<< Rather ideas emerge, are torn to shreds, reformulated, torn to shreds, prototyped, torn to shreds, launched to internal users, torn to shreds, rebuilt and relaunched, torn to shreds, refined some more, torn to shreds, put back together one last time, torn to shreds by SREs, tweaked again in a seemingly-endless frenzy of last minute work ... >>

That totally explains why we haven't seen Google Drive aka Platypus being released to the public yet. :p

Unreserved? Do u mean "undeserved Google Praise"

Both words are OK in this context, but I also read "undeserved".

(I did mean unreserved, e.g. as in these from Answers.com: "Given without reservation; unqualified: unreserved praise." ... "Without limitations or mitigating conditions" ... "Completely such, without qualification or exception")

It's funny, a post on Ionut's blog just yesterday covered something like what this post is talking about, and about how Gmail slowly evolved and was very basic until internal users demands brought it to where it should be, and about humility, release early, etc.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/02/gmails-humble-beginning.html

While I agree it'd be interesting to hear more about the internal battles and struggles, I can also see why they wouldn't want to publicize those kinds of things as much to the outside world, where it gets exaggerated and overblown or isolated incidents could be taken in a broader context.

actually I'd love to see a little more criticism of Google's process around product marketing / product education. they could really be doing a lot more to educate the market, both before (nigh impossible) and once a product rolls out. in all too many cases the Goog suffers from expectations of mass user adoption w/o much more than a terse Faq page. its been getting a little better lately, altho more would be better, IMHO.