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Re:Steve's Google Platform rant by SoftwareMaven on Wednesday October 12, 2011 @06:01PM (#3104822)
I would call that very dangerous and very likely a premature optimization. Nobody cares you are a platform until they use your product, and if you spend all your time building a platform, there will be no product to use.

The path requires far more finese than "always create a platform". You need to balance over-engineering with the ability to re-evaluate previous decisions.

I agree Google has wandered far off this path, but imnot sure they are on any more well defined path than Yahoo. They just happen to be earlier.

Re:Steve's Google Platform rant by bluedanieru on Friday October 14, 2011 @02:19AM (#3110207)
This applies to startups, less so to more mature companies who can and will throw more resources behind a project. After the prototyping phase, once you're reasonably sure of the direction you're going to go in, it isn't a bad idea to keep extensibility in mind from the start. It's more like premature architecting, if anything, than premature optimization, which is much less offensive (and not even necessarily bad).