I put money down with a buddy (when Google+ launched) that within a year Google would drop the Google+ brand. This article basically agrees with me, but has it backwards.
Google+ will just become Google. Owning an Internet scale social-graph is just too important for Google; thus they will do whatever it takes to own one. This will include forcing users who just want search (or email) to have the functionality of Google+; but to avoid brand dilution Google will drop the "+".
(They will continue to use the + in the UI for +1, but that's different).
I had just assumed that Google+ would essentially encompass everything in Google that requires a google account to use. Google search, google shopping, and similar services that don't require an account would remain plus-less.
Though I agree with your reasoning, I don't think the "+" is going away, and I do think your buddy will end up winning.
Like Circles, the + is becoming it's own strong brand, and though it may be that "Google+ == Google", the plus brand will stick around.
Likely, Google will still retain the non-plus Google search, but put most of it's efforts into improving and integrating the "account required" Google+.
Could this be simply because you're taking their search for granted? Perhaps because I Chrome, I find Google search to be my main way of getting around the internet, both for specific sites and specific queries.
Maybe it's because I type gmail.com far more often than google.com. In fact, I don't think I ever type google.com.
I probably make a couple dozen searches a day, but only spend around 30 minutes a day in the search engine. On the other hand, 99% of the time I have Gmail running.
I haven't used Gmail in several years so I don't know if it offers anything not offered by other services. Smart, simple to manage email is available in abundance these days.
Google search on the other hand is to me at least the epitome of function. I don't even think about how often I use it but it's many many times per day.
I am just looking for an alternative, but so far, only contender worth evaluating I found is Microsoft's live.com. I want IMAP, then having all my emails online (which means at least 5GB space), and what's crucial to me, grouping emails by conversations so I can read it all at once - most providers fails me here.
I consider mail a critical tool and thus I have no qualms paying money for it. I'm using Exchange Online from Microsoft. I use Outlook so that obviously affects my choice.
This is a well-written and persuasive, and I think Elgan does a terrific job at structuring his argument around the 'product-to-feature' angle.
What I don't agree with necessarily is the framing that Google's success is fait accompli. One skill that Google has NOT established is their ability to integrate separate services such that the whole is at least as much as the sum of its parts. One might argue the only case where they've had success in this is AdSense. Tell me if I'm forgetting something.
While Google's scale and technological advance is a major plus, if you don't design these integrated products cleverly enough, you end up with a bloated, confusing, nebulous morass that people can't grasp as easily as they would independent services. I'm sure Page is aware of this, but the devil is in the execution, and again, the precedent so far is not encouraging. It'll be intriguing to see how well they do this in 2012.
"And between these two giants, it will be no contest. Google will almost certainly have vastly superior search -- it's Google, after all -- superior messaging, superior office documents, superior spam filtering, superior video chat -- superior everything."
I think the author is drastically overstating the inevitability of Google's product superiority. Google already spectacularly failed once at messaging with Google Wave, and Gmail doesn't actually have the market share that most people think it has (even just considering webmail). Office documents don't seem to be a make-or-break feature for social, and Google Docs has had very limited success competing with Microsoft Office (in fact, my favorite Google office productivity product, EtherPad, was killed in favor of Wave). Spam filtering is legitimate, but it's not that hard of a problem really in a technical sense; Facebook could keep up. Video chat is a weak point for Facebook, granted.
Besides, integrating your competitor's product as a feature of your own doesn't always spell success. Microsoft integrated Bing with its operating system through the IE search box, and look how little that has mattered. Both Apple and Microsoft have tried to "feature-ize" Dropbox, and Dropbox seems to have emerged unscathed. Instapaper is doing fine even in the face of the Safari Reading List. The list goes on. (Sometimes the strategy does work, such as IE against Netscape, but it's hardly clear-cut.)
I think Dropbox is a great example to illustrate the weaknesses of the product-to-feature template. Yes, a product can be crushed by a feature, but only if that feature is "good enough".
Dropbox, in particular, is remarkably resilient, because the competing features still aren't "good enough". Apple and Microsoft are actually relatively weak competitors because neither of them "plays well with others" (and having access to your files "anywhere" is a big part of Dropbox's value proposition). Amazon is a more significant threat (competing with your infrastructure provider is never easy), but even they haven't done enough to make Cloud Drive simple and ubiquitous.
