[0x12]

With great power comes great responsibility. Once you are the CTO of the #1 web company you have to expect that you're going to be held to different standards than J. Random Blogger.

The fact that you consider it 'fairly insignificant' is probably what drives your view of this more than anything, consider the possibility that you are wrong.

Yegge is anything but dumb and when people like that speak up, publicly or otherwise and you employ them to further the goals of your company the smart thing to do is to listen.

Nobody is all knowing.

If you hire such people to ignore them do them and yourself a favor and don't waste their time. After all, what's the point of having talent like that on board without at least hearing it out. Verbose or not.

[statictype]

Google is a large company. I'm sure Brin didn't personally hire Yegge and didn't do it for the sole purpose of his inputs on platforms.

That said, he (Yegge) does have a good point and I bet the top brass at Google really did pay attention to what he said.

I suspect this is Brin just trying to be funny.

[freejack]

Yegge already knew what Brin thought of his post long before Brin made that comment. You can't seriously think that this wasn't dealt with internally. The only reason that Brin is making jokes about it is because it is 100% water under the bridge for them.

[0x12]

Well, then maybe he should have said something to that effect. The problem with speaking in public is that people will actually hear what you say. If you don't intend to come across as flippant don't be flippant.

[freejack]

Yeah, and I'm sure that his entire statement would have been quoted in the press :-)

"We talked with Yegge and dealt with the matter internally, and besides, I didn't read past the first thousand pages"

gets quoted as...

"I didn't read past the first thousand pages..."

[sigmaxipi]

Brin is not the CTO of Google: "Sergey Brin co-founded Google Inc. in 1998. Today, he directs special projects. From 2001 to 2011, Sergey served as president of technology, where he shared responsibility for the company’s day-to-day operations with Larry Page and Eric Schmidt."

http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/execs.html#ser...

[0x12]

I should have verified that I guess, but it doesn't really matter either way. Brin is very visible as co-founder of Google and can expect his words to be quoted. And typically those quotes will come out in the worst possible way so when you make a public statement you try to do so in a way to minimize the possible damage.

[jxi]

By no means did I mean it was dumb. I meant that this kind of thing happens almost every week inside of Google. There is a ton of discussion going on all the time and Google is known to be a company where every employee's voice is heard.

Steve's rant was a bit longer than usual rants, and he was just pointing that out in his kind of lame way. What would be a satisfactory answer anyway? "I thought it was a good idea, we are going think about making all of Google into platforms right now"? Or, some no-op response that most CEO/CTO's tend to give to things like this?

[potatolicious]

The funny thing is Brin's response is in direct contrast to Gundotra's - both of whom were being interviewed at the same time.

Gundotra was diplomatic and used the question as an opportunity to brag about Google's culture of openness. Brin used it as an opportunity to either:

A - crack a badly worded joke

B - slam Yegge

One can only hope it was option A, though given the way it's worded I don't doubt there is some venom in there.

[bad_user]

You can't argue that Amazon is kicking their asses in regards to AWS versus Google's App Engine. The lame joke I'm seeing here is GAE.

And I think Yegge has a good point - Facebook IS different for each individual because everybody has their own preferences in regards to how they use it and that's because while Google was making lame experiments with Buzz forcing Gmail users to use it, Facebook was busy becoming a platform.

And Android is popular not because it's a better / more polished product than iOS. It isn't, not by a long shot. Instead Android is a better platform.

Personally I loved Steve's rant and he nailed it.