8 ms·

This is Vic Gundotra's legacy and perhaps the first major strategic decision Larry Page made in the post-Eric Schmidt era and it was the design and launch of Go

by cletus 8y ago

This is Vic Gundotra's legacy and perhaps the first major strategic decision Larry Page made in the post-Eric Schmidt era and it was the design and launch of Google+ and (IMHO) it marked a turning point in the company's culture. Internal resistance to aspects of G+ was enormous. People outside the company get this idea that Google acts as some kind of singleminded (possibly nefarious) entity when "herding cats" is so often much closer to the truth. In G+'s case, the rank-and-file was largely against things like the Real Names policy yet leadership went ahead with it anyway (Vic often quipped that you didn't want everyone named "Dog fart", which was a pretty ridiculous argument). And while it may have been Vic driving this, Larry backed him so has to bear shared responsibility. Probably the worst decision made in this whole mess was (again, IMHO) trying to unify the account model. Youtube accounts have different permission models to Gmail accounts, etc. It would've been sufficient to simply link them (and not require they be linked) rather than jamming single-sign-on down everyone's throats, which really gained nothing except a lot of user backlash. The worst part of this was that the for the longest time some policy violation (like your name not being "real") could lock you out of your entire account. Whoever made this decision needed to be fired. Deciding someone's name wasn't real enough should NEVER lock you out of your Gmail (or Youtube or any other service). I was reminded of this in a thread yesterday about the disaster that was the Snapchat redesign. Leadership ignoring user feedback as people start to attribute luck to skill and vision (people have a tendency to socialize losses and privatize wins). Is this merely hubris? Because it's very reminiscent of the dismissal of internal feedback that is now routine (at Google). It's unfortunate how much Google-hate is on HN these days because I think it's largely unjustified. There are definitely some bad (IMHO) leadership decisions but the rank-and-file are still culture carriers for a lot of the things that made Google great. Still, as the Chinese say, the fish rots from the head. Disclaimer: Xoogler. All opinions are entirely personal and I don't speak for this or any other company. EDIT: TIL the origin of "a fish rots from the head" is disputed and possibly Turkish not Chinese: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fish-rot-from-the-head-down.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fish-rot-from-the-head-d...

