Steve Yegge

So, there's an ex-Amazon employee who now works for Google, called Steve Yegge, who wrote a firing-up-the-troops internal memo for Google and accidentally published it to the world. If you're tech-savvy, I recommend reading the whole thing because it's about the future of the web - though Yegge isn't really thinking beyond the future of Google. It's all about interfaces that connect all this amazing stuff on the internet to all the other amazing stuff, so that there truly will be an App For Everything in our future. But even if you don't care or understand about platforms vs products, you might like to read the first handful of paragraphs which, well, 'really slag off' is probably the right term, Amazon and Jeff Bezos to an impressive extent. And to my mind, Amazon is about to take over the world of books (see next post). Which is a shame if they really are jerks. link

Also, here's my favourite techy, snarky excerpt: "I'm just frankly describing what developers.google.com looks like to an outsider. It looks childish. Where's the Maps APIs in there for Christ's sake? Some of the things in there are labs projects. And the APIs for everything I clicked were... they were paltry. They were obviously dog food. Not even good organic stuff. Compared to our internal APIs it's all snouts and horse hooves."