I stopped reading when he made the claim that Google+ is not the success that "Google obviously intended it to be". Because at that point, you either need to claim that Google is incompetent from an engineering standpoint or that they were flat-out lying when they said their scaling up had been outpaced by the adoption rate several times. Instead of addressing this, the author seems to have gone with a pseudo-intellectual squintiness that sounds more like an attempt to mentor Vic Gundotra than analyse the product itself.
While I sympathize with your point, I feel like it's a mistake to assume that just because one point in the post is wrong, no part of the article may be insightful.
Agreed, but something that glaring suggests that the rest of the article is less likely to have relevant insights. The article is a nice refresher on Sun Tzu, for instance, but that's not what it was aiming to be.
Engineering has nothing to do with user adoption. It could very well be that the author is reasonably smart and can read between the lines of Google's PR statements. It has been well documented that statements from Google could be read as misleading (for instance: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/how-go...)
> Did they say Excel was broken when they let you make spreadsheets in Docs? Did they break down email to its bare bones and remake it for Gmail?
no one had managed to make a good spreadsheet/wiki cross before google docs. i know because i looked for one for years. as for gmail, they didn't fix email, they fixed webmail. if coldewey thinks they didn't he has clearly forgotten what the webmail landscape was like before gmail came out. (it is possible that microsoft's outlook-in-the-browser was up there with gmail; i have never used that. everything else pretty much sucked.)
>And second, even if it were broken, Google has never fixed anything before.
>Google never said “What you’re doing is broken. Use our thing instead.” They always said “Did you know you we can do that too, for free?”
I don't agree. I think they saw search was broken, and then fixed it. I think they also basically 'fixed' webmail with GMail.
The argument in this article seems spread pretty thin, to me.
I agree - Google "fixed" search and webmail. I also think arguing that a company shouldn't do something because they haven't done it before is a little superficial.
I remember precisely the period when GMail was launched and I received an invitation from a friend. Until then I've been using private email servers with local clients + Yahoo's Mail.
My first reaction to GMail was somewhere along the lines ... fuck, this is too good to be true.
The same thing happened when I discovered their search engine. I've been using Altavista and I actually was late to the party. So here I was in an Internet Coffee, frustrated that both Altavista and Yahoo were giving me shitty results, then I saw somebody using Google and I tried it out. The results were visibly much, much better and the interface was fast, simple and effective. And I would tell the same story for Android right now, if it weren't for Apple's iOS that came first.
The article completely misses the point of why Google is Google. They are engineers fixing things. Which is why I don't blame them for trying out their luck with Google+. The problem is indeed that they haven't fixed anything in Google+.
What really worries me is that Google is losing their culture of tinkering, their playfulness. They will soon fail to capture new markets, to further innovate, then they'll become evil, using their amassed wealth and influence to crush competition and to break standards.
I think they've totally hit the nail on the head. The problem with G+ is that the profile page and wall felt like blatant FB ripoffs so no one used them. Everything else in the Google space was and still is widely used. It's just that now Google has to embarrassingly acknowledged to its users that it tried to be FB, failed.
Perhaps more importantly G+ has eroded user trust of Google because it made people come to grips with the amount of data Google has about them in a way they could before just not think about.
And perhaps most importantly, Google has finite eng and user experience resources and instead of them being devoted to Google's many other products (many of which are not finished or ready for go-time with enterprise customers), they were sucked into the G+ black hole because it was the hot new thing. Too bad most of their work was in vain...
Google+ is not Facebook, and it's just getting started -- At this point, I don't see how anyone outside of Google could think they have a strong enough grasp on what's in store to come to these conclusions.
You don't see any Facebook profile postings on Hacker News, but PG had to change the HN URL format to accommodate all the Google Plus postings. Moreover, a Google Play link just appeared on my black bar -- Google Plus will come more into Play as it goes mainstream.
I don't believe there's a feature that G+ can add that will overcome the friction of changing social networks from Facebook to G+.
To me I've found that G+ sits in a continuum where LinkedIn is far on one side (the professional world), Facebook on the other, and Google+ sits somewhere in the middle. They can grow from that niche.
