Google has succeeded as much or perhaps more than any other technology company ever. They have accomplished all of this all the while being supporters of and with the support of the open source community. They are known for their corporate drive to have the best of everything as much as their corporate motto of “do no evil”. They have the best hardware, the best data centers, they hire the best people. They have always prided themselves on having the best search software and developing cutting edge software infrastructure. But have open source alternatives left Google’s software stack in the dust? One former Google engineer says that in fact Google’s software stack is obsolete.
Dhanji R. Prasanna a former Google engineer and self-styled hacker says that while Google’s hardware design and data center remain a cut above the rest of the industry, its “software stack on top of it is 10 years old, aging and designed for building search engines and crawlers. And it is well and truly obsolete.” Prasanna goes on to say that Google developed software which at one time were the envy of the industry like, “Protocol Buffers, BigTable and MapReduce are ancient, creaking dinosaurs compared to MessagePack, JSON, and Hadoop” (all open source BTW).”And new projects like GWT, Closure andMegaStore are sluggish, overengineered Leviathans compared to fast, elegant tools like jQuery and mongoDB”. Prasanna says the Google apps are “designed by engineers in a vacuum, rather than by developers who have need of tools”.
A pretty damning statement for sure. But lets also take this with a grain of salt. The fact is Prasanna was part of the Google Wave team, a Google project that was killed. He is one of several team members that left shortly after receiving their end of year bonus (albeit at the end of Q1 instead of end of year, but that is not unheard of). In addition to stating that the Google stack is obsolete, Prasanna also says that Google’s culture is very territorial and for a “hacker” like himself way to confining to truly stretch his wings. So while he praises Google in his post, he certainly has some motive and reason to have an axe to grind.
All of that aside though, I find myself very happy to hear that many of the open source projects and tools that I have covered here in my blog are mentioned as being superior to the tools that Google has developed. I am not under any illusions though. Much of what Google did back in the day did represent the best of the best. But as Prasanna says in any closed system, innovation and evolution can grind to a halt. The open source system which continues to evolve can and will surpass it. On top of this Google like many companies can take on too much and as a result some of their later projects can suffer from bloat.
It happened to Microsoft, it can certainly happen to Google. What does this mean for Google apps and the companies future? I don’t think they are done. They will continue to move forward. However, the golden age of Google’s unique advantage may be over. Or who knows maybe they will adopt some of these open source tools. Embrace them truly and in place of the apps they have poured millions into. Maybe Google will once again gets its groove back. It is all part of the natural rhthym of companies maturing.
