Leaving Google and returning to Microsoft
Sergey Solyanik left Google and is back to Microsoft. His post on the subject is just... hum.. pragmatic! Here are my favorite parts of the post: (bold format is my responsibility)
(...) "First, I love multiple aspects of the software development process. I like engineering, but I love the business aspects no less. I can't write code for the sake of the technology alone - I need to know that the code is useful for others, and the only way to measure the usefulness is by the amount of money that the people are willing to part with to have access to my work.
Sorry open source fanatics, your world is not for me! "(...)
(...)"On the other hand, I was using Google software - a lot of it - in the last year, and slick as it is, there's just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it's a different 10% every week - the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more.
This is probably fine for free software, but I always laugh when people tell me that Google Docs is viable competition to Microsoft Office. If it is, that is only true for the occasional users who would not buy Office anyway. Google as an organization is not geared - culturally - to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.
The culture part is very important here - you can spend more time fixing bugs, you can introduce processes to improve things, but it is very, very hard to change the culture. And the culture at Google values "coolness" tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked" (...)
And with that said, we can continue to run business as usual. Back to work!
