Startup Chatter by Donna Bogatin

HOORAY! An unintimidated ex-Googler with the courage and thoughtfulness to speak truth to Googley power, once out the (not so) holy Googleplex gates.

Sergey Solyanik’s first hand developer account of the “eye-candy” nature of Google’s (erroneously) vaunted “cloud computing” software mantra confirms the analyses that I have written for the past two years about Google’s disinterest in, and inability for, producing mass-market, meaningful, quality software deserving of consideration by individuals and organizations valuing productivity, functionality, reliability and security.

Just days ago, my first-hand Googler account led to my advisory to the Googler-In-Chief: “Hey Eric, Google TV Ads, Presented by Microsoft Office!”

Sergey Solyanik (ex-Googler): Google software business is divided between producing the “eye candy” - web properties that are designed to amuse and attract people - and the infrastructure required to support them. Some of the web properties are useful (some extremely useful - search), but most of them primarily help people waste time online (blogger, youtube, orkut, etc). All of them are free, and it’s anyone’s guess how many people would actually pay, say $5 per month to use Gmail. For me, this really does make the project less interesting if people are not willing to pay for it.

This orientation towards cool, but not necessarilly useful or essential software really affects the way the software engineering is done. Everything is pretty much run by the engineering - PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. While they do exist in theory, there are too few of them to matter.On the other hand, I was using Google software - a lot of it - in the last year, and slick as it is, there’s just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it’s a different 10% every week - the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more.

This is probably fine for free software, but I always laugh when people tell me that Google Docs is viable competition to Microsoft Office. If it is, that is only true for the occasional users who would not buy Office anyway. Google as an organization is not geared - culturally - to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.The culture part is very important here - you can spend more time fixing bugs, you can introduce processes to improve things, but it is very, very hard to change the culture.

And the culture at Google values “coolness” tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked. Since I’ve been an infrastructure person for most of my life, I value reliability far, far more than “coolness”, so I could never really learn to love the technical work I was doing at Google.

So, it is “back to Microsoft” for Solyanik, back to the BUSINESS OF SOFTWARE!

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