Former Google+ UI Designer Suggests Inept Management Played Role In Demise (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Morgan Knutson, a UI designer who seven years ago, spent eight months at Google working on its recently shuttered social networking product Google+ and who, in light of the shutdown, decided to share on Twitter his personal experience with how "awful the project and exec team was." It's a fairly long read, but among his most notable complaints is that former Google SVP Vic Gundotra, who oversaw Google+, ruled by fear and never bothered to talk with Knutson, whose desk was "directly next to Vic's glass-walled office. He would walk by my desk dozens of times during the day. He could see my screen from his desk. During the 8 months I was there, culminating in me leading the redesign of his product, Vic didn't say a word to me. No hello. No goodbye, or thanks for staying late. No handshake. No eye contact."

He also says Gundotra essentially bribed other teams within Google to incorporate Google+'s features into their products by promising them handsome financial rewards for doing so atop their yearly bonuses. "You read that correctly, "tweeted Knutson. "A f*ck ton of money to ruin the product you were building with bloated garbage that no one wanted." Gundotra is today the cofounder and CEO of AliveCor, maker of a device that captures a "medical grade" E.K.G. within 30 seconds; AliveCor has gone on to raise $30 million from investors, including the Mayo Clinic. Asked about Knutson's characterization of him, Gundotra suggested the rant was "absurd" but otherwise declined to comment. Knutson goes on to paint "a picture of a political, haphazard, wasteful and ultimately disappointing division where it was never quite clear who should be working on what or why," reports TechCrunch.

Comments

So what was moot doing that whole time?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought he was supposed to save Google+ from itself?

Re:So what was moot doing that whole time?

[davecb]

Hint: we used to call this "vice-president wars". If you worked for the wrong VP in some companies, it could be a career-ending move.

"A Role"

[bekeleven]

I feel like the next hundred comments could each mention a different issue that played "a role" in google+'s demise.

I'll start: Invite-only rollout.

Re:"A Role"

[Anonymous Coward]

former Google SVP Vic Gundotra, who oversaw Google+

While running Goog+, Mr. Gundrota implemented a policy of requiring everyone to use their "real name". Funny thing about that. Mr. Gundrota's real name is not Vic. Like many Indians who come to the U.S., he adopted a more "American" first name. So, the guy demanding that you you must use your real name, is using a fake name.

But wait, the lulz are just getting started.

Goog+ AUTOMATICALLY got linked to your G-Mail, YouTube, Goog Docs, everything.

So if, for some reason, Goog thought you were using a fake name (all hail the Mighty Algorithm) -- because of your Youtube name, or because you have an "obviously fake" name like Jake Butt-- your Goog+ account got permanently suspended. With the standard Google appeal / recourse of "fuck you, no humans here".

This also took out your G-Mail account (and all your mail), and your YouTube account, and your Goog Docs...

Anyone who was even mildly curious about Goog+ dropped it like a toxic hotshit and never looked back.

Re:"A Role"

[crow]

Lack of pages for businesses and celebrities at the initial roll-out was a significant factor. It would have been better to delay the launch and have everything ready at the start.

Re:"A Role"

[Bourdain]

I myself actively avoided it for this very reason - why risk my google account when there were reports of it being disabled for no good reason and no room for appeal with the only benefit of using a nascent social media platform?

Re:"A Role"

[Darinbob]

I dunno, but there were a lot of people furious about that. Possibly they were self important and wondered why they weren't allowed on. But this is standard procedure for many new products - roll them out slowly, try it out in a beta test, etc.

The thing I hated was linking it to other Google services. I liked Google+, but then one day I found out I had a Youtube account that I did not want and could not get rid of. Even today Youtube automatically logs me in if I am logged in to Google+.

Google+ had a good thing going if only Google had realized this. It was better than Facebook in every way except popularity when it was new. But once it was out Google started losing interest in it. Like most Google products.

Re:"A Role"

[DerekLyons]

I feel like the next hundred comments could each mention a different issue that played "a role" in google+'s demise.

I'll start: Invite-only rollout.

Yep. Being feature-incomplete compared to Facebook at the time didn't help either. It was essentially Twitter with screwy privacy settings and a crappy UI.

Re:"A Role"

[epine]

Yup, it was Google's real name policy and their policy of neutron bomb non-recourse to any errors on their side that caused me never even to consider learning the first thing about Google+.

And this from a position where I figure Google was already 100% under my personal privacy kimono, so I estimated my exposure to marginal privacy loss at close to zero. (For every other social media service, I either block cookies entirely, or use the service on a thin, sporadic basis at most.) So basically, Google+ was the only social media service I would even have considered seriously, and it was crossed off my list on day zero for exactly the reasons you gave above.

