No one has near-perfect up-front knowledge of a software system designed to change and expand. The solution space is too large and the efficient delivery methods are a search thru this space.
I may have phrased it poorly. What I should have said is that Google absolutely could have “anticipated” that many of their subsystems would deal with partial messages and multiple versions, because they most certainly already did. The designers would have maintained, developed and debugged exactly such systems for years.
