Last week Google developer Steve Yegge accidentally posted publicly a rant on Google Plus that was meant only to be read internally. Last night he posted a follow-up saying that he hadn’t been fired or reprimanded. Yegge didn’t retract any of his previous statements, but did feel bad about publicly trashing Amazon and wanted to paint a more balanced picture.

The new post mostly focused on Amazon, but Yegge also noted that Google is really listening to his complaints and trying to figure out how to improve its ability to build a service oriented architecture (SOA) upon which to build applications.

To review, the basic goal of SOA is interoperability – the need for one Google app to be able to talk to another Google app, whether internally or externally. Part of what SOA enables, as Yegge pointed out in his previous post, is the ability for different teams within the company to communicate and collaborate across silos.

The need for different silos to better communicate is not a foreign concept at Google. In fact, Google was an early adopter of what we now call DevOps – a movement to improve IT operations by, among other things, helping operations staff work more closely with development staff. At the Surge event Google CIO Ben Fried talked about how silos had caused a major IT disaster at Morgan Stanley when he worked there. Google may have a long way to go in terms of implementing SOA internally, but there is a culture of tightly integrating development and operations, and Google is in a good position to improve.

Services Angle

Google Plus is slowly improving and the API is gaining more functionality. But what really needs to happen, as Yegge pointed out, is a cultural shift at Google. That might not be possible, but I think that if Amazon could do it, Google can do it.