Looking at Google+ that way, I think many products won't be threatened by Google+'s features. For example, Google+ doesn't support anonymity the way Tumblr does, so it isn't likely to be a "good enough" replacement.
Facebook might be special case, though. Other than the existing user base (which isn't an impossible hurdle), I don't really see any dimension along which Google+ isn't likely to be a "good enough" alternative. On the other hand, I've never been a fan of Facebook, so I'm probably a bad person to assess that.
People are invested in Facebook with their updates, photos etc. Unlike what the OP contends, people are not going to switch over their usage to a competitor based on features. Bing is as good as Google for most queries, but how many people have switched to Bing? Google is not attacking, it is defending. FB messages is already way more efficient for quick communication than email. It may not replace email, but can occupy significant market-share.
No matter how many places Google pushes G+, people are not going to switch unless they can achieve the same functionality by copy-pasting a link.
People were invested in Myspace with updates, photos, page customizations, etc. Now they're all on Facebook. There's no reason to believe they won't move again if the right feature set comes along.
I'd actually expect that Facebook's far deeper penetration would mean that there is a far lower percentage that are willing to jump on the "next big thing".
Ironically enough, Facebook effectively support anonymity more than Google+ and that will keep a significant number of people off of Google+.
Consider, however dubious I might find Facebook, the only thing that I would move to is something like what diaspora promised - a less corporate, more anonymous platform. I won't move to Google+ no matter and so some number of my friends won't find me there ever. A small number of my friend have talked about moving to G+ yet are still on Facebook. I suspect this dynamic will protect Facebook until something offering a more desirable platform comes along - G+ calling itself an "identity platform" seems to scream that Google will be selling its members even more than Facebook sells us.
While I agree that Google+ has any advantages over Facebook, a lot of users just use Facebook as a way to quickly share information and be done with it. While Google+ has many good features, it does not pose a good enough reason to migrate to a new social network and build up there entire network again. I understand this is a major generalization about Facebook users, but I think it's fine in this case.
The bigger point is that Google has put the cart before the horse. Before they start piling on their superior features Google + needs a killer app or an identity. I wrote a longer thought but it looked crappy in the comments. http://bit.ly/rD59uE
Maybe I am an exception here, but what author overstates is also user's willingness to have every eggs in the Google's basket. I found myself to consciously working on NOT using Google for everything - I use them for general search, gmail and Analytics. That I think is more than enough. My social graph is on Facebook, bookmarks are on ReadItLater and files are in Dropbox, and I am not going to change it even if Google offering is comparable.
My longterm strategy is to use different companies for different services. It is a slightly bigger hassle than to have everything integrated by one company, but not that a big hassle, after all. My goal for the future is that Google will own only my search strings, and not much else. I would even like to replace Gmail, but didn't find an alternative yet (but live.com looks promising).
"author overstates [...] user's willingness to have every eggs in the Google's basket."
Most users don't care. They're not thinking about the wider implications of Google having all the information Google+ will accumulate. That's completely incidental to their goal, which is to keep up to date and share stuff with their friends. And they want that to "just work".
They want convenience, which means not wanting to have to get past obstacles like logging into a completely different site to share a file. Even if the UI Google offers is a bit more sucky than the competition, e.g. dropbox, not having to go to the competition in the first place can easily be enough to make the Google experience the overall winner.
If they think about the "eggs in Google's basket" problem at all, many will see that they give Google all their personal info (name, dob, email address, location?, etc...) to use Google features, and they give Facebook all the same personal info to use Facebook features, and they give some other company a subset of their personal info to use, e.g. file-sharing features, etc.... Seeing as how Google already has the personal information they think about when they think about personal information, it won't occur to them that the meta-information Google will get from tying together. Rather, 3 or 4 companies have their personal information now, and they could reduce that to 1 by doing everything with Google.
Agreed about the overstatement, but I think that is just for the sake of powerful exposition. You have to admit it's quite a compelling vision for Google—something which has been lacking ever since they revolutionized online advertising.
That said, the challenges will be many, not the least of which is how do you organize the user interfaces (plural because of mobile vs web vs other devices) on such a super product and not end up with lukewarm soup.
>> Office documents don't seem to be a make-or-break feature for social, and Google Docs has had very limited success competing with Microsoft Office.