Facebook is dying on several fronts. Most notably it's made a deal with the devil by allowing it's profitability to become closely tied to Zenga style 'social' games which drive people away. That's not to say it's going to die quickly, but neither did Yahoo.
I don't know if G+ is going to win or if something else is going to show up. But Facebook as a public company is going to be squesed to extract ever more revenue from it's users and that's exactly the behavior that drives people away from 'free' sites.
I think Facebook will eventually lose its luster, but its going to be to something completely different then another "Social Network".
The thing about Google+, at least how I use it, is that it's a news aggregator rather than a friend feed. I find it more useful to compare it with HN than Facebook.
Google Play is cool, but social isn't about features. It's about people, and the people are on Facebook. Maybe Google+ isn't designed to supplant Facebook, and maybe it shouldn't be, but it's hard to argue that it wasn't designed at least with Facebook in mind. Like it or not, Facebook directly stores and controls a tremendously large chunk of the data in the world, and to top it off it is arguable that it is this data is most important to people personally, since they spend so much more time with it than they do with, say, Wikipedia. Regardless of whether G+ is a direct Facebook competitor or not, this chunk of information is also off-limits to Google, and the result is that Facebook as an entity poses an existential threat to the entire company, whose job is expressly to make information accessible and searchable. Search isn't going anywhere, but if the most important information is locked away by Zuckerberg and Company, then it may also not be going anywhere especially interesting.
In spite of what I just said, I will grant that you're right when you say that Google+ isn't Facebook. The comparison is almost certain to be unflattering to Google+, and it misses something essential. In particular, regardless of what TC or any other pop-tech journalism firm likes to admit, Google did get one thing profoundly right with Google+. The ability to share blog-style posts in a more freely social setting has catapulted the site to popularity among a nontrivial portion of very prominent academics, not to mention the very influential tech people who use it. Facebook was the minority when it launched to ivy league schools, but one key to their success was that they had the attention of the right people. Google may not be popular, but that doesn't mean they're wrong. Time will tell what happens from here on out, but it will be ironic if the prominent hackers who jump ship because Google is changing ended up jumping ship so that a new set of hackers could build something cool in their place.
While I ended up agreeing with a lot of the points of the original TC article, I think your conclusion ended up being more right, and it is truly unfortunate that Google+ does not get defended as it probably should.
Search isn't going anywhere, but if the most important information is locked away by Zuckerberg and Company, then it may also not be going anywhere especially interesting.
As Google+ grows, it could put pressure on Facebook to open up.
I keep seeing this, but have you looked at Facebook's API? What do you feel it's missing, because it's pretty darned open, just access controlled (as it should be).
> It's about people, and the people are on Facebook.
but Facebook's full of people who I don't want to talk to! I've got 412 facebook friends, and you know how many of them I actually want to talk to? Like seven. How many of them leave comments on anything I say, though? Like 30 of them. The 30 who I like the least.
On G+, I only talk to people I like. It's quieter, but there's a lot less LOOK AT MY BABIES and HERE'S POORLY INFORMED POLITICS and I POKED A COW and everything terrible.
"Google+ is not Facebook, and it's just getting started -- At this point, I don't see how anyone outside of Google could think they have a strong enough grasp on what's in store to come to these conclusions."
You can say that about any product from any company. With smart players, it's often true, but it's not informative.
>Remember that browser plug-in that sounded a siren whenever it detected Google in any way, shape, or form?
What's this plug-in? I'd love to see one where people compete to see how long they can go without using one of their properties. Think of it like a "this many days since the last on-the-job injury" counter.
I stopped using it because I just hate that I'm logged in to googlesearch and YouTube automatically. While some interesting people post on g+ it's more a blogplatform, the contentarea when logged in is too narrow and I noticed that I am very hesitant engaging in a discussion with my real name, not so on reddit e.g.
I agree that the article has too little to add for all the ominous sounding words.
But why not make the +1 button private by default? It annoys me that when I +1 something it's public. Shouldn't the total count of +1's be what everyone wants to know anyway?
