Yes, I agree with that. If Protobuf hadn't been a reasonably-good design for Google-scale distributed systems, it wouldn't have won (within the company, or beyo

Yes, I agree with that. If Protobuf hadn't been a reasonably-good design for Google-scale distributed systems, it wouldn't have won (within the company, or beyond). So regardless of how that design came about, we can say it is a reasonably good design overall. But only in aggregate -- not every individual decision can be assumed to be great on its own.