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Google Insiders Talk About Why Google+ Failed
An anonymous reader writes in with this story about what happened to Google+ from an employee perspective. "Last month, Google announced that it's changing up its strategy with Google+. In a sense, it's giving up on pitching Google+ as a social network aimed at competing with Facebook. Instead, Google+ will become two separate pieces: Photos and Streams. This didn't come as a surprise — Google+ never really caught on the same way social networks like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn did....Rumors have been swirling for months that Google would change its direction with Google+. Business Insider spoke with a few insiders about what happened to the network that Google believed would change the way people share their lives online. Google+ was really important to Larry Page, too — one person said he was personally involved and wanted to get the whole company behind it. The main problem with Google+, one former Googler says, is the company tried to make it too much like Facebook. Another former Googler agrees, saying the company was 'late to market' and motivated from 'a competitive standpoint.'"
yeah.. now they've created 1 billion artificial google+ accounts and they're just dumping them into two baskets? what the fuck?
(*by artificial google+ accounts I mean accounts created from gmail and youtube accounts in a deceptive fashion. they kept changing the prompts and one bad click and boom your gmail account now was your youtube account and at the same time a google+ account. I think they had some bonus scheme going on for the folks involved where if they got x number of g+ accounts they would get x dollars of bonus. the bonus scheme didn't involve people using g+ as g+ though it seemed - and yeah they were counting on having made one youtube comment within the year as being an "active google+ user").
I would venture to say that just 1% of google+ accounts are from people who on purpose wanted to create a google+ account for the sake of using google+.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
And what company is pure enough for you?
Anybody who gives you free social networking is evil, and anybody who charges money will fail.
Fiat Lux.
It failed because it was boring, shitty, and unnecessary, just like this article. Next question?
No kidding. I write software for a desktop application that integrates with YouTube. Apparently they're shutting down the API we've been using and want us to not only invest a bunch of time changing around our software for no good reason, but then expect us to get all of our users to upgrade to the new version we put out. We've decided it's just not worth it, and would rather explain to users who email our support line that Google shut down the API. It's not our fault that you can't upload videos and such directly to YouTube anymore. Don't expect a patch.
*The software does lots of other things, uploading to YouTube directly is/was just a side feature.
You don't know me, but I thought circles were... well, compelling is a little strong, but the whole G+ UX is vastly superior to Facebook's. Everything pretty much makes sense. OTOH, on the rare occasions I'm forced to interact with FB, I get that exact same throbbing headache I remember from troubleshooting other people's Win95 machines, which leaves me in a sour mood the rest of the day.
https://startpage.com
1) Use Startpage instead
2) Startpage anonymises Google results
3) See #2
4) Tell your friends about Startpage
... the beginning of the end of Google
Everything has a beginning, an end, and a stretch of roller coaster ride in the middle
Google started as a search engine. Larry Page and Co. didn't actually have much more than a search engine in mind when they started Google (and obtained that legendary check from Andy Bechtolsheim
What we are seeing now --- the branching of Google into driverless cars, into Google+, into Youtube (actually they acquired it), and so on --- is but afterthoughts, aka what should we do with all the Billions we got?
Like M$, like Yahoo, like Myspace and so on, Google is on its way down
As for fb, don't worry, it too is on its way down --- as nothing stays up forever
We've decided it's just not worth it, and would rather explain to users who email our support line that Google shut down the API.
That's something that's always amazed me about Google, if Microsoft did something like this (which they did in the 1990s), the masses would be at the gates with pitchforks and flaming torches screaming for blood. When Google behaves like Microsoft did 20 years ago... well, meh, it's Google, they can do that. What's changed?
That's a fair response. I can agree with the merit of your suggestion, Office 2003 is basically the same product and is moderately comparable in modern times. It doesn't have the OOXML formatted files that its successor used, but most modern systems can read the binary .doc and its siblings to a fair degree. It shares the advantage of most desktop applications in that its interface can remain literally unchanged from the day it was installed, for good or bad.
I think I'd argue that some of your current iteration examples are a bit hard to compare to those that Google shut down. Apart from shopping and 411, which have easy and popular alternatives in Amazon, eBay, and local 411 telephone services, all the rest are pretty much services that only have context on the Internet. It's difficult to compare a venerable service like retail (Amazon, eBay) to Wave, which was an experiment in combining IMs, email and Google Docs. It's certainly easy to imagine how a service like Amazon could survive without the Internet, albeit with some hardships, but not as easy to imagine a service like Google Wave. I agree, those services you listed off are still around in their current iterations that mimic their 2005 iterations reasonably well, but they have the advantage of being instantly recognizable and accessible services with direct offline analogues, something that Google Wave, iGoogle and the others didn't have.