I mean, seriously, nobody cares what I click +1 on. Capitalize on that.
If this is the case, they really need to work on the wording... If I hover over the +1 icon on this article, the popup text states "Publicly +1 this as <MY NAME>".
"Even if you choose to keep your +1's tab private, your +1's will still appear publicly. +1’s can appear as annotations on the content you +1’d wherever that content appears across the Web."
It's because of search. If you share something on G+ it will be emphasized on others' search result. If I have you on my circles and like what you share, then I would care about what you +1. Because it would make my searches better.
Another long "I am boldy lecturing Google" post. It seem to be the new sport everyone must learn at least once. But this guy missed the most interesting bit (or I skimmed too fast): the removal of the logo as home of product links are indications that gplus home (your stream) will soon replace the empty Google home. How much do you bet?
Google is a corporation with tens of thousands of employees. In addition to that, the actions of the corporation are influenced by many outside organizations and individuals (competitors, regulators, customers, the list goes on). Even natural disasters affect the course of corporations.
However the business press always anthropomorphizes them into this unified figure because it allows them to tell a story. But it seems like the longer the narrative gets, and the more speculation it does about things that can't actually be verified, the further away it gets from having any predictive value, and the closer it gets to being cargo-cultish, something akin to religion.
This story seems a long way out in that direction.
"Google was never good at making new things" - uhm, what???
I suppose if you want to you could accuse everything and everybody of that, as everything anybody invents builds on things that have existed before it (yes, even the iPhone). But to accuse Google of that really seems an enourmous stretch. What about street view and Google earth? Google Wave? Self driving cars? Container based data centers? Map Reduce? And so on... I am not a Google fanboy and haven't memorized their achievements, but seriously, they introduced a lot of "new" things.
'"Google was never good at making new things" - uhm, what???'
Yeah, especially since _Apple_ was pointed out as the opposite - you know, that company the invented the smart phone, and the mp3 player, and the gui, and the mouse…
Even as somebody who could quite credibly be accused of "drinking the Steve Jobs Kool Aid", I laughed out loud at that.
The truth is that Facebook have successfully copied the features from Google Plus and put them into Facebook. Much like Microsoft has with the Mac Operating system. Because they have market lock-in it has meant they have been able to stop people moving across.
Google don't need to be number 1 in social to "win". Anyone that has advertised on both platforms can tell you where they put their money.
Also, Google lost a lot of great engineers after IPO and they're probably hedging that the same will happen at Facebook.
Much like Microsoft has with the Mac Operating system
This is a really good point. As far back as 1996[1], Steve Jobs was saying Apple couldn't win by being a little better than Microsoft/Dell. They had to be 10 times better.
The original Google was one of those 10x improvements over the status quo. +1 seems very me-too.
If I were Google, I would try to buy Github. They are quietly creating a new kind of social network around code and hacker culture. Google is much better at code than social, and with Github they can do certain things 10x better than Facebook.
[1] This interview of Jobs by Terry Gross is remarkable.
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/06/141115121/steve-jobs-computer-...
The consumer Internet was still a very new thing and he correctly described where it was going and what Apple might do if he were at the helm (he had not rejoined Apple yet).
I'll tell you where I put my money: with Facebook Ads. By a factor of 400x.
Yes, when you are looking for "cheap red shoes" just right now, Google AdWords is wonderful. But when you are trying to sell a product that the customer doesn't know they want, but you know they do based on who they are, Facebook Ads blows Google AdWords out of the water. Different tools for different usage. It's what TV ads and branding has been all about. Who knows, soon Google may be a niche advertiser similar to late night shopping channels. I'd hate that.
If I were paying you to do PPC marketing for my products and you showed me those numbers and then bragged about how much money you spent on Facebook I'd have some serious concerns.
I stopped using G+ because I hated their real name policy, and when I submitted my nickname that I use everywhere else on the internet they rejected it for no good reason. That was the last straw.
The one thing I've missed about not being on G+ is...nothing. Nothing of value was lost. Virtually no one I know uses it.
