Woof

Do you eat your own dog food?

I once wrote about a 1980 memo, reflecting on a decision by Apple’s then-CEO, Michael Scott (same name as Steve Carell’s character in The Office), that was “circulated” to the company’s employees:

EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY!! NO MORE TYPEWRITERS ARE TO BE PURCHASED, LEASED, etc., etc.

Apple is an innovative company. We must believe and lead in all areas. If word processing is so neat, then let’s all use it!

Goal: by 1-1-81, NO typewriters at Apple… We believe the typewriter is obsolete. Let’s prove it inside before we try and convince our customers.

This was a big deal at the time because, well, everyone used typewriters. In fact, I like to imagine that the memo must have been typed and copied, and handed out as hard copies.

Back then, the Apple II had only been introduced a few years before; the first version of Microsoft Word wouldn’t be released for three more years.

After I wrote about the Apple memo, a Google employee contacted me to say I should really think about another newsletter:

"If one company is amazing at this concept, it's Google. We have a concept called 'dogfood' and 'fishfood' where we heavily use consumer-facing and internal-facing products ourselves on a day-to-day basis well before a beta release."

Sure enough, a quick Google search revealed the Google Testing Blog, written by yet another Google employee, reflecting on the product development and release process at Google:

We have a large ecosystem of development/office tools and use them for nearly everything we do. Because we use them on a daily basis, we can dogfood releases company-wide before launching to the public.

These dogfood versions often have features unavailable to the public but may be less stable. ... Dogfooding is an important part of our test process. Test teams do their best to find problems before dogfooding, but we all know that testing is never perfect.

...

Not surprisingly, test-focused engineers often have a lot to say during the dogfood phase. I don't think there is a single public-facing product that I have not reported bugs on.

Among the products cited by the Google engineer as having been part of the dogfooding program were:

• Google Drive

• Gmail

• Hangouts

• Calendar

• Maps

• Groups

• Sites,

• App Engine,

• Chrome, and ... drum roll please ...

• Google+.

It reminds me of a joke:

If you spend a lot of time on Instagram, you're probably a millennial. If you spend lots of time on TikTok, you’re likely Gen Z.

But, if you spend a lot of time on Google+, you probably work for Google.

Outdated joke, obviously, since Google+ shut down completely in 2019.

Perhaps not coincidentally, a 2011 analysis found that among Google's founders, almost nobody — not the then-CEO, not senior management, not the entire corporate board— had even tried Google+.

“One of the most important rules in software is to eat your own dog food,” as Ben Parr wrote at Mashable at the time. “Perhaps somebody should tell that to Google's senior management, because the people in it are not eating their own dog food when it comes to Google+.”

Pretty prescient, don’t you think? And it applies to almost everything in life, doesn't it? I

I mean, if you don’t really believe what you say, then why should I believe you?

Here, have some kibble.

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7 other things worth knowing today

• The U.S. Supreme Court let Donald Trump's administration on Monday end temporary protected status that was granted to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the United States by his predecessor Joe Biden, as the Republican president moves to ramp up deportations as part of his hardline approach to immigration. (Reuters)

• Former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an "aggressive form" of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, his office said in a statement. "The President and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians," his office said. (CBS News)

• Elon Musk‘s company xAI says an “unauthorized modification” to its Grok chatbot on X caused it to bring up the myth of “white genocide” in South Africa in response to completely unrelated prompts. However, Grok has started to dabble in Holocaust denial, saying that it is “skeptical” that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and that “numbers can be manipulated.” (Rolling Stone)

• The Trump administration has agreed to pay nearly $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt to settle a lawsuit brought by Babbitt's estate, two people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post. Babbitt was an Air Force veteran and a staunch Trump supporter who was fatally shot by a U.S. Capitol Police officer on January 6, 2021, as she was attempting to enter the House Speaker's Lobby during the riot at the U.S. Capitol. (Newsweek)

• Crypto High-Rollers Go Big on Bodyguards to Deter Kidnappers. (Bloomberg)

• Elmo, Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster and the rest of the “Sesame Street” crew are headed to Netflix. Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization, made two announcements on Monday morning: "New seasons of ‘Sesame Street’ ... are coming to Netflix worldwide, AND those same new episodes will release on the same day on PBS stations and PBS KIDS digital platforms in the U.S., keeping our 50+ year relationship going strong." (KTLA)

• Stop Asking Servers ‘What’s Your Favorite Dish?’: If you want to ace your order, there are better questions to ask, according to the pros. (Bon Appetit)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Ayla Verschueren on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.