If any app being social means being popular among general web users than yes Google Docs / Office document is not make-or-break feature for social. But when you use Google docs within an organization for team collaboration there is no better tool than this I've found so far. I doubt whether they are working on Google Docs desktop or not but I think that will be a one on one competition to MS Office.
>> (in fact, my favorite Google office productivity product, EtherPad, was killed in favor of Wave)
Etherpad was simple tool. Yes, we can't run it on etherpad.com, does it means they killed it ? I don't think Google killed it, they opensourced it. There are plenty of other hosted options available and are linked at the same domain http://etherpad.com. Why don't use them, they run Etherpad as well.
Apparently all this "integration" appeals to some people, but I can't say I'm one of them. The last thing I want is google+ integrated with my gmail (largely why I haven't signed up with google+). I'd rather just have my mail be my mail, not some sort of weird blob-like uber product trying desperately to force me to classify the people I kind of know into "circles". I get the value for the company, but as a consumer the idea of all this integration just creeps me out.
a circle is exactly the same feature as a contacts group, something email clients have had since their inception. you've never organized your contacts into groups or lists so you could quickly send an email to a pre-defined list of people? that's exactly what a circle is. i can't imagine any rational reason to be creeped out by that.
and even if you don't group your contacts, that's perfectly fine. there is nothing forcing you to do that. after-g+ gmail works exactly the same way it did before g+, only now it has the ability to send mail to any circles you've set up in google+.
Functionally the same, but emotionally different. It's more official. Placing people into discreet groups feels weird to me. I don't really naturally do that. I don't really like the idea of placing people into certain circles while discreetly excluding others.
It's not an egalitarian thing, I just don't think that social groups are that easily defined. Illegibility is really at the heart of it. The entire notion of circles strikes me as being naive and kinda creepy but mostly annoying.
Similar, but not exactly the same. Contact groups are more of a memory aid. You just need to be able to find the person, and most of the time this is the only consideration. Circles involve privacy and thus they also involve social considerations.
For instance, I'd have all my f* buddies in the same group but not in the same circle. People who I don't want to discuss my stuff together I wouldn't have in the same circle, and this happens a lot.
That said, it's been a while I don't even use contact groups, I have just 2 lists: people I actively communicate with (time doesn't allow for a ton of these) and people I seldom communicate with, or whose contact I may or may not need. I've also learnt to delete people who I don't need or want in my contacts, and found it to be a great life-hack.
Same here. It started with Youtube attempting to merge their accounts and Google accounts. A fine idea, but for me, the execution was lacking, not knowing which account to sign into, not being able to use multiple Google accounts on different sites, etc.
Another thing is that Google doesn't always make the best products. By far.
> As Blogger becomes an easily customizable face for a Google+ public stream, Tumblr will have more trouble succeeding with its blogging product.
I'm not sure if the author has used much of Blogger, but it is horrendous, and terrible if you want to do anything slightly more powerful than a simple blog. Wordpress completely outclasses it.
They center their products around ads, because that is where the profit margin is. Google is just unique in that it does a lot of externally tangential web services that on the outside don't make direct income but really keep the google brand going and strong. They are pretty much the only company to realize they can have a separation between what makes money and what makes customers.
I actually hope this does come to pass, but I don't see it happening any time soon given the current state of affairs. Only a handful of my friends use G+, and they are the web/coder guys. All the social butterflies, the girls, the parties, and the pictures post on Facebook. It seems to me that many of my peers' internet surfing these days consists almost entirely of hanging out on Facebook. They have never heard of reddit, they don't follow blogs, they have no compelling interest in international news or trends, and if they have heard of G+ they consider it irrelevant. I think there is a key demographic of extroverts around which social gatherings coalesce that G+ needs to start making a dent in if they ever want to dethrone Facebook as the social space.
The other thing that concerns me is Google's prior lack of commitment to these types of projects. Facebook did not succeed only because it was better than myspace, I believe it was also due to just how bad myspace became that people started actively looking for an alternative. Remember the terrible auto-start songs, horribly mangled html templates, creepy spam and rampant security flaws? It might be the case that in a few years Facebook will start to implode in much the same way. Too many crappy Zynga games, an increasinly cluttered interface, questionable privacy compromises, a constant battering of status minutia updates and/or some catastrophic privacy event might drive people to begin migration to a new service. That might take years though. My question is, will G+ still be there, ready to accept them with a stable of polished features and seamless integration to the entire Google application lineup? Or will Google have abandoned G+ years ago, the same way it did with Wave and countless other "experiments"...