As others have noted, that article is very wrong. Google did see that email was broken, and search was broken, and mapping was broken (old mapquest was horrible). They proceeded to attempt to fix them.
They did see that Excel was broken, it costs $120 normal retail. That's a broken business model. Spreadsheet interface attached to AWS = user cost of $0.25 per month, if that. They recognized the high price points of old software were doomed and ridiculous.
Google also spotted something wrong in the mobile market, and they bought Android to try to fix it. Agree or disagree with the results, Android is wildly successful (both in usage and spitting profit for Google).
Some googlers thought there was a better way to do browsers, and they proceeded to fix various flaws in that category. They were successful, they built a superior browser.
To me, this looks like more of a long game. Why is google in Android? Why is google in social? I don't think it's in it to win complete market share, but rather to prevent companies such as apple and facebook creating closed gardens which it cannot index. Its goal is not to win, but rather not to lose...
I have faith in Google+. Google has a big trump in the shape of the Android Market, which does not offer integration with Facebook. The Market is growing rapidly, as is the number of Android users. It's difficult to speculate how, but I have a feeling this will come in play in the future.
I was excited by Google+ in the lead up, but once I saw it I just moved on - I have not seem many comments to support this, but to me its ugly to look at.
There's a long road ahead. It's way too soon to pick a winner. Many people will have lots of opportunities to engage with Google's offerings for many years to come. And they'll have lots of time to refine their products. I think Google+ was a smart move. Maybe they haven't been hugely successful yet, but I see potential.
as far as I've seen the TC articles that make up here, their arguments are rarely thicker than air. The usual process goes like this: I begin to read, come up with their assumptions regarding X,Y,Z (depending on the product) as "facts". I click the little x button and chastise myself again for reading a TC article with the aim of finding some actual content.
I think the gold in this article is the authors view of what Google should have done. I agree with pretty much every point, Google by basically declaring Google+ as "their social push" and "facebook killer", they already had their head in the noose.
Articles about disgruntled Google employees help in no part to fuel a new found disrespect for Google which I have noticed emerging rapidly recently.
I love the authors thoughts on what Google should have done, and I would like to see similar service released by a third party vendor, a simple browser plugin or even a bookmarklet. Does a simple "I like this" call to a server, which correlates all your personal likes. Its been done, and done to death, but I want it to be done better.
One of my favourite things on the internet at the moment is the like button on youtube, it is my new way of sharing music with my friends. But already I feel the need to do certain things with my likes. Tag them, write tiny comments about something my friend have liked. A lot of buzz around pinterest recently, and perhaps this is why.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadno one had managed to make a good spreadsheet/wiki cross before google docs. i know because i looked for one for years. as for gmail, they didn't fix email, they fixed webmail. if coldewey thinks they didn't he has clearly forgotten what the webmail landscape was like before gmail came out. (it is possible that microsoft's outlook-in-the-browser was up there with gmail; i have never used that. everything else pretty much sucked.)
I don't agree. I think they saw search was broken, and then fixed it. I think they also basically 'fixed' webmail with GMail.
The argument in this article seems spread pretty thin, to me.
My first reaction to GMail was somewhere along the lines ... fuck, this is too good to be true.
The same thing happened when I discovered their search engine. I've been using Altavista and I actually was late to the party. So here I was in an Internet Coffee, frustrated that both Altavista and Yahoo were giving me shitty results, then I saw somebody using Google and I tried it out. The results were visibly much, much better and the interface was fast, simple and effective. And I would tell the same story for Android right now, if it weren't for Apple's iOS that came first.
The article completely misses the point of why Google is Google. They are engineers fixing things. Which is why I don't blame them for trying out their luck with Google+. The problem is indeed that they haven't fixed anything in Google+.
What really worries me is that Google is losing their culture of tinkering, their playfulness. They will soon fail to capture new markets, to further innovate, then they'll become evil, using their amassed wealth and influence to crush competition and to break standards.
Perhaps more importantly G+ has eroded user trust of Google because it made people come to grips with the amount of data Google has about them in a way they could before just not think about.