Given Google's outward profile, Vic Gundrota was a bad, bad hire.

He'd have been way better off staying at Microsoft (where he used to work), or being hired by Oracle or Amazon or Apple during one of its many heel turns, or any other outfit that celebrates scorched earth.

Re:"A Role"

[swillden]

Goog+ AUTOMATICALLY got linked to your G-Mail, YouTube, Goog Docs, everything.

This is because Google+ was actually two different things: A unified Google login and a social media network. I'm told that people at Google had been thinking about the idea of a single login to all Google products for a while, so when the social media thing got started, it became that single login, too. People (quite reasonably) misinterpreted it as an attempt to force them into using Google+, but it was really a separate thing. I think if the notion of a unified Google login had been pitched a year or two before the launch of Google+, people would have been fine with it. Combining it with Google+ certainly turned out to be a terrible idea.

Anyone who was even mildly curious about Goog+ dropped it like a toxic hotshit and never looked back.

Well, it still has about 500K regular users, so not everyone. Personally, I like Google+. It evolved to be more of an interest network than a social network, and that worked for me. Before Google+ I enjoyed USENET newsgroups focused on my interest, but they got buried in spam and most people drifted away. Google+ was an inferior replacement for USENET, but it was okay. I don't know what I'll replace Google+ with. Nothing, probably.

Re:"A Role"

[ZorinLynx]

The real-name policy is what drove many of the people I know off the platform.

The policy basically made G+ another Facebook; if that's the case, why not use use Facebook?

Some of us don't like using our real names online, for a variety of reasons. I think even my reason, that I just like using a different name, is perfectly valid. Anyone can find my real name if they really want to. But it was the principle. Others used pseudonyms because they didn't feel safe using their real names online. For those people, which included some of my friends, it was a big deal.

This is what killed G+ for me and my social group.

Re:"A Role"

[arglebargle_xiv]

This is because Google+ was actually two different things:

It wasn't two things, it was everything. At the same time, it was nothing. No-one in Google really knew what Google+ was supposed to be. It was this... and this... and that too. None of it had been coded up yet, but Google+ was going to do all of it when it was finished. No idea how it would all fit together, but it'll be great when we get there.

I don't know whether you can lay the blame at the feet of any one person. It was like a train wreck in slow motion, one freeze frame at a time. No manager could have managed it to success. It was where innovation went to die.

Re: "A Role"

[nnull]

That and the forced google+ account on YouTube. It made me forever not ever trust Google.

Re:"A Role"

[Ambient Sheep]

Absolutely. Like many others here, it was the "real name" policy, and especially Google nuking years'-worth of your old emails if you failed it, that absolutely killed G+ stone-dead at birth for me and everybody I knew. Nobody wanted to touch it with a bargepole after those first reports of punitive data loss came out.

They had a golden window of opportunity to kill Facebook at a time when everybody hated it, and they completely and utterly botched it.

(I wrote more about this on here three years ago, as did many others, but tbh the above is a better, less waffly, summary.)

Re:"A Role"

[AmiMoJo]

Lack of businesses and celebrities was what made it good. G+ wasn't just an endless stream of bullshit like Facebook, it was stuff that was actually interesting and relevant to you. A lot of nerds used it for technical groups and discussion, including Linus.

The other great thing was Hangouts, which isn't really part of G+ but was tied in to it. It's basically a webcam chat system but the only one that really works for multiple users. It detects who is talking and displays their avatar on everyone's screen, so not only is it obvious whose voice you are hearing but it helps prevent people talking over each other. If you needed more control than that you could appoint a moderator who could mute people, which was great for formal moderated debates that otherwise just turn into shouting matches.

Hangouts is still going for now, hope they keep it alive.

Re:"A Role"

[Hognoxious]

Well if the first sentence, of the article, is anything to, go by, then a plague of, commas probably didn't help.

Might be right, but

[bhcompy]

This guy might be right, but he's also a huge narcissist. This guy thinks he shits gold

Re:Racism at Google+

[Narcocide]

That's a good question but I suspect the answer is "never" and the real story hidden beneath this facade of incompetence is whatever crimes Gundotra was committing that he was afraid this guy would find out about if he got involved too much in decision making.

:It's a fairly long read,"

[sgage]

What, did Twitter up its character limit again?

Where he went wrong

[SuperKendall]

I hate to second guess people in bad situations, but from my reading through his few hundred tweets earlier today I would say a few points jumped out to me as him doing the wrong thing at the time:

1) Should not have agreed to design review meeting the next morning. If a deadline is totally unrealistic, don't agree to it man. Tell them you need to delay It by whatever makes sense. If they hate you already they will not hate you any more or less because you push back.