Getting back to Office 2003, I have to point out that many of the big tech companies are even moving away from that format of desktop application. Microsoft, Apple, and of course Google, have been releasing services (Microsoft 365, iWork with iCloud, etc) that blur the line between desktop and web applications. More companies, such as Adobe, Autodesk and other industrial products are moving in this direction as well, taking their software into the cloud and offering it on a subscription basis. These products will be just as subject to the whims of their creator as was Google Wave, as fleeting as iGoogle, and able to be redesigned, restructured, have its features removed or reorganized or replaced, and possibly shut down, all on the whim of the company. Subscribers have no ownership in this situation, and are just as beholden to the goodness of the company they subscribe from to maintain the product. Even with contracts and money flowing, a business could easily decide to shutter a product line in favor of something else, especially those with broader categories of applications (e.g. Microsoft, Adobe and Google). I would propose that we haven't seen the last of shuttered services like these, and the next time it happens it will be far more shocking than Google Reader ever was.
It was clear from the start that what it wanted was your information, they didn't even try to hide it with their real name policy. And for the trouble they didn't really give much more then their competitors were already giving.
Yes, I think it was better from face book, but it didn't seem to have any care for any sort of privacy. So if you are concerned about your private details? Too bad. If you are in an online community that you don't care to share your personal information with? Too bad. Teenagers didn't like it, want to post where your parents won't see? Too bad.
They mentioned that they made a service that was for Google, but not for it's customers, I don't think they really still understood how deep that went. The fact that they started forcing people to join only reenforced the reality of the situation, turning something that had potential into joke.
Maybe someday someone will build a site for people the in the modern internet age, and not just for the corporation that runs it. G+ wasn't even a compromise between the two.
Ironically, I'd argue that since Schmidt left, Google's products have only gotten worse. Gmail was redesigned, and started hiding features rather than adding them. Labs was killed, mostly across the board (it still struggles on in Music, but for who knows how long?). Maps was redesigned once, twice, each time removing more of the interface and increasing the CPU/RAM utilization of hardware. Google, who used to be known for products made by (and for) power users, became a company focused on design and the democratization of the interface. Their latest introduction to Project Fi has basically completed the transformation, with Google's introductory trailer claiming that the service "just works," echoing Apple's famous adage from years ago.
I can appreciate what you're saying. I went the opposite way. I use Android, which means I use Google for maps, search, etc. Therefore, I've decided since Google has a good profile of me, I'll try to limit it to ONLY Google, rather than being thoroughly profiled by several different companies.
As a side benefit, Google Now does some pretty cool stuff as their database begins to have good data about my interests and such.
if Microsoft did something like this (which they did in the 1990s), the masses would be at the gates with pitchforks and flaming torches screaming for blood.
No they wouldn't. Some geeks would be pissed off, which they were in the 90s.
When Google behaves like Microsoft did 20 years ago... well, meh, it's Google, they can do that. What's changed?
Nothing. Many of us are pissed off at Google for ruining good products they had. My bugbear is Google Navigate, and the removal of the separate "blue arrow" navigate icon. They totally fucked it up by rolling it up into Maps and changing the interface the way they did. Even to this day I install the old Maps APK on my Android phones.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Office 2003 may long be discontinued, but Microsoft didn't take my data with them when Office 2007 was released.
It goes MUCH further than that...
http://www.amazon.com/Microsof...
You may, if you are so inclined... buy a brand new in box copy of MS Office 2003 right now, today, and it will work perfectly fine...
You don't have that option with Google Service X...
Microsoft would do well to remember that when making their own cloud services. Everyone doesn't want to be on the "newest thing" and sometimes older products work well...
I'm sad about the iPhone app for it, which drove me nuts yesterday. I look for bowling alleys, and it shows me the 3 nearby ones, great! I select one, great! I * do not care* about the reviews, I want to be select it and get directions! Can't do that, I have to go *back* to the bare interface, remember the name or address and type it in, then get directions.
WTF?
Google+ failed miserably because no one wants every single video you saw listed for the whole world, 90% of the population does not want to show to the whole world what books you read, what pages you have visited or Android applications that you use. Hell, I'm not even sure if the hangout messages are really reserved for participants! Add it the fact that the interface is shit apparently made by trainees (probably the same idiots who made the "material style" on the Android Lollipop), and it's clear why this crap failed.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I will never, ever, forgive them for their short-sightedness in shutting down Reader. We told them at the time that they were shutting down a massive community of geeks & influencers, but they went ahead and did it anyway. A massive strategic mistake.
Maybe I was naive, but I never really thought about the prospect of Google shutting down a service I relied on - sure they shut down some services that had almost zero usage, but a server *I* relied on? No, Google would never do that. It's used by geeks and technologists for goodness sake, Google was *our* company.
Then the hammer fell - Reader was a service I accessed every half hour of every day. I know we some good alternatives have belatedly emerged (well, one), but the problem remained - how could I ever recommend a Google service to anyone in the future? How could I recommend gmail to my family when I wasn't sure it would vanish overnight because Google believes we were doing email wrong? How could I recommend to my boss that we move some critical infrastructure to App Engine, when Google had shown it was willing to shut down heavily used services because they just weren't quite big enough? Maybe all the snarly comments about fancy food and foosball tables were right all along - Google was staffed with kids and academics who had no idea how the real world worked.