And perhaps most importantly, Google has finite eng and user experience resources and instead of them being devoted to Google's many other products (many of which are not finished or ready for go-time with enterprise customers), they were sucked into the G+ black hole because it was the hot new thing. Too bad most of their work was in vain...
You don't see any Facebook profile postings on Hacker News, but PG had to change the HN URL format to accommodate all the Google Plus postings. Moreover, a Google Play link just appeared on my black bar -- Google Plus will come more into Play as it goes mainstream.
I do. I don't believe there's a feature that G+ can add that will overcome the friction of changing social networks from Facebook to G+.
I think Facebook will eventually lose its luster, but its going to be to something completely different then another "Social Network".
To me I've found that G+ sits in a continuum where LinkedIn is far on one side (the professional world), Facebook on the other, and Google+ sits somewhere in the middle. They can grow from that niche.
I don't know if G+ is going to win or if something else is going to show up. But Facebook as a public company is going to be squesed to extract ever more revenue from it's users and that's exactly the behavior that drives people away from 'free' sites.
The thing about Google+, at least how I use it, is that it's a news aggregator rather than a friend feed. I find it more useful to compare it with HN than Facebook.
Google Play is cool, but social isn't about features. It's about people, and the people are on Facebook. Maybe Google+ isn't designed to supplant Facebook, and maybe it shouldn't be, but it's hard to argue that it wasn't designed at least with Facebook in mind. Like it or not, Facebook directly stores and controls a tremendously large chunk of the data in the world, and to top it off it is arguable that it is this data is most important to people personally, since they spend so much more time with it than they do with, say, Wikipedia. Regardless of whether G+ is a direct Facebook competitor or not, this chunk of information is also off-limits to Google, and the result is that Facebook as an entity poses an existential threat to the entire company, whose job is expressly to make information accessible and searchable. Search isn't going anywhere, but if the most important information is locked away by Zuckerberg and Company, then it may also not be going anywhere especially interesting.
In spite of what I just said, I will grant that you're right when you say that Google+ isn't Facebook. The comparison is almost certain to be unflattering to Google+, and it misses something essential. In particular, regardless of what TC or any other pop-tech journalism firm likes to admit, Google did get one thing profoundly right with Google+. The ability to share blog-style posts in a more freely social setting has catapulted the site to popularity among a nontrivial portion of very prominent academics, not to mention the very influential tech people who use it. Facebook was the minority when it launched to ivy league schools, but one key to their success was that they had the attention of the right people. Google may not be popular, but that doesn't mean they're wrong. Time will tell what happens from here on out, but it will be ironic if the prominent hackers who jump ship because Google is changing ended up jumping ship so that a new set of hackers could build something cool in their place.
While I ended up agreeing with a lot of the points of the original TC article, I think your conclusion ended up being more right, and it is truly unfortunate that Google+ does not get defended as it probably should.
As Google+ grows, it could put pressure on Facebook to open up.
Google arguably has more users than Facebook.
Google: 1 billion unique monthly visitors in June 2011 - http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/06/21/google-notches-one-bi...
Facebook: 850 million active monthly users in February 2012 - https://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-has-over-845-mi...
but Facebook's full of people who I don't want to talk to! I've got 412 facebook friends, and you know how many of them I actually want to talk to? Like seven. How many of them leave comments on anything I say, though? Like 30 of them. The 30 who I like the least.
On G+, I only talk to people I like. It's quieter, but there's a lot less LOOK AT MY BABIES and HERE'S POORLY INFORMED POLITICS and I POKED A COW and everything terrible.
You can say that about any product from any company. With smart players, it's often true, but it's not informative.
What's this plug-in? I'd love to see one where people compete to see how long they can go without using one of their properties. Think of it like a "this many days since the last on-the-job injury" counter.
But why not make the +1 button private by default? It annoys me that when I +1 something it's public. Shouldn't the total count of +1's be what everyone wants to know anyway?
I mean, seriously, nobody cares what I click +1 on. Capitalize on that.
You can +1 things all over the web and your friends will only know about it if you actively share the +1 on your stream.
