Googler reaps rewards of non-agility

The headlines on TechMeme yesterday were a little overblown: Google Engineer Disses Google+ on Google+ because he couldn't figure out how to post on Google+ privately, ha ha ha. If it was a little amusing, it was also a distraction from the main message of the now-archived post: Google has conceptual trouble building platforms and Google+ is a "pathetic afterthought" because of that.

I basically have two responses to that. One, of course it's true, Google has pretty consistently cranked out a series of interesting, innovative products that have failed because they neither provide nor support a larger platform. Buzz, Wave, Google Video, Knol, Orkut... one could go on. But, two, none of that really matters because in few or none of those cases, nor again with Google+, was it really necessary to create a successful platform or product; it was enough to provide enough a semblance of one to spur the competition to improve their own.

I can't speak to the motivations internal to Google, but if you examine their incentives, it's clear enough: Google succeeds financially on the basis of Internet advertising. To the extent that more people use the Internet, for nearly any purpose, Google benefits. It is, in fact, a massive waste of their resources to create a platform if other people are willing to do it for them. They simply need to foster that growth. Releasing the modern equivalent of vaporware seems to have that effect. Of course, Facebook represents an ad-revenue competitor, so that's a bit more complicated, but notice how the company reacted like a scalded cat as soon as Google+ was released. Google is still moving the needle.

None of that really relates to agile operations, though, and the only reason I really read through the post was that the engineer's name rang a bell. A little searching and I realized I had read one of his posts before. And it was about Agility!

I thought it was interesting because some of the concepts he touts in the earlier post, the absence of project management and the emphasis on the individual engineer, could fuel the problems he describes in the current post. Google engineers are churning out products, not a platform, because when you are working in small teams without external direction, a product is pretty much what you can build.

This is not a problem that relates directly to agile, but it does serve to highlight some of the flaws of avoiding any methodology at all. His conception of good agile revolves around the emergent system formed of offering individual incentives, but at some level, that's bound to fall apart without additional coordinating levels... the dreaded project managers or their ilk.

In my view, that's exactly what agile gets right, in that it continues to recognize a need for that level of coordination, while at the same time seeking to make it as un-encumbering as possible by emphasizing individuals, collaboration, and flexibility over the traditional constraints of PM-centric methodologies.

Of course, that's not going to help Google, because you can still have all that and fail to have the vision to make use of it. Yegge confirms my long-held notion that Google doesn't have that vision (although I don't necessarily agree that they need it; serving ads doesn't require it). If they got it, though, you have to question how they could leverage the internal methodology he describes to act on it in the way that an Amazon or a Microsoft did.