When you're up against a strong incumbent, don't attack your opponent where he is strongest, or at least don't do that in the opening game. Look for where he is

When you're up against a strong incumbent, don't attack your opponent where he is strongest, or at least don't do that in the opening game. Look for where he is weak instead. Google+ didn't lose because Facebook used any particular counter-attack. It lost because it basically set out to copy Facebook, which constituted an attack where Facebook was strongest; why would anyone use it when they could use the original, which had more people on it? Google should have tried doing something different. Maybe drop the real names policy, maybe allow open programmatic access, I don't know enough about the domain to be able to say for sure exactly what, but they needed to provide some reason for at least some percentage of users to switch.