fundamentally interesting thing that I think showed in everything that we did was that we built for ourselves. We had taste. We cared about the experience.
The "taste" thing is weird, making an analogy with Apple vs. Microsoft, who explicitly competed at many times
As DannyBee said, there was never any Google vs. Github competition, because Google's intention was never to build something like Github
In fact, one thing he didn't mention is that URL, as I recall, was
code.google.com/hosting/
not
code.google.com/ # this was something ELSE, developer API docs for maps, etc.
SPECIFICALLY because management didn't want anyone to think it was a product. It was a place to put Google's own open source projects, and an alternative to SourceForge. (There was also this idea of discouraging odd or non-OSS licenses, which was maybe misguided)
That is, the whole project didn't even deserve its own Google subdomain !!! (according to management)
(I worked on Google Code for around 18 months)
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However if I try to "steel man" the argument, it's absolutely true that we didn't use it ourselves. The "normal" Google tools were used to build Google Code, and we did remark upon that at the time: we don't dogfood it, and dogfooding gives you a better product
But it was a non-starter for reasons that have to do with Google's developer and server infrastructure (and IMO are related to why Google had a hard time iterating on new products in general)
I think also think Github did a lot of hard work on the front end, and Google famously does not have a strong front end culture (IMO because complex front ends weren't necessary for the original breakout product of search, unlike say Facebook)
The "taste" thing is weird, making an analogy with Apple vs. Microsoft, who explicitly competed at many times
As DannyBee said, there was never any Google vs. Github competition, because Google's intention was never to build something like Github
In fact, one thing he didn't mention is that URL, as I recall, was
not SPECIFICALLY because management didn't want anyone to think it was a product. It was a place to put Google's own open source projects, and an alternative to SourceForge. (There was also this idea of discouraging odd or non-OSS licenses, which was maybe misguided)That is, the whole project didn't even deserve its own Google subdomain !!! (according to management)
(I worked on Google Code for around 18 months)
---
However if I try to "steel man" the argument, it's absolutely true that we didn't use it ourselves. The "normal" Google tools were used to build Google Code, and we did remark upon that at the time: we don't dogfood it, and dogfooding gives you a better product
But it was a non-starter for reasons that have to do with Google's developer and server infrastructure (and IMO are related to why Google had a hard time iterating on new products in general)
I think also think Github did a lot of hard work on the front end, and Google famously does not have a strong front end culture (IMO because complex front ends weren't necessary for the original breakout product of search, unlike say Facebook)