His point wasn't that Google has no platforms, he specifically mentions a few groups in Google that do get it right and anybody that has used the gdata APIs for those products would agree that they really are quite nice to use as a third party developer when compared to a typical web API.
His point was that there shouldn't be so much variation on this from team to team and they should strive to make these platform services a cultural core part of the company.
I totally agree with his point, though I'm coming from the outsider perspective. I was really jazzed to hear they finally released an API for Google+ and then crushed to realize it was completely worthless for almost any task. They've recently released an updated API, adding in some very basic search stuff.. but the API is still worthless. Hopefully within a year or so they'll have an API that isn't completely worthless, but it would have been nice if they had one from the start and if they internalized the API culture Steve is talking about, this would have been a no-brainer because the API would be an integral part of the service from top to bottom instead of something being slowly bolted on later.
His point was that there shouldn't be so much variation on this from team to team and they should strive to make these platform services a cultural core part of the company.
I totally agree with his point, though I'm coming from the outsider perspective. I was really jazzed to hear they finally released an API for Google+ and then crushed to realize it was completely worthless for almost any task. They've recently released an updated API, adding in some very basic search stuff.. but the API is still worthless. Hopefully within a year or so they'll have an API that isn't completely worthless, but it would have been nice if they had one from the start and if they internalized the API culture Steve is talking about, this would have been a no-brainer because the API would be an integral part of the service from top to bottom instead of something being slowly bolted on later.