"Even if you choose to keep your +1's tab private, your +1's will still appear publicly. +1’s can appear as annotations on the content you +1’d wherever that content appears across the Web."
However the business press always anthropomorphizes them into this unified figure because it allows them to tell a story. But it seems like the longer the narrative gets, and the more speculation it does about things that can't actually be verified, the further away it gets from having any predictive value, and the closer it gets to being cargo-cultish, something akin to religion.
This story seems a long way out in that direction.
I suppose if you want to you could accuse everything and everybody of that, as everything anybody invents builds on things that have existed before it (yes, even the iPhone). But to accuse Google of that really seems an enourmous stretch. What about street view and Google earth? Google Wave? Self driving cars? Container based data centers? Map Reduce? And so on... I am not a Google fanboy and haven't memorized their achievements, but seriously, they introduced a lot of "new" things.
Yeah, especially since _Apple_ was pointed out as the opposite - you know, that company the invented the smart phone, and the mp3 player, and the gui, and the mouse…
Even as somebody who could quite credibly be accused of "drinking the Steve Jobs Kool Aid", I laughed out loud at that.
The truth is that Facebook have successfully copied the features from Google Plus and put them into Facebook. Much like Microsoft has with the Mac Operating system. Because they have market lock-in it has meant they have been able to stop people moving across.
Google don't need to be number 1 in social to "win". Anyone that has advertised on both platforms can tell you where they put their money.
Also, Google lost a lot of great engineers after IPO and they're probably hedging that the same will happen at Facebook.
This is a really good point. As far back as 1996[1], Steve Jobs was saying Apple couldn't win by being a little better than Microsoft/Dell. They had to be 10 times better.
The original Google was one of those 10x improvements over the status quo. +1 seems very me-too.
If I were Google, I would try to buy Github. They are quietly creating a new kind of social network around code and hacker culture. Google is much better at code than social, and with Github they can do certain things 10x better than Facebook.
[1] This interview of Jobs by Terry Gross is remarkable. http://www.npr.org/2011/10/06/141115121/steve-jobs-computer-... The consumer Internet was still a very new thing and he correctly described where it was going and what Apple might do if he were at the helm (he had not rejoined Apple yet).
Yes, when you are looking for "cheap red shoes" just right now, Google AdWords is wonderful. But when you are trying to sell a product that the customer doesn't know they want, but you know they do based on who they are, Facebook Ads blows Google AdWords out of the water. Different tools for different usage. It's what TV ads and branding has been all about. Who knows, soon Google may be a niche advertiser similar to late night shopping channels. I'd hate that.
(You can read a longer version of my experience here: http://blog.foundrs.com/2011/04/01/sell-your-google-stock-li...)
The one thing I've missed about not being on G+ is...nothing. Nothing of value was lost. Virtually no one I know uses it.
OK, that was a quick read.
Another day, another attention seeking TC writer.
They did see that Excel was broken, it costs $120 normal retail. That's a broken business model. Spreadsheet interface attached to AWS = user cost of $0.25 per month, if that. They recognized the high price points of old software were doomed and ridiculous.
Google also spotted something wrong in the mobile market, and they bought Android to try to fix it. Agree or disagree with the results, Android is wildly successful (both in usage and spitting profit for Google).
Some googlers thought there was a better way to do browsers, and they proceeded to fix various flaws in that category. They were successful, they built a superior browser.
Life goes on...
Articles about disgruntled Google employees help in no part to fuel a new found disrespect for Google which I have noticed emerging rapidly recently.
I love the authors thoughts on what Google should have done, and I would like to see similar service released by a third party vendor, a simple browser plugin or even a bookmarklet. Does a simple "I like this" call to a server, which correlates all your personal likes. Its been done, and done to death, but I want it to be done better.
One of my favourite things on the internet at the moment is the like button on youtube, it is my new way of sharing music with my friends. But already I feel the need to do certain things with my likes. Tag them, write tiny comments about something my friend have liked. A lot of buzz around pinterest recently, and perhaps this is why.
Much as I have distaste for Google+, the strategy needs to be viewed on a longer timescale. Even search took years to become a mainstream success.