Platform vs. Product

Speaking of our favorite publication, Business Insider, last month they published an article titled, “Google Engineer: Here’s Why Google+ Is Failing, And How We Can Start ‘Doing This Right.’” About a month ago was when it was becoming painfully clear that Google’s much anticipated launch into the realm of social was loosing steam fast. If my experiences mirrored others, the number of invites started to decrease, and the general level of activity just wasn’t there. It’s a great product, but there is only so much time in the day. Apparently, at least one person within Google noticed it too. He didn’t drink the Kool-Aid about why it must be other people’s fault if Google+ has not yet surpassed Facebook. Google engineer, blogger, and frequent public speaker Steve Yegge “wrote an epic rant about Google’s inept handling of the Google+ platform.”

In an ironic twist, Steve Yegge posted his rant using Google+, which would have been fine and makes perfect sense. The only problem is that Google+ is not the most intuitive platform when sharing to a select group or a single individual. It’s the same interface to send to one as it is to many. Steve forgot to uncheck the public sharing option. It went out to all connections not the select group of Googlers he intended. We can only imagine how that felt the next day when you wake up or perhaps receive tens if not hundreds of emails, texts, calls all saying, “Um dude. Your post is out in the public domain.” Thank goodness the job market is so competitive for talented engineers, because at a lesser company and in a different time, you can be sure he would not have a job that same day.

Here are a few quotes from Yegge’s novella that the Business Insider piece shared.

• "That one last thing that Google doesn’t do well is Platforms. We don’t understand platforms. We don’t "get" platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on."

• "Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers

• "The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them…

• You can’t do that. Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious few people in the world, over the entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them. We don’t have a Steve Jobs here. I’m sorry, but we don’t."

• "It’s everyone. The problem is that we’re a Product Company through and through. We built a successful product with broad appeal — our search, that is — and that wild success has biased us.

The drama of the slip-up aside, it’s an amazing piece and one that helped us view the world differently. We never really understood what made Facebook Facebook and why Twitter and Foursquare seemed equally resilient even though it took a week to code Twitter. The reason is because they are all the ultimate form of user generation, albeit in a controlled way. It’s a way to let the users build the business for you, for them to feel pride in authorship and ownership. They need you not because they need you, but because they feel like they helped create you.

We came across this distinction between product and platform recently at a small event we produced for the fashion and tech space. It was a tale of two custom clothing companies – Proper Cloth and Clothes Horse. In some respects, they are almost identical. Both have tried to help solve the fit issue of ordering online. In the former, they have a proprietary algorithm along with some super useful tools to help you figure out what you want. They sell their own brand of shirt custom made to your size directly to you. It’s a pure product business, and it will scale based on how many shirts they can sell. The second company, Clothes Horse, also tries to solve fit. They too have proprietary algorithms and some tools to help people determine what size to order, which cuts down returns, increases repeat rates, and a whole slew of other beneficial things for a retailer. Instead of selling their own line of clothing, though, they offer their service as a plug-in for an existing retailer. They want to be a platform, open and extensible for all.

This platform versus product distinction probably explains why Facebook succeeded and MySpace ultimately didn’t. In the end, it would be nice to say there is no right or wrong choice, and in some ways that is probably true. If you are a product person, build product. If you are a platform company, build platforms. One of the lessons we take away is that both can be successful, but you should know which you are. If you are going to try and create one that goes counter to the typical culture of the business, the take away there is be careful and be committed, but probably be careful.

As for the Yegge saga, Rip Rowan, on whose Google+ page still exists the unedited version of the discourse, writes, “Google’s openness to allow us to keep this message posted on its own social network is, in my opinion, a far greater asset than any SaS platform. In the end, a company’s greatest asset is its culture, and here, Google is one of the strongest companies on the planet.”