Dion Almaer

Software, Development, Products

Web Platform

The difference between Platforms and Ecosystems

tl;dr: “What’s the difference between a platform and an ecosystem?” This simple question resulted in an ecosystem strategy to connect sub-ecosystems that work on the Web. What if we lean in and deeply connect our tools, services, frameworks, and platforms….. and align on the right incentives for a healthy web?

I work in a product area of Google that is called Platforms and Ecosystems, and I sometimes reflect on the question “what’s the difference between a platform and an ecosystem?”

There are many, but I have found myself diving into the differences in complexity of a rich ecosystem.

With platforms we often think in layers, each layer building on each other, and the interfaces mostly being at the boundaries. This is a nice abstraction when done right, as it isn’t leaking all over the place.

The layers view of a platform

An ecosystem often forms on top of a platform, or if it gets connected enough, you get combinations. Sub-ecosystems form that have their own fractal view of the world, and they may connect with multiple technical platforms (e.g. the React ecosystem touching Web, iOS, Android, Desktop, ….).

The Web is complex enough that it is one of the canonical examples of an ecosystem that has many sub-ecosystems. You can even slice “the web” itself into pieces including the technical client platform that is embedded in almost every native platform there is (WebView anyone?) as well as the connected open Web, where many technical stacks are available to run as well.

A week ago, I had the pleasure of spending some time with representatives from major global CMSes, and they are a fantastic example of sub-ecosystems.

We spoke of ecosystem loops, and how an ecosystem has so many more connection points that are not restricted to layers, and are multi-directional.

These connection points, when strong, can enable a healthy web ecosystem. This realization has changed the way that we work, thinking about we can truly enable healthy connections.

Foundationally, we obviously want to build web platform APIs that work for as many ecosystems as possible, whilst also push the web. We also work to build clear guidance on web.dev that helps developers understand what is possible on the web across key pillars and principles. We want to deliver new and better tools that help you create, debug, and deliver actionable insights to you (e.g. DevTools, Lighthouse, CrUX).

Speak the right language

Lighthouse Stack Packs can speak your language

One of the problems we see, is that there is often an impedance mismatch between the layer of abstraction that a developer uses (e.g. using a particular framework, set of libraries, or backend infra) and the feedback that tools and services surface.

We are on a journey across our portfolio to fix this, and the best example is probably Lighthouse:

  • Lighthouse plugins allow you to build on the platform to offer your own audits and rulesets, enabling you to enforce you own criteria or requirements. For example, a framework may have important linting tests, or an ecommerce platform may have retail oriented audits.
  • Lighthouse Stackpacks bring an understanding of the ecosystem into the existing core rules. Don’t give generic guidance on next generation images when you could give custom guidance for particular plugins or point the developer to a setting in the admin console.

Elsewhere we are thinking of similar evolutions:

  • web.dev offers framework specific guidance, but what if the base guidance changed based on your needs?
  • There are many Chrome extensions for developers which extend DevTools, but what if there was a strong plugin API where knowledge can be brought to the core tools?

I am excited to work with the ecosystem to enable this kind of intelligence for our collective developers.

Show me the incentives!

We can make life much better for developers, but we have also learned that this isn’t enough to fully elevate the web together.

We want to see the flywheel moving nicely on the above ecosystem loops, with users engaging with high quality content from developers and their sites and platforms.

As platforms, how do we enable this outcome? It’s hard, but we have learned a lot from the work that the ecosystem did to move to HTTPS.

Moar TLS!

It may be hard to think back to the days when HTTPS wasn’t the norm, and only 30% of traffic was secured. How could we make it the vast majority? I remember hearing thought such as: “it can’t be done!”, “people just don’t actually care enough!”, “it’s too hard!”

In retrospect, it’s interesting to reflect on the parts and pieces that I think collectively drove things forward:

#1 Knowledge and Insights
There was a lot of content on *why* this is important, and *how* to do it. I remember it being really quite hard to do, and also waking up in a sweat on a couple of occasions with my brain racing: “did my certificate expire?“

#2 Tooling
The ecosystem jumped in to help make it MUCH easier. LetsEncrypt changed the game, and servers and hosts jumped in too.

#3 Demand
Now it’s easier, and it’s the right thing to do, but companies have huge backlogs. How do we make “the right thing to do” blindingly aligned to users and the company?

