One-trick Pony
I had read the Google+ part of it, but found the rest more interesting. It is surprising that internally Googlers like him are most concerned that they aren't adequately delivering a platform. I tend to see Google's larger problems revolving around legal issues related to its de facto monopoly on search/web advertising and Android, as well as a systemic need to know at least as much if not more about its users than Facebook does. The latter is by far the worst. Not long ago, I read a thoughtful article by a developer who pointed out the benefits of users paying for software or content, namely that there was no need for the company to bombard them with advertising or mine their personal habits. In this regard, Amazon has a few problems as well and is willingly heaping on more by selling the Fire at cost. But as Yegge alluded to, Amazon doesn't have a profit model predicated entirely on one type of revenue source - and let's face it, selling books, power tools and music is somewhat useful to society. Advertising is corrupting.
The problem is really broader than the programmer's view that Google doesn't deliver a platform. What Google doesn't have - even with Android, Google Office, Gmail and Google+ - is an ecosystem (whether narrow like Apple's or broad like Microsoft's) that provides a variety of revenue sources. Apple gets money from hardware sales (which are split between ioS devices and Macs), music and other media, and iOS apps. Microsoft gets money from hardware (Xbox, input devices), Windows, Office, Server, SQL Server, developer tools, consulting and hosting. Amazon also is a far cry from the online bookseller. By and large, Google is still a one-trick pony and you see it more and more when trying to do searches that advertising is skewing the results. And it's what you don't see that might be more concerning. Google has admitted and explains to users in the fine print of its agreements that every email, ever document, every picture you send through its servers is subject to analysis. Coupled with the patterns it can glean from the searches you do (whether public or private, if done close enough in time), click-throughs and locational data, Google can know a lot about it you. Of course what it knows is always less complete than if the details were directly provided by you, but like an erroneous credit report, that could be worse than if you just provided a complete profile on your own.
My point is, Google has to stoop to these things because it has to keep feeding a business model that not only narrow but prone to corruption. Its competitors have their own faults but at least have had the vision to actually create things that people buy (or in Amazon's case, a store where you can buy them) so they have a more varied and direct revenue model. Perhaps the object lesson for consumers is to think about paying up front instead of in a roundabout way. Either way, you're gonna have to serve somebody.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
