[enbrill]

In the article I find these two statements, from Percival, contradicting:

"Percival talked about what the company might have done differently, and admitted that by the time he arrived in 2009, it was possibly unsaveable – not least because by that time, it was difficult to hire the most talented engineers against competition from Facebook, Google and other rising tech companies."

“There are companies that do not get social and they never will. Apple’s one of them, Google is the other: they’ve failed with Google+. When your culture is engineering-focused, you do not understand social. Social is a very emotional experience. Engineers are not so much, in a lot of cases,”

[gojomo]

Try interpreting "most talented engineers" and "understanding social" as orthogonal categories. Success in this market required both, but they don't necessarily come together in the exact same people/companies.

[theandrewbailey]

Not contradictory to me. The second statement does not say nor imply anything about Myspace, or anything about an engineering culture at Myspace.

[enbrill]

Maybe I didn't make it clear enough.

In the first quote he basically says MySpace didn't have the engineers to save the company.

In the second quote he basically says engineers are not what make the social industry tick. Yes, he's talking about Apple and Google here, but he's contradicting what he said.

Regardless I'm not sure why he said the first quote in the at all. The problem they had, had nothing to do with Engineers, but had everything to do with the company culture.

[theandrewbailey]

The first quote is there for the benefit of people who aren't in the industry, and did not realize that Myspace wasn't hot among engineers in 2009.

You are misconceiving the second quote. That quote is the end of the article, where it has moved on from the topic of "What happened at Myspace", and is talking about the social networking industry at large. I do not interpret it as being a stab at Myspace specifically, nor about what happened there.