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by jimbokun 3494 days ago
"Their platform and organization are made up of small teams that own services with well-defined interfaces, accountable for customer metrics."

You are using the terminology of products and platforms with the exact opposite meaning of the article's author.

Those "services with well-defined interfaces" become a platform others can use to build their own products. Similarly with the e-commerce and fulfillment infrastructure third party sellers can use. And maybe the transportation infrastructure in the future.

I also think you vastly underestimate the quality of Google's UX. Type any thing you can think of into one simple box, and you get surprisingly useful auto-completions, relevant spelling corrections, and almost always find the answer to the question you had when you started typing. There are any number of complex back end services working in parallel to resolve your query, with results gathered, ranked, merged, and rendered in a fraction of a second. Pretty hard to beat that user experience.

This is how the author defines product focus, emphasis on combining many components internally to provide an outstanding end user experience, without necessarily making the components available to be used by others to create their own user experience for their customers.
1 comments
seregine 3494 days ago
Products and platforms overlap quite a bit, e.g. many enterprise products can be thought of as platforms, or AdSense and Android. That's why I think it's less useful to contrast the two companies on a product vs. platform axis, and why I find the cultural differences more interesting.

Google does make great products, especially when it's a matter of presenting a simple elegant interface to a complex internal system. I'm a big fan of Google Search and Maps UX, and Google Now.

But the UX of a product isn't just its immediate interface, it's also all the interactions you have with support, documentation, and change over time, and trust. The cultural differences are more evident there, though some teams at Google are getting pretty good at these things as well.

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