yuhong 8y ago
Yea, I remember the debacle well. I think I had a few HN posts about it.
dekhn 8y ago
As a Xoogler I agree completely. The whole social debacle distracted the company from a more important goal (cloud) and now google has to play catch up to AWS and Azure. This was a case where a very large number of Googlers tried to advise leadership on some of its more boneheaded decisions and had to work overtime to deal with the problems and fallout.
- cft 8y ago
  Very good insight. If you think about it, Google benefits from proliferation of third party websites, thus cloud business is synergetic with Google search. Facebook and Google+ are competitive with Google search since they centralize the web. For many, Google search reduced to a search engine for Wikipedia and StackOverflow and a couple of other big sites. This poses a long-term threat for search.
  - Latteland 8y ago
    When I was at google, the one thing I took away was that most of the terrible decisions such as described above were very widely panned before being released inside the company. Everyone one of them. That doesn't mean the group of engineers was always right, but they were very good at pointing out bad, controversial ideas.
    - JoblessWonder 8y ago
      Is there an example of an idea that was panned that turned out to be a (even moderate) success?
      - dougb5 8y ago
        The acquisition of YouTube is one that comes to mind. While it wasn't universally panned, there were a lot of engineers (myself included) who felt it was wildly excessive.
        village-idiot 8y ago
394549 8y ago
> The worst part of this was that the for the longest time some policy violation (like your name not being "real") could lock you out of your entire account. Whoever made this decision needed to be fired. Deciding someone's name wasn't real enough should NEVER lock you out of your Gmail (or Youtube or any other service). This is exactly what made me nope-out of Google+. At the time my gmail account was my primary personal email accoun, everything went there. There was no way I was going to take any chances with it.
gaius 8y ago
Probably the worst decision made in this whole mess was (again, IMHO) trying to unify the account model. This was a half-arsed attempt at inflating user numbers by counting every user of YouTube as a login to Google+.
jklinger410 8y ago
>Probably the worst decision made in this whole mess was trying to unify the account model. Trying it at all after realizing it was not going to be complete. I think the unified account was an all-or-nothing strategy, and they met with early resistance from every dedicated user silo on all of their previously very separate products. But instead of launching some big unified account thing to really force Google+, they did a kind of half-assed thing. Some accounts migrated and auto-signed up, there were some weird account-links, people had multiple accounts (youtube, gmail) etc etc. They backed out, pandered, etc. It was an absolute shit-show from the perspective of a power user. If someone would have had the prescience to say "our products are too silod for a successful merger" at the onset, and then either spent 5 years slowly breaking down those silos FIRST, or just tearing the walls down AT ALL, it might have worked.
justicezyx 8y ago
Not relevant, but "the fish rots from the head" is relevant to Chinese? I cannot find any explanation of that connection. Just curious.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- gojomo 8y ago
  When I search Google for [fish rots from head], the top 3 results each mention some Chinese connection – one calls it a "Chinese proverb", others say it's been variously attributed to many traditions, often Turkish, Greek, or Chinese. (So: maybe that's an origin. Or perhaps there's something vaguely similar in some Chinese traditions. Or perhaps it's just a common mal-attribution, as there's a tendency in the west to ascribe various highly-figurative or riddle-like pearls of wisdom to "the Chinese", or "the Arabs", or "the Buddhists", etc.)
  - monomyth 8y ago
    https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fish-rot-from-the-head-down.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fish-rot-from-the-head-d...
- anyfoo 8y ago
  I cannot answer that question, but I can add that it's a common German saying as well, in a slightly different form: "The fish smells from the head."
- vl 8y ago
  It's widely used in Russia and considered to be a classical Russian proverb.
  - paganel 8y ago
    It's also very much used in Romania, so I suspect we either got it from the Turkish (the source mentioned by someone above) or it comes from our Slavic roots (from where it might have originated in modern Russian, too). Living at the crossroads of different civilizations and migration routes can be fun like that.
tomjen3 8y ago
>Leadership ignoring user feedback as people start to attribute luck Funny, that YCs motto is "make something people want".
dwc 8y ago
> It's unfortunate how much Google-hate is on HN these days because I think it's largely unjustified. There are definitely some bad (IMHO) leadership decisions but the rank-and-file are still culture carriers for a lot of the things that made Google great. The fairly small number of people I know who are Googlers or Xooglers are all pretty awesome as techies and as people. That does little to change my opinion of Google itself. Sometimes it makes me even more cynical, thinking that management might take special care in internal messaging lest the rank-and-file revolt. But from my perspective, from the outside, what Google does as a company is what counts for me and for society. All the good people inside don't ameliorate the external behavior of the company.
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  lest the rank-and-file revolt The rank-and-file are extremely well compensated, with cash, with stock, with on-the-job perks. Why would they bite the hand that feeds them? A lot of people will put up with incredible violations of their principles before they'll risk losing a comfortable position.
  - dleslie 8y ago
    This is one of many reasons why it is worthwhile to compensate well, at all levels: loyalty can be purchased.
  - lrem 8y ago
    Googlers will and have on multiple occassions revolted. Many have resigned when their personal red lines were crossed, usually over things the external world would not have noticed. Various top-down decisions have been reverted due to this, up to walking back an announcement that already went public. Big part of the reason is that finding the next job after Google is nowhere near a hard problem. Chances are you might even get paid more by the next place. Source: I'm a Googler that has signed some of these petitions, never got his red lines crossed and is still happy to work here.
agumonkey 8y ago
I lost my original youtube account due to the merger. The idea of social mirror of society using a single point of identity is (in hindsight) totally ridiculous. We liked so much having pseudos and different personas depending on the context.
- CamperBob2 8y ago
  That's a very important point, IMHO, and an underrated one. The next big social network -- the one that turns Facebook into MySpace 2.0 -- will be one that lets users maintain not just multiple 'circles' but multiple identities. I don't just want to separate what my parents see from what my coworkers see, or separate what my (hypothetical) friends from church see from what my (hypothetical) fellow members at the local underground S&M club see. I want to be different people as far as they're all concerned. This will scale in interesting ways. For one thing, advertisers will actively benefit from this model because it will let them target individual personae. The notion of keeping the name you were born with and using it forever, everywhere, is the original "single sign-on" paradigm. To the extent single sign-on, single identity is suboptimal in cyberspace, it will eventually be seen as such in real life. The use of real names online already ranges from a useless practice to a hazardous one, depending on how common or how obscure your name is.
  - djsumdog 8y ago
    I kinda doubt that. It's not in those networks best interests. They need as complete a picture of _you_ as possible to sell you shit. You can have semi-multiple identities based on the pages you manage/control, but most sites don't want to make it easy to switch accounts because it could lead to ambiguity to their data. For example, to use multiple accounts on Reddit, you need either The Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) plugin or some type of cookie isolator like container tabs in Firefox or multiple browsers. I think you need to do something similar for Twitter (or use a desktop client). Federated Social networks that use either ActivityPub or OStatus (like Mastodon, Pleroma and GNUSocial) are interesting because you can have independent accounts on multiple instances, and be logged into all of them without browser tricks (since they're all on different domains).
jedberg 8y ago
> Leadership ignoring user feedback as people start to attribute luck to skill and vision I think a lot of this is because of Steve Jobs. He did this but was for the most part successful at it. Everyone wants to think they are the next Jobs.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Nelson69 8y ago
Google "hate" is a product of their success. IBM, MS, Apple, they all get it or have had it too. What is frustrating with plus though, it was clear from outside Google that the company wasn't completely behind it. It also seems like it was good enough that they could have played with it to find the right recipe. I haven't followed it that closely, but from the outside, it looks like it launched, it didn't achieve facebook-like popularity immediately, they just sort of babysit it for a while and now it's shutting down. I know better, but it doesn't seem like the company tried very hard... Where were the stupid drug dealer games or some kind of fantasy football apps? It was only part social or something.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  except when they did throw their weight behind it they did it in weird ways - requiring google+ for youtube but then keeping all youtube tools on youtube and google+ as an abstracted login entity that had some old version of your data(google+ profile didn't pull your youtube banner or details in any way nor did it facilitate creator growth by automatically suggesting contacts based on the type of content you create - which is very much in the realm of possibility for google)