No, the author missed it completely. Google's business is massively threatened in many different dimensions. Google is in a desperate fight to save their business, and the Google+ product is entirely a defensive reaction to the threat imposed by social networks, targeted searches (Yelp) and non-web searching (Siri) and information discovery. I do not forsee a future where people perform searches by going to www.google.com. A conventional search engine is going to look quaint in the coming years and that's bad if you make 97% of your revenue from something that has or will peak.
The author's argument seems to be hinging on his notion that Google has "superior everything", "it is Google after all".
I was with him to a point - the notion of absorbing products into features of G+ is a powerful strategy that would make it difficult for the competition - but the problem with this approach for Google is that it takes their search product further and further away from what made it great in the first place. Taking this strategy to its logical conclusion almost by definition means making search more complicated than it needs to be.
Google likes to say its mission is organizing the world's information, but its customers like to believe that Google's mission is simple, effective search. When it comes to defining the brand, the customer always wins. This could be Google's downfall.
I don't agree with the author on many counts, but I wish that everyone who makes the point about Google being threatened by "social networks, targeted searches, non-web searching and information discovery" would elaborate a bit further.
Let us look at factors you have pointed out:
1. Social networks: Google has 3 positions in Alexa's Top 10 for the US market. Only Facebook and Twitter are the only two sites that are social networks on that list. Other than Twitter (protected accounts), Bing and Paypal, every other site on that list is crawl-able by Google. Even for Facebook, it is better to have public than private pages (6,330,000,000 pages in the Google index). *
It is very much possible for Facebook to be double the size that it is at and also for Google to grow at the same time. There are more people using more of the internet every year. They all need to connect with others and also find other information they are looking for. Growth for both Google and Facebook need not be mutually exclusive.
The most tangible growth-related metric of year-on-year growth for Google is still pretty impressive: http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html Till a lot of the numbers start veering drastically off-course, I won't worry much about it.
2. Targeted searches: There will always be niche companies who do this over a million domains. I do not think Google would bother too much with it purely because of the clout they carry in the search market. If you have to get good non-organic traffic, you need to be indexable on Google these days. There is also the fact that Google would not want to dominate in everything related to search as it leaves them badly exposed to anti-trust issues.
3. Non-web searches: This is more of an input/interface matter. It has been possible to search through speech for a while on Android and it is something that is only bound to grow as speech recognition gets more and more better across all platforms. What matters is the quality of results and if competing platforms can provide better results from a non-Google platform, then Google would be in trouble. Parsing spoken text is different from delivering results for a query. So, Siri doing a good job of parsing what you are saying is different from Siri being able to serve results from a different search engine than Google.
If the majority of people who do speech-based searches get their results from Google, it will be something for Google to rejoice and not fear. In fact, I think Apple may have even done Google a favour with Siri. There is now going to be a race to be the best voice-based interface on non-iOS platforms as a result of Siri. There is also the increased awareness of this feature now due to Siri.
4. Information discovery: If I am not mistaken, Google already is the leader on this front. They layer a lot of additional information into search results (which, I am not a fan of) and there is nobody of a comparable size who is competing with them on it.
* Alexa is a flawed metric. I am using it as a comparative/indicative measure. Google's page count is broken; but they do have a LOT of pages on Facebook that is crawl-able.
RE #1: Even if Google grows thanks to indexing Facebook pages, isn't "Where do people search for these pages?" the question that matters. And I'd bet that if people are trying to find a friend or a group or whatever on Facebook, their first attempt will be searching with Facebook.
That being said, Facebook's search could definitely use some help, and the more they improve it, the less anyone will need Google to search for things inside the Facebook ecosystem.
Absolutely correct there about Facebook being the primary destination to find Facebook friends. Point I am trying to make is that Facebook being open to being indexed by Google also contributes to Google's growth.
Searching for most names on Google throws up first results from Facebook, which makes it one more reason why I'll search for a name on Google than the situation where Google would not have the results on the what is probably the most authoritative page for most people. Thus, in the latter case, creating a situation where I am forced to use Facebook at the cost of Google.
Edit: I think there is a popular zero sum perspective to these things, which is not necessarily true when you look at it closely.
