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by VladRussian2 4724 days ago
yep, i've seen too many times how such things happen at various places to imagine that it can go any differently:

"... she brought a “product perspective” to Google’s developer tools, insisting that, although they were only used inside the company, they should be treated like like products used by the world at large. “She bootstrapped a new charter for the team,” he says. “We had to think of these as products used by other Google engineers — and she brought that attitude. We had to think of them as cohesive things, to give them a nice presentation. That had not been the focus before.”"

focus, perspective, think of as product, bootstrap, charter, cohesive, team... 7 large ones in BS-bingo.

1 comments

It's hard to get promoted at Google unless you launch things, and the Internal Tools team never launched shit. So they just latch onto any excuse to launch whatever they can, even if it makes no fucking sense. You'll see this a lot with other Google products too, Gmail being one of the worst offenders (totally unnecessary UI changes that piss everyone off, changing Gtalk into Hangouts just to have a chance to launch a new app, etc).

The Gtalk one is particularly ridiculous if you buy into their disingenuous arguments about combining disparate forms of messaging, especially given the spectacular failure of Wave, which tried to do the exact same thing. But if you view it through the lens of "Gtalk hadn't launched anything in a while, and their engineers wanted to launch something" it makes perfect sense.