[hueving]

It wasn't invented in Google and is therefore inferior. Google has a massive incentive to develop projects specific to their requirements and then open source and evangelize them to stomp out approaches not optimized for them.

[nevir]

Don't forget that there is a constant inflow of developers to Google. They all bring the tools and practices that they know, and will definitely leverage what they can.

It's not like we're run through a brainwashing machine when walking through the door :P

There just happen to be a lot of challenges to make things run on Google's infrastructure - and not all the tools we know and love happen to work well on it. Some of that is legacy, some of that doesn't have many parallels externally.

So, we write solutions that work well on Google's infrastructure. Some of that gets open sourced, in the hopes that it's also useful to the greater community.

But I definitely would not consider Google-written code to be superior to other solutions out there - just an alternative option to choose from - and certainly not the best for many situations.