I think Steve might be my new favourite person... he's a guy at Google, and he accidentally published a rant intended for internal use (i.e. others at Google). Which itself isn't why I love him; it's because the things he's saying confirm what I already felt, and because he's standing up and making a fuss about putting it right...
quote:
There's actually a formal name for this phenomenon. It's called Accessibility, and it's the most important thing in the computing world.
The. Most. Important. Thing.
When software fails to be accessible to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software.
quote:
Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms.
The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call.
quote:
I apologize to those (many) of you for whom all this stuff I'm saying is incredibly obvious, because yeah. It's incredibly frigging obvious. Except we're not doing it. Google doesn't get Platforms, and Google doesn't get Accessibility.
quote:
But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they're quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you're blind or deaf or whatever.
That's just some short quotes (emphasis is all mine, some bits modified for readability), the full thing is over four thousand words long, and an interesting read. He's deleted it from his own stream, but it's currently
mirrored here and no doubt all over the Internet too.
Let's hope this does actually make Google realise why they're shit and do something about it.
EDITED: 13 Oct 2011 01:10 by BOUGHTONP