignored.
I love Steve's writing and it would be a mistake not to listen to him
And here:
https://console.developers.google.com/project
Also the open-source releases of Bazel[1] and gRPC[2] indicate that there's a lot more coming in this direction.
[1] http://bazel.io/
I read Steve's rant as a cri de coeur not for an AWS-style infrastructure as was relevant and genre-busting at the time of the essay's inception, but for Google to stop following slowly with slightly inferior, copycat versions of other people's grand ideas and expecting anything good to happen out of it.
Granted, Google has some pretty great, if in-the-small, consumer-facing initiatives: think Street View.
But as one of the primary governments of the internet, they could be doing so much more to move the needle for computing and advance the general state of the art.
Where's googlelang?
Where's infinite instant CI for any language?
Where's infinite immutable package versioning for every language?
Where's the big thoughts?
The needle is moved by having nontraditional ideas and following through with commitment. I know Google has enough great minds for (a), where, bafflingly, is (b)?