We need the right incentives, and this was the final puzzle piece. How do we reward developers that do the right thing? Some examples here are:

  • Browser UI surfacing quality: At first browsers changed their UI to highlight the good (e.g. showcase “secure”), and then…. over time…. deliberately…. switch to the point where the default is secure and we highlight the insecure
  • HTTPS required for API usage: WIth Service Workers, and powerful capabilities such as those being worked on via Project Fugu we need to make sure that we aren’t setting users up for attacks. This keeps our users secure, and also incentivizes developers to move to HTTPS to gain access to said APIs.
  • Acquisition: highly quality content is better for our users, so we want to make sure that Google Search is driving engagement to that content. When HTTP was added as a ranking factor we noticed an increase in adoption.
    It has been great to see the sum of the parts add up to the great adoption of HTTPS and we continue to push.

Moar Incentives!

How do we learn from HTTPS and bring this to the other areas of quality such as performance?

We will make sure that:

  • We will be clear about the metrics that we think represent quality
  • We will surface data and insights for developers and decision makers across our suite of products, and accessible for third party tooling solutions
  • We are very deliberate in carrots and sticks so everyone has time to plan
  • We will work with the sub-ecosystems so we can align on everything above so we row in the same direction. For example, if you are an established CMS provider, it isn’t solely important to track how many themes and plugins you have in your marketplace, but also note the quality of the output and how you can use said marketplace to share the same incentives (surfacing the right metrics etc).

How can we build connections that will strengthen us all? Do you see anything we should be doing? I am all ears.

Delight developers in ecosystem-enhancing, easy to copy ways

Gibson Biddle came to give a product leadership talk at Google and one section really stuck with me. He mentioned how he came up with a simple statement that packs into it the role of product, while he was VP of Product at Netflix:

“Delight customers in margin-enhancing, hard to copy ways.”

– Gib

So short. So simple. Yet, much to unpack. For example:

  • Delight customers: The Kano model discusses the role of delight and how “Users don’t expect features that delight them. Consequently, if these features are not there, customers will not be dissatisfied. However, if they are present, they can easily have the biggest influence on the customers’ level of satisfaction.“
  • Margin-enhancing: A ha. The business side that reminds us that we live in the real-world, and life isn’t solely about thinking through what the user wants….. as that won’t matter if you can’t survive or thrive, which is necessary to fund more delight. I now look out for the obvious bits here…. E.g. when you can’t just buy a book on the Kindle app on iOS. That restriction isn’t in place due to user-centric reasons.
  • Hard to copy: show me the moats!

I work on a developer platform, and a very open one at that, so I got to thinking about how a version of the statement would make sense for the Web Developer Ecosystem team, and came up with:

“Delight developers in ecosystem-enhancing, easy to copy ways”

– me

How does this unpack?

Delight developers

A platform needs to bring a supply of users to the table, for developers to have an opportunity to reach.

ASIDE: One of my kids asked me the good ole chicken and egg question, so I showed him:

And then for fun, I asked:

It was fun chatting through the birth of computing, and how the first users kinda were developers too, etc. It was also interesting thinking through various platforms and the stage at which third party developers were allowed on, and how it often depended on how valuable the host of the platform was as-is.

For example, the iPhone started first party, with Safari running the back catalog. The radio on the other hand….. I don’t remember it having any saved content that you could listen too if nothing was on the waves!

Anyway, back to delighting developers….. it’s important that we bring the meat of ROI (lowest cost to build your best experience for a large supply of users) but also the delight. Features such as this:

Value attracts, quality drives loyalty, and innovation differentiates.

Ecosystem Enhancing

Whatever we invest in should be enhancing the ecosystem. This means that we shouldn’t be thinking short-term. It means we should be thinking about the diversity in the ecosystem. One of the beauties of the Web is how anyone can make a home there. Grab a domain, and bob’s your uncle.

As a platform, yes you are a match maker of sorts (users and developers), but the long term aspect means that you aren’t just measuring hook ups, but family and societal growth that comes of the matches.

How do you notice weeds in an open ecosystem? You see silos that go over the top, and there are pure winners in verticals that stomp out competition. If you aren’t measuring and looking for the right things, it can look like engagement is going up and all is good…. when in fact the diversity is rotting away. We don’t want walls that keep people in and out, and even when we see people really enjoying a set of flowers, who knows how long that will last. Fashion’s change, and flowers can die out, so it is vital to not be all in on tulips.