Google might fail in the long run for the simple reason that new, valuable information being added to the internet isn't necessarily going to be available on the web, in indexable fashion. Google won the web, and they're strangling it to death in the same way Microsoft strangled the PC industry.
Meanwhile the rest of the computing industry is heading in a direction opposite to what Google can make huge sums of money in and dominate in the way they currently do. Instead of static web pages with low information-to-noise ratio and plastered with ads the internet is moving toward a data-consumption model through highly targeted mobile and mobile web applications. The search engine bully will no longer have a place at the table.
I think it's an interesting argument. Google+ might be Google's biggest success, and also sew the seeds of their downfall. Now that G+ is spreading into Gmail, there is no going back.
I can't see a future where the majority of people (knowingly) opt in to having their personally identifiable web histories stored and analyzed by anonymous nerds. Sure, that's happening already if one has a facebook account, and the battle's already over and lost there, but a lot of friends, more than I have on facebook, avoid social networks for that very reason.
That said, it seems like google's focus is now desperate imitation of anything remotely successful on the social web with subsequent bundling of the winners into one uber-product within google+. And it would be a real shame if this is as good as it gets. Is it?
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 88.6 ms ] threadGoogle+ will just become Google. Owning an Internet scale social-graph is just too important for Google; thus they will do whatever it takes to own one. This will include forcing users who just want search (or email) to have the functionality of Google+; but to avoid brand dilution Google will drop the "+".
(They will continue to use the + in the UI for +1, but that's different).
Like Circles, the + is becoming it's own strong brand, and though it may be that "Google+ == Google", the plus brand will stick around.
Likely, Google will still retain the non-plus Google search, but put most of it's efforts into improving and integrating the "account required" Google+.
I'm not sure if I'm alone on this, but Gmail is by far the most critical part of my Google experience.
Maybe it's because I type gmail.com far more often than google.com. In fact, I don't think I ever type google.com.
I probably make a couple dozen searches a day, but only spend around 30 minutes a day in the search engine. On the other hand, 99% of the time I have Gmail running.
Google search on the other hand is to me at least the epitome of function. I don't even think about how often I use it but it's many many times per day.
I am just looking for an alternative, but so far, only contender worth evaluating I found is Microsoft's live.com. I want IMAP, then having all my emails online (which means at least 5GB space), and what's crucial to me, grouping emails by conversations so I can read it all at once - most providers fails me here.
DISCLAIMER: I have family working at Microsoft.
What I don't agree with necessarily is the framing that Google's success is fait accompli. One skill that Google has NOT established is their ability to integrate separate services such that the whole is at least as much as the sum of its parts. One might argue the only case where they've had success in this is AdSense. Tell me if I'm forgetting something.
While Google's scale and technological advance is a major plus, if you don't design these integrated products cleverly enough, you end up with a bloated, confusing, nebulous morass that people can't grasp as easily as they would independent services. I'm sure Page is aware of this, but the devil is in the execution, and again, the precedent so far is not encouraging. It'll be intriguing to see how well they do this in 2012.
I think the author is drastically overstating the inevitability of Google's product superiority. Google already spectacularly failed once at messaging with Google Wave, and Gmail doesn't actually have the market share that most people think it has (even just considering webmail). Office documents don't seem to be a make-or-break feature for social, and Google Docs has had very limited success competing with Microsoft Office (in fact, my favorite Google office productivity product, EtherPad, was killed in favor of Wave). Spam filtering is legitimate, but it's not that hard of a problem really in a technical sense; Facebook could keep up. Video chat is a weak point for Facebook, granted.
Besides, integrating your competitor's product as a feature of your own doesn't always spell success. Microsoft integrated Bing with its operating system through the IE search box, and look how little that has mattered. Both Apple and Microsoft have tried to "feature-ize" Dropbox, and Dropbox seems to have emerged unscathed. Instapaper is doing fine even in the face of the Safari Reading List. The list goes on. (Sometimes the strategy does work, such as IE against Netscape, but it's hardly clear-cut.)
Dropbox, in particular, is remarkably resilient, because the competing features still aren't "good enough". Apple and Microsoft are actually relatively weak competitors because neither of them "plays well with others" (and having access to your files "anywhere" is a big part of Dropbox's value proposition). Amazon is a more significant threat (competing with your infrastructure provider is never easy), but even they haven't done enough to make Cloud Drive simple and ubiquitous.
