First reaction to Stevey’s Rant http://j.mp/rec8pd
Google pays him more than Amazon did. But since he hasn’t worked at Amazon in 6 years his thoughts on Amazon nowadays don’t matter much. Oh, and he’d like to try this new SOA thing he read about in a 2006 infoWeek article.
Amazon’s UI is successful because they test it with real users, not a 1980s UI expert. It’s evolutionary, so not pretty, but it sells product.
Stevey completely misunderstands the concept of dogfood, and so it’s value. He also confuses product and marketplace.
Steve Jobs failed because he didn’t understand marketplace and tried to predict what users want. But he succeeded by stumbling into standardizing a marketplace on iPod & iPhone (through greed) and won developers to his platform despite iOS.
Microsoft hasn’t “gotten it” for a whole decade. They’re running on fumes. Coincidentally this was about the time that Bill Gates discovered politics and stopped taking an active interest in his company.
Facebook gets it the same way as Amazon. Give the customer what they want. Ignore the code to the point you have to distribute for stability
Before you get all nostalgic for Larry&Sergey’s pristine code, remember Google was hacked together by a 5th grader, and they stumbled onto their clean UI because they couldn’t afford a designer (even a bad one) so left the home page blank & discovered that’s what users want
Humble people don’t get angry when they’re accused of arrogance. And they don’t claim to be 99% humble. and 99% perfect
99% of the secret of Google’s success, not brilliant search algorithms akin to Apple’s virus free claim.
Google’s product is Doubleclick.com, not search
Stevey misses the point that success is often accidental. Zuckerberg didn’t have to have a brilliant design. Facebook beat Myspace because it had a simpler interface–the same reason Google beat Yahoo. And because your mom wasn’t on Facebook yet.
If you want a distributed platform, hire worse coders–you’ll be forced into it. If you want visual appeal & usability, ignore designers.
Anything that your mom uses is ripe for being overtaken by something new, just for the sake of kids wanting to be different than parents
The one thing Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, & Facebook have all had in common is single owner with an intense interest in the success of his company.
This was orginally written as a post-blast on Twitter. I’m sure I annoyed lots of people. Sorry about that. Guess Google+ would be good for something — if only anyone used it.
Fijiaaron 
Overall, I don’t think Stevey’s post was all that insightful or earth shattering. Mainly, it got attention because it was *supposedly* an “accidentally” leaked internal memo.
But Stevey’s not a grunt. He’s not a suit, but he was hired by Google primary on the popularity of his blog, entitled “Stevey’s Rants” — this is what they hired him for. His love of Google is directly tied to his monstrous salary and free rein to play around — and have other people work on his pet projects, but a large part of that stipend and leeway was granted with the implicit command that he shut up on his blog.
Maybe Google felt too many of their employees were reading his too long rants, and his phenomenal salary was worth the productivity boost to get him to stop blogging, but even looking back over his few parody posts over the last couple years, you can see his heart isn’t in it.
I think Google wanted this rant to go public. But at any rate, you can tell Stevey misses the audience, and his new raise and promotion will only contain him so long before he gets the urge to evangelize again.