In a healthy ecosystem, different parts interact in complex ways. You can mashup content, and someone can use an extension that makes something work better for them. The platform should be watching out for new patterns and work to bake them in so many can benefit.

Easy to copy

Rather than building first party competition that is zero sum game, we want to inspire the ecosystem and do so in a way that anyone can easily build on what we do.

We want to share building blocks, and help any sub communities throughout the stack. Open source enables us to not only share our own work in a well known way, but it also means we can participate and help other projects.

We see this in so many ways. From Chromium, to our guidance, libraries, and tools (DevTools, AMP, Lit, Lighthouse, workbox, you name it!), and with communities such as WordPress.

It’s incredibly fortunate that we can work in a way where we legitimately want sharing and copying, as we work together to garden the ecosystem, and make it the best destination to draw in more humans to play with us.

And thank you, Web community, for all of the creation and curation that you do.

Becoming a better Pacesetter for Web Developers in 2019

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Roger Bannister breaking the 4 minute mile barrier

When you work on a platform, you quickly feel how you are one part of the overall ecosystem. The Web is a huge ecosystem with diversity galore. Web standards, multiple browsers, a huge number and variety of devices, a plethora of tools and services available. It can be quite overwhelming at times!

Over the holiday break, I was naturally noodling on our role, and how to help improve the Web. As is cliche for this time of year, I jumped aggressively into the desire for healthy habits, and went on (short!) daily runs, often with my dog, or 9 year old son. When running with Josh, I started to think about the role of a Pacesetter:

“A runner who leads a distance running event to ensure a fast time and avoid excessive tactical racing.”

I want 2019 to be a year in which we will run to where the Web community is today, and do all we can to train to get in shape for where we all need to be.

We want developers to be successful on the Web by shipping great experiences for our (collective) users. Part of this success revolves around us setting up the environment (the meet) to have as many users available as possible, setting up the rules of the game, and helping developers train and get better.

The Goldilocks Pacesetter

What does it take to be a good pacesetter? You need to make sure that you aren’t on either end of these extremes:

  • If you are too far ahead of the runner then you are no longer making pace for them. They can’t reasonably keep up, and thus you may as well not exist and they will go back to their natural pace.
  • If you are running alongside them, even cheering them along as you do so, you are also not doing your job, and they won’t improve as much as they could.
  • If you win the race you are not doing your job, you need the runners to trust that you are going to do the job you agreed: to make the race fast and competitive and let the racers race.

We need a balance, pushing the pace in a way that is achievable, yet naturally will contain stress (in a good “the only way to improve” way).

How are we reaching developers where they are today?

At Chrome Dev Summit, we shared how we understand that we partner with frameworks, to deliver the surface area that developers use to program for the Web, and how we want to work closely with them:

  1. Include frameworks in the Chrome Intent to Implement process
  2. $200,000 of funding for improving performance best practices in frameworks.
  3. Increased collaboration with frameworks from the Chrome team.

We also know that we need bring the APIs that you need, to make the Web more capable, allowing you to bring your best experiences to the Web. This also includes enhancements to the UI toolkit of the Web, allowing you to build rich, fluid, UI.

We all know there is work to be done there, but we also have more tools available to deliver high quality UIs than ever before. The stack is changing. Salesforce posted on the change they have seen between 2014 and today, and how it enables them to take a very different approach using Web Components. This standard, shared API, gives us interoperability across frameworks. They can invest in fast, accessible, <killer-components>, that work with all. These components could even progressively change under the hood, allowing features such as various Worklets, and a scheduler to improve the experience.

Where do we need to be?

If we work together, we can break the four minute mile equivalent for the Web, which is delivering an instant, responsive, jank-free experience for our users.

There are many types of Web applications, with a variety of trade offs. A tool such as Squoosh is a different beast compared to a content site, or an e-commerce store. We want to deliver a platform that can work well for the variety of use cases we see on the Web, and collectively learn from each other on patterns to build such experiences.

Now we have a challenging goal, it’s time to jump into the New Year, and put in the work to achieve it!

p.s. As always, I am always very interested to hear your thoughts on what you need from the Web platform and ecosystem, and what you would want from a Pacesetter!

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.