Google Engineer Calls Google+ a 'Pathetic Afterthought'
Note to Google employees: If you're going to write a criticism of the company, make sure you don't accidentally post it where everyone on the internet can see it. In the same week Google announced it has 40 million users now on its social networking site, a company engineer mistakenly posted an opinion piece criticizing Google+ in a place where the public could read it.
Steve Yegge's post was accidentally posted in the public part of his Google+ account on Wednesday, and was quickly copied and reposted around the Internet before he had the chance to take it down. The full text of the post can be found at siliconangle.com.
“The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought,” Yegge wrote in his post after going on a long rant about his former employer, Amazon.com.
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“Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work,” he later added.
He argues that third parties should be able to develop products, like games, for Google+, because the company won't be able to anticipate what users want. He also says Steve Jobs was one of the only people who could anticipate what consumers wanted in technology, but says, “We don't have a Steve Jobs here. I'm sorry, but we don't.”
To be fair, Yegge's complaints about the Google social network was one of the only issues he had with the company. At the beginning of the post, and at several other places throughout, he states that “Google does everything right.”
In a later public post on his Google+ account, Yegge made it clear that he took down his critical rant on his own accord. He says that he spoke to Google's public relations staff, and the company has made it very clear to him that they would not censor his opinions regardless of whether he took it down or not.
Google probably isn't all that concerned about the post anyway. On Thursday, the company reported bringing in $9.72 billion in revenue in the third quarter of this year, which ended on Sept. 30. That number is 33 percent greater than 2010's third quarter results, when the company brought in $7.29 billion.
