At Google, some of the engineers would joke, self-deprecatingly, that the software internally was not particularly exceptional but rather Google’s dominance was an example of the power of network effects: when software is custom tailored to work well with each other.
Rii-iight. There is definitely room for writing bespoke software that just does exactly what you need in exactly the way you want, but the problem is that there’s generally a tendency for “what you need” to expand over time and you find yourself spending not 1-2 days but 1-2 months of each year writing code that someone else has already written.
Rii-iight. There is definitely room for writing bespoke software that just does exactly what you need in exactly the way you want, but the problem is that there’s generally a tendency for “what you need” to expand over time and you find yourself spending not 1-2 days but 1-2 months of each year writing code that someone else has already written.