Google has been catching a lot of flak over the past couple years, much of it along the lines of this post about Google Plus. The gist of it is that Google products are built by nerds, for nerds. In other words, Google is too nerdy. It’s not a new idea. Sometimes it’s expressed as “Google has an engineering culture.” But the implication is the same – that Google is made up of nerds who don’t know much about social interaction.

At the same time, Google engineer Steve Yegge claims that Google didn’t understand platforms and the lack of consistent APIs and standards across internal teams and external sites. Google shutting down some of its APIs and not offering a front-end API for Gmail has been a source of frustration for developers. In other words, Google is not nerdy enough.

So which is it?

First of all, I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss any of Google’s failures, real or perceived, as being a result of some inherent inability on the part of developers and engineers to understand basic social interaction. The stereotypes of engineers being fundamentally awkward and anti-social is not, in my experience, at all correct. Not to mention the fact that Facebook was developer-driven in the early days as well.

That said, there’s nothing in particular that qualifies software engineers to build intuitive and fulfilling social network sites. But who exactly is qualified? I’m not so sure Google can magically fix these problems by hiring, say, cultural anthropologists or usability experts (and for what it’s worth, Google did hire Matias Duarte to work on Android). I don’t think anyone really knows exactly how to build great Web applications, or great social applications. People try different stuff, some of it works, some of it doesn’t.

How did Google get to this point? The company used to be praised for making simple, useful products. I don’t remember anyone saying the original Google search engine, that cleared away the clutter and just provided useful search results, was too nerdy. I don’t remember people complaining that Gmail, with its conversation bundling, integrated instant messaging and massive storage space, was “too nerdy.” I don’t remember anyone saying that Google Maps was too nerdy or that it needed to be more like Mapquest. Even as recently as the release of the Chrome browser it seemed like Google was pretty on top of the whole user experience thing.

Where did it go wrong? Android? Wave? Buzz? I’m not sure, but it sure does seem like Google is striking out a lot these days. I use Android for various reasons, but usability isn’t one of them. I never found Wave interesting. I hated Buzz. The Google Plus interface is a nightmare.

As to the other question, whether Google is nerdy enough, well, it’s hard for me to dismiss someone like Google Plus engineer Joseph Smarr, who as the CTO of Plaxo and has been pushing for standards for years, as being “not nerdy enough” or not standards driven enough. And yet, I still can’t look at Google Plus and call it “developer friendly” in the same way that Twitter was back before it started telling developers not to build new clients.

But here’s the thing about Yegge’s proposal: if Google Plus were more developer friendly, more nerdy, someone could theoretically stumble on the perfect way to make it easier for non-nerds to use. Yegge wrote:

The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them.

You can’t do that. Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious few people in the world, over the entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them. We don’t have a Steve Jobs here. I’m sorry, but we don’t.

Larry Tesler may have convinced Bezos that he was no Steve Jobs, but Bezos realized that he didn’t need to be a Steve Jobs in order to provide everyone with the right products: interfaces and workflows that they liked and felt at ease with. He just needed to enable third-party developers to do it, and it would happen automatically.

I apologize to those (many) of you for whom all this stuff I’m saying is incredibly obvious, because yeah. It’s incredibly frigging obvious. Except we’re not doing it. We don’t get Platforms, and we don’t get Accessibility. The two are basically the same thing, because platforms solve accessibility. A platform is accessibility.

That strikes me as being at least close to the heard of the matter. But as I’ve pointed out, Google used to be pretty good at predicted what people really wanted – the original ultra-clean Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, etc. Now that it can’t, it needs to make it really easy for people to experiment and iterate.

So maybe it’s not that Google is “too nerdy” – it’s that Google is nerding out in the wrong places.