From Ballmer to Jobs, tech leaders write memos, manifestos, and rants that shape how all of us consider computing. These 10 provocative statements each have a spot in tech history.
Technology tends to be linked to cold, mechanical precision. Nevertheless, the technology industry attracts a good variety of outspoken firebrands.
Perhaps the opinionated nature of noted technology leaders is a consequence of the personality traits required to press ahead within the face of naysayers, skeptics, and rivals. Regardless of the reason, the tech industry has given rise to a plethora of indignant memos, manifestos, and rants rich with self-righteousness and private conviction. They describe what is wrong with the realm and the way to set things right.
They let us know to think different(ly).
Following are 10 of one of the most meaningful, entertaining, astute, and provocative pieces to seem online long ago 20 years.
[ From Amazon to Y2K, listed here are the stories behind the various most pivotal developments in technology over the last quarter century. See InformationWeek’s Most necessary Cover Stories. ]
Steve Yegge, Google: Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant
Google engineer Steve Yegge spent six years at Amazon, and in 2011 he used that have to tell his indictment of what Google does wrong and Amazon does right. It’s remarkable in its candor. And it is a testament to Google’s maturity as a company that Yegge remains employed at Google and his criticism remains online, albeit hosted by a 3rd-party Google+ account.
The gist of his argument is that Amazon gets platforms and Google doesn’t. That’s less true today than it was then — Yegge’s observations evidently were noticed by Google management. However the rant is still relevant for Google and for any company operating a platform business or all in favour of doing so.
A choice passage:
Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in brief-term thinking, predicated at the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a good product. But that isn’t why they’re successful. Facebook is successful because they built a whole constellation of goods by allowing folks to do the work.
Yegge’s rant is made more meaningful by his follow-up post per week later. And it contrasts with subsequent observations about how he believes Amazon “is inside the bottom half the industry when it comes to being a pleasing place to work” and Google “is undoubtedly within the top 0.1% of one of the best places to work on this planet, across anything even remotely computer-related.”
James Whittaker, Google: Why I Left Google
A former professor of computer science on the University of Florida, Whittaker founded a safety software firm, joined Microsoft, left for Google, after which returned to Microsoft. He left Google early last year, disenchanted with the changes caused by CEO Larry Page. His widely read public letter, “Why I Left Google,” might be one of the best known of a small but apparently growing list of public departure letters — see also Spencer Tipping’s “Why I Left Google” and Douglas Bowman’s “Goodbye, Google.”
Whittaker recounts how Google went from being an innovative, decentralized company under Eric Schmidt to an advertising machine focused solely on remaking itself within the image of Facebook through Google+.
His criticism about Google+ still resonates:
Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t portion of it. People were sharing throughout us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. i could not even get my very own teenage daughter to have a look at Google+ twice: “Social isn’t a product,” she told me when I gave her a demo. “Social is people and the folk are on Facebook.” Google was the wealthy kid who, after discovering he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The indisputable fact that nobody came to Google’s party became the elephant within the room.
And yet as Whittaker himself admits in his post, “Truth is, I’ve never been much on advertising.” Google is an advertising company and advertising has gone social, perhaps unavoidably and forever. The great old days when the internet was free, the NSA sought permission to listen, and we were ignorant about how web services and Soylent Green were made — OMG, it’s people’s data! — are gone, in the event that they were ever anything greater than self-delusion.
Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo: The Peanut Butter Manifesto
Yahoo’s low point came in late 2010. But in 2006, Brad Garlinghouse, then Yahoo senior VP, saw where things were headed. In an internal memo leaked to The Wall Street Journal, he castigated the corporate for its loss of vision, ownership, and accountability, using a slightly odd metaphor:
I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter around the myriad opportunities that continue to adapt within the online world. The end result: a skinny layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we concentrate on nothing particularly.
I hate peanut butter. All of us should.
Let or not it’s said that peanut butter is awesome, unless you’re allergic to it. But otherwise Garlinghouse was directly to something. Had Yahoo’s management on the time paid more attention, perhaps its recovery do not have taken see you later.
Earlier this year, Garlinghouse posted a follow-up note through LinkedIn, wherein he suggests the issues he identified were merely symptoms of a bigger problem: failed corporate culture. The excellent news is that Marissa Mayer seems to be coping with that, without disparaging everyone’s favorite lifesaving, nutrient-rich, nutty spread.
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