2) When report of grandmother dying comes in, drop everything and send a message out noting you need a reschedule and why. If they say no, well wouldn't it be great to go to HR with a complaint that a manager would not let you attend to a dying nana? Regardless urgent family matters ALWAYS come first for anyone you care about.

3) When meeting was called off the next morning do not whine about that to whoever. Just roll with it. It would have been irrelevant anyway if the first two points I made had been followed. As it was it led to an HR complaint and since it made you look weak the people that hated him tried to take advantage and treated him even worse after.

4) If you are put under a manager you know "will not end well", GET OUT ASAP. Maybe finish up some important task you have but start figuring out your exit immediately, because you will be exiting anyway and better to do it while you have endured minimal stress.

Again, I know I was not in the situation at the time, but there is no situation I've ever been in where point 1 or 2 could not be followed all the time without repercussion. You should always always push back on very unreasonable things and not just pretend you can meet them, even if sometimes you can. Anyone worth working for can understand reasonable pushback, so if they can't you needed a new job anyway.

Re:Where he went wrong

[kiminator]

Yup. Reading through his story, it really seems like he put quite a lot on himself that he did not need to.

I generally don't doubt him at all about the shitty people he interacted with, but it really sounds like he sort of shot himself in the foot a number of times. There's no reason why he should have felt obligated to listen to his crappy manager's statement on not bothering to come back to work, for example. I'm pretty sure he could have pushed back on that and won without too much difficulty. It's very likely he could have switched teams too.

So, basically, I don't really doubt that he worked with some shitty people, and he may be correct about the poor management being a problem for Google+. But he took a bad situation and made it much, much worse for himself than it ever needed to be.

Sad

[crow]

I like Google+. I felt they really botched the roll-out when they had lots of excitement, but didn't have features for businesses and such. They had one shot at taking out Facebook, and they completely messed it up. I don't see anyone else having enough credibility to convince people to move to another platform, no matter how better it may be.

Google aint Google anymore

[aberglas]

They have gone through the transition from a small, cool, outwardly facing start up to a huge bureaucratic, inwardly facing monster. Happens to all successful companies.

The Damore memo incident is a good indicator of this. Not because I care about Damore but because it gave a rare insight into the thinking and priorities of Google's CEO.

Alphabet was a good idea as a way to try to escape it. Not sure whether it will succeed.

Re:Google aint Google anymore

[youngone]

My own company is going through this right now, having been bought by an investment firm a couple years ago.

I handed in my notice the day my old boss announced the company had been sold to an investment firm.
Most of the people I worked with were gone within a year, and the doors closed about a year after that. I am pretty easy going, but I won't work for an investment company, or an accountant.

Second Life

[ArhcAngel]

So you're telling me...a company with the resources of Alphabet/Google were unable to put together a viable social platform but Second Life is still a thing?

Re:Second Life

[ZorinLynx]

Second Life is still a thing because there is a steady user base that puts money into the system.

It's not really growing much anymore, but it's not shrinking either. It's stable, and Linden Labs is making a reliable profit.

The community is not that large, but it is very dedicated and many people live a decently large percentage of their lives in that virtual world.

I used to be a heavy user but haven't been lately. I still pop in from time to time, and I see a lot of the same names there. It's pretty fascinating.

Huh?

[raftpeople]

What's Google+?

Re:Huh?

[BrianMarshall]

What's Google+?

It's a different version of Myspace.

Meet the new Google, same as the old Microsoft

[MikeS2k]

tldr = Google are becoming the new Microsoft.

Ultimately, you hire people from Microsoft and other large companies (plus MBA's etc), and you act surprised when your company behaves like these large companies? What happened to the community of enthusiastic developers like "the old days"?
Remember when Microsoft were being praised for being a "little startup" that took down IBM? look what they became..
Someone should come up with a name for the cycle of - company produces good product and grows; "management" get brought in to improve profits; product suffers. users jump to a new product developed by a different company. this company grows and brings in "management" to improve profits.....

You can tell Google have been infiltrated by morons because a) They have hired ex-Microsoft employees; b) they listen to these idiotic UX "experts" and have gotten rid of vertical scrollbars; because everyone needs to know gestures now as gestures are so much more intuitive than something you can see on a screen...