Looking at Google+ that way, I think many products won't be threatened by Google+'s features. For example, Google+ doesn't support anonymity the way Tumblr does, so it isn't likely to be a "good enough" replacement.
Facebook might be special case, though. Other than the existing user base (which isn't an impossible hurdle), I don't really see any dimension along which Google+ isn't likely to be a "good enough" alternative. On the other hand, I've never been a fan of Facebook, so I'm probably a bad person to assess that.
No matter how many places Google pushes G+, people are not going to switch unless they can achieve the same functionality by copy-pasting a link.
Consider, however dubious I might find Facebook, the only thing that I would move to is something like what diaspora promised - a less corporate, more anonymous platform. I won't move to Google+ no matter and so some number of my friends won't find me there ever. A small number of my friend have talked about moving to G+ yet are still on Facebook. I suspect this dynamic will protect Facebook until something offering a more desirable platform comes along - G+ calling itself an "identity platform" seems to scream that Google will be selling its members even more than Facebook sells us.
My longterm strategy is to use different companies for different services. It is a slightly bigger hassle than to have everything integrated by one company, but not that a big hassle, after all. My goal for the future is that Google will own only my search strings, and not much else. I would even like to replace Gmail, but didn't find an alternative yet (but live.com looks promising).
Most users don't care. They're not thinking about the wider implications of Google having all the information Google+ will accumulate. That's completely incidental to their goal, which is to keep up to date and share stuff with their friends. And they want that to "just work".
They want convenience, which means not wanting to have to get past obstacles like logging into a completely different site to share a file. Even if the UI Google offers is a bit more sucky than the competition, e.g. dropbox, not having to go to the competition in the first place can easily be enough to make the Google experience the overall winner.
If they think about the "eggs in Google's basket" problem at all, many will see that they give Google all their personal info (name, dob, email address, location?, etc...) to use Google features, and they give Facebook all the same personal info to use Facebook features, and they give some other company a subset of their personal info to use, e.g. file-sharing features, etc.... Seeing as how Google already has the personal information they think about when they think about personal information, it won't occur to them that the meta-information Google will get from tying together. Rather, 3 or 4 companies have their personal information now, and they could reduce that to 1 by doing everything with Google.
That said, the challenges will be many, not the least of which is how do you organize the user interfaces (plural because of mobile vs web vs other devices) on such a super product and not end up with lukewarm soup.
If any app being social means being popular among general web users than yes Google Docs / Office document is not make-or-break feature for social. But when you use Google docs within an organization for team collaboration there is no better tool than this I've found so far. I doubt whether they are working on Google Docs desktop or not but I think that will be a one on one competition to MS Office.
>> (in fact, my favorite Google office productivity product, EtherPad, was killed in favor of Wave)
Etherpad was simple tool. Yes, we can't run it on etherpad.com, does it means they killed it ? I don't think Google killed it, they opensourced it. There are plenty of other hosted options available and are linked at the same domain http://etherpad.com. Why don't use them, they run Etherpad as well.
and even if you don't group your contacts, that's perfectly fine. there is nothing forcing you to do that. after-g+ gmail works exactly the same way it did before g+, only now it has the ability to send mail to any circles you've set up in google+.
It's not an egalitarian thing, I just don't think that social groups are that easily defined. Illegibility is really at the heart of it. The entire notion of circles strikes me as being naive and kinda creepy but mostly annoying.
For instance, I'd have all my f* buddies in the same group but not in the same circle. People who I don't want to discuss my stuff together I wouldn't have in the same circle, and this happens a lot.
That said, it's been a while I don't even use contact groups, I have just 2 lists: people I actively communicate with (time doesn't allow for a ton of these) and people I seldom communicate with, or whose contact I may or may not need. I've also learnt to delete people who I don't need or want in my contacts, and found it to be a great life-hack.
Another thing is that Google doesn't always make the best products. By far.
> As Blogger becomes an easily customizable face for a Google+ public stream, Tumblr will have more trouble succeeding with its blogging product.
I'm not sure if the author has used much of Blogger, but it is horrendous, and terrible if you want to do anything slightly more powerful than a simple blog. Wordpress completely outclasses it.
