Products and platforms overlap quite a bit, e.g. many enterprise products can be thought of as platforms, or AdSense and Android. That's why I think it's less useful to contrast the two companies on a product vs. platform axis, and why I find the cultural differences more interesting.
Google does make great products, especially when it's a matter of presenting a simple elegant interface to a complex internal system. I'm a big fan of Google Search and Maps UX, and Google Now.
But the UX of a product isn't just its immediate interface, it's also all the interactions you have with support, documentation, and change over time, and trust. The cultural differences are more evident there, though some teams at Google are getting pretty good at these things as well.
Google does make great products, especially when it's a matter of presenting a simple elegant interface to a complex internal system. I'm a big fan of Google Search and Maps UX, and Google Now.
But the UX of a product isn't just its immediate interface, it's also all the interactions you have with support, documentation, and change over time, and trust. The cultural differences are more evident there, though some teams at Google are getting pretty good at these things as well.