[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.