SOA thoughts

Maybe you've read the legendary "Stevey's Google Platforms Rant" by Steve Yegge - I did so today. If you call yourself a Software Architect or somewhat like this you have to think about his words and sentences.

You. Have. To.

For me the most important statements of him are:

 "But they [Amazon] do services because they've come to understand that it's the Right Thing. There are without question pros and cons to the SOA approach, and some of the cons are pretty long. But overall it's the right thing because SOA-driven design enables Platforms."

"We [Google] don't understand platforms. We don't "get" platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority."

"A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product."

So let's talk about my thoughts and maybe yours.

Did you ever feel like this? Sitting in your chair, reading such sentences and think "We don't understand platforms." Working in the online gaming business means perfomance. Tune up performance. Don't care about code quality. Tune up performance. Don't think about maintainability. Tune up performance. But why? Right! Because "We don't understand platforms."

Nobody cares about SOA, because it's slow - in the eye of many developers in the online gaming industry. But is it really important for a casual social click-based game to be high performant? Is it really important to ignore the opportunities a platform offers? I don't talk about a second Facebook. I talk about internal platforms. About publishing platforms. Regarding the understanding for the importance of a platform: "Some of you do, but you are the minority."

And I think, the ones who will understand the importance of a platform in the online gaming industry will rule the future. You can't beat Facebook. Did you ever think about why? Have you ever thought about what Facebook is? Not? Then go and read "Stevey's Google Platforms Rant". We don't talk about a social network website. We talk about a platform. A networking platform. A gaming platform. An application platform. I fully agree with Steve Yegge - that's why Google+ failed, why it sucked. It never was a platform and it will never be a true platform. Google can build products, Google can't build platforms.

And what about you?