The other thing that concerns me is Google's prior lack of commitment to these types of projects. Facebook did not succeed only because it was better than myspace, I believe it was also due to just how bad myspace became that people started actively looking for an alternative. Remember the terrible auto-start songs, horribly mangled html templates, creepy spam and rampant security flaws? It might be the case that in a few years Facebook will start to implode in much the same way. Too many crappy Zynga games, an increasinly cluttered interface, questionable privacy compromises, a constant battering of status minutia updates and/or some catastrophic privacy event might drive people to begin migration to a new service. That might take years though. My question is, will G+ still be there, ready to accept them with a stable of polished features and seamless integration to the entire Google application lineup? Or will Google have abandoned G+ years ago, the same way it did with Wave and countless other "experiments"...
I was with him to a point - the notion of absorbing products into features of G+ is a powerful strategy that would make it difficult for the competition - but the problem with this approach for Google is that it takes their search product further and further away from what made it great in the first place. Taking this strategy to its logical conclusion almost by definition means making search more complicated than it needs to be.
Google likes to say its mission is organizing the world's information, but its customers like to believe that Google's mission is simple, effective search. When it comes to defining the brand, the customer always wins. This could be Google's downfall.
Let us look at factors you have pointed out:
1. Social networks: Google has 3 positions in Alexa's Top 10 for the US market. Only Facebook and Twitter are the only two sites that are social networks on that list. Other than Twitter (protected accounts), Bing and Paypal, every other site on that list is crawl-able by Google. Even for Facebook, it is better to have public than private pages (6,330,000,000 pages in the Google index). *
It is very much possible for Facebook to be double the size that it is at and also for Google to grow at the same time. There are more people using more of the internet every year. They all need to connect with others and also find other information they are looking for. Growth for both Google and Facebook need not be mutually exclusive.
The most tangible growth-related metric of year-on-year growth for Google is still pretty impressive: http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html Till a lot of the numbers start veering drastically off-course, I won't worry much about it.
2. Targeted searches: There will always be niche companies who do this over a million domains. I do not think Google would bother too much with it purely because of the clout they carry in the search market. If you have to get good non-organic traffic, you need to be indexable on Google these days. There is also the fact that Google would not want to dominate in everything related to search as it leaves them badly exposed to anti-trust issues.
3. Non-web searches: This is more of an input/interface matter. It has been possible to search through speech for a while on Android and it is something that is only bound to grow as speech recognition gets more and more better across all platforms. What matters is the quality of results and if competing platforms can provide better results from a non-Google platform, then Google would be in trouble. Parsing spoken text is different from delivering results for a query. So, Siri doing a good job of parsing what you are saying is different from Siri being able to serve results from a different search engine than Google.
If the majority of people who do speech-based searches get their results from Google, it will be something for Google to rejoice and not fear. In fact, I think Apple may have even done Google a favour with Siri. There is now going to be a race to be the best voice-based interface on non-iOS platforms as a result of Siri. There is also the increased awareness of this feature now due to Siri.
4. Information discovery: If I am not mistaken, Google already is the leader on this front. They layer a lot of additional information into search results (which, I am not a fan of) and there is nobody of a comparable size who is competing with them on it.
* Alexa is a flawed metric. I am using it as a comparative/indicative measure. Google's page count is broken; but they do have a LOT of pages on Facebook that is crawl-able.
That being said, Facebook's search could definitely use some help, and the more they improve it, the less anyone will need Google to search for things inside the Facebook ecosystem.
Searching for most names on Google throws up first results from Facebook, which makes it one more reason why I'll search for a name on Google than the situation where Google would not have the results on the what is probably the most authoritative page for most people. Thus, in the latter case, creating a situation where I am forced to use Facebook at the cost of Google.
Edit: I think there is a popular zero sum perspective to these things, which is not necessarily true when you look at it closely.
Meanwhile the rest of the computing industry is heading in a direction opposite to what Google can make huge sums of money in and dominate in the way they currently do. Instead of static web pages with low information-to-noise ratio and plastered with ads the internet is moving toward a data-consumption model through highly targeted mobile and mobile web applications. The search engine bully will no longer have a place at the table.
I think it's an interesting argument. Google+ might be Google's biggest success, and also sew the seeds of their downfall. Now that G+ is spreading into Gmail, there is no going back.
That said, it seems like google's focus is now desperate imitation of anything remotely successful on the social web with subsequent bundling of the winners into one uber-product within google+. And it would be a real shame if this is as good as it gets. Is it?