A personal rant about Google here (tl;dr Google software is becoming as much as a pain as MS software) - I do the IT for a School and Google are getting just as user hostile as MS ever were. Their attitude is now "what we want matters more than what the users want" (Google got big by providing what users wanted, and Microsoft is getting smaller for ignoring this - e.g. MS browser share is now 3%. 3%! can you imagine that 15 years ago?).

I ended up recommending Bing to my users a few months ago because Google kept prompting users to fill in a Captcha every time they did a search - which sounds fair enough but a Captcha involving picking street signs, 10 - 15 times, for each page of search results? Is that the best they can come up with?

Our Proxy IP address was showing "Bot-like activity" - I have checked our logs for evidence of malware or other bogus searches (found none) - I can see how a thousand searches an hour for "Fortnite Skins" seems like bot activity, so I can't criticise them for this too much - but why isn't there any human support where I can inform them that we are a school and our search profile might be different? our IP address is even on an educational-only ISP.
Instead you just get to an FAQ telling you to run a virus scan because their algorithms are never wrong, never mismatch search patterns; basically they do not care.

Ultimately it is their software, their servers and they can do what they want. Such it is that I can also switch our default search provider over to Bing, and inform my users that Google software is basically just as bad as Microsoft software.

My own experience of Google+

[DrXym]

Personally I found Google+ to be fairly pleasant to use - mostly working like a simplified Facebook with elements of Twitter. It worked and given a user base I think it would have succeeded.

BUT, and this is a huge, service-destroying BUT, dear god did that fucking site do its best to annoy users and drive them away. Every time I went to use the thing it would annoy me with interstitials - Add more information about yourself! Invite your friends!etc. Then after skipping those to get to my feed there would be permanent embedded nag panels telling me to link, add info etc. I very much doubt the programmers decided to do this, but management / marketing did. I'm not surprised to learn management for the product was dysfunctional.

So anyway, I stopped using it.

Twitter and Facebook have their own annoyances, Facebook especially likes nagging but two points apply here a) Facebook's nagging is still not as annoying as Google+, b) why is Google copying the worst aspects of its competitor anyway? They should have just thrown it out there, ad-free, nag free and let it grow at its own pace. People would hang out there, treat it as a personal space without all the dissonance reminding them that it's not. Google could still no doubt scrape up information / usage under the surface so why even go this route?

Re:Ruling by email?

[phik]

“Vic Gundotra .. ruled by fear and never bothered to talk with Knutson, whose desk was "directly next to Vic's glass-walled office” Sounds like one of my former managers who used send me directives by email even though he was sitting right next to me.

A lot of people like a paper trail. I would always ask for something in person, then send a short email right after.

Yes--A Very Common Cause of Failures

[Slicker]

I've been a software developer for almost 30 years and I can certainly attest that incompetent management is one of the leading causes of project failures and management is almost always a limiting factor on the success or potential of projects. Unnecessary constraints and top-down decisions with a lack of understanding is what it seems to be, in my experience. I don't think that is only about software projects, though. I think it's endemic in business... probably more so in larger organizations.

Sometimes it can also be dirty business. Once I was even blamed by my manager after successfully doing everything he asked me to do, all the while lightly noting that I didn't think it was going to work the way he suggested it would. Later I heard that toward the end, he was making me look incompetent in meetings I did not attend. In private, he gave me all kinds of praise and even when he let me go, said he'd be a strong reference for me.

Google Hangouts

[Daralantan]

I remember signing up on Google Plus when it was invite only, but mostly because I thought the hangout idea was cool. I liked the idea that you could chat/talk with friends and watch a youtube video as a group.

I then proceeded to never use that feature, and my google + experience was uploading a picture and saying I was testing Google + out.

No cooperation between platforms

[Rastl]

I have a G+ account that's not me (which wouldn't have been allowed at their ill-advised rollout requiring real names) and I use it a LOT. It's all the stuff I don't want linked to me but I want to post. Facebook is for cat pictures and memes.

When I heard they were shutting it down I decided to start a Blogger blog so that I could continue to post. And get some formatting in the darn things but that's another story.

Unfortunately there's no way to simply move your G+ posts to Blogger posts. Since the basic format is the same you would think that doing so would be a minimal effort. Nope. The best way to do it is to export your G+ posts in HTML format then copy-paste each one into a new Blogger post.

This means the dates are hopelessly screwed up since everything shows it being posted with the current date.

I'm working through six years of posts and doing Control-C, Control-V over and over and over and over. I'm only through 2012 so I might see if I can work some magic to convert these to some kind of XML Blogger will recognize and maybe even get those original post dates in there since the G+ export has them.

I'm not surprised to see G+ bite the dust. I'm more annoyed they didn't provide any kind of reasonable method to even move to one of their own products.