by cletus 8y ago

yuhong 8y ago

Yea, I remember the debacle well. I think I had a few HN posts about it.

dekhn 8y ago

As a Xoogler I agree completely. The whole social debacle distracted the company from a more important goal (cloud) and now google has to play catch up to AWS and Azure. This was a case where a very large number of Googlers tried to advise leadership on some of its more boneheaded decisions and had to work overtime to deal with the problems and fallout.

cft 8y ago
Very good insight. If you think about it, Google benefits from proliferation of third party websites, thus cloud business is synergetic with Google search. Facebook and Google+ are competitive with Google search since they centralize the web. For many, Google search reduced to a search engine for Wikipedia and StackOverflow and a couple of other big sites. This poses a long-term threat for search.
- Latteland 8y ago
  When I was at google, the one thing I took away was that most of the terrible decisions such as described above were very widely panned before being released inside the company. Everyone one of them. That doesn't mean the group of engineers was always right, but they were very good at pointing out bad, controversial ideas.
  - JoblessWonder 8y ago
    Is there an example of an idea that was panned that turned out to be a (even moderate) success?
    - dougb5 8y ago
      The acquisition of YouTube is one that comes to mind. While it wasn't universally panned, there were a lot of engineers (myself included) who felt it was wildly excessive.
      - village-idiot 8y ago

394549 8y ago

> The worst part of this was that the for the longest time some policy violation (like your name not being "real") could lock you out of your entire account. Whoever made this decision needed to be fired. Deciding someone's name wasn't real enough should NEVER lock you out of your Gmail (or Youtube or any other service). This is exactly what made me nope-out of Google+. At the time my gmail account was my primary personal email accoun, everything went there. There was no way I was going to take any chances with it.

gaius 8y ago

Probably the worst decision made in this whole mess was (again, IMHO) trying to unify the account model. This was a half-arsed attempt at inflating user numbers by counting every user of YouTube as a login to Google+.

jklinger410 8y ago

>Probably the worst decision made in this whole mess was trying to unify the account model. Trying it at all after realizing it was not going to be complete. I think the unified account was an all-or-nothing strategy, and they met with early resistance from every dedicated user silo on all of their previously very separate products. But instead of launching some big unified account thing to really force Google+, they did a kind of half-assed thing. Some accounts migrated and auto-signed up, there were some weird account-links, people had multiple accounts (youtube, gmail) etc etc. They backed out, pandered, etc. It was an absolute shit-show from the perspective of a power user. If someone would have had the prescience to say "our products are too silod for a successful merger" at the onset, and then either spent 5 years slowly breaking down those silos FIRST, or just tearing the walls down AT ALL, it might have worked.

justicezyx 8y ago

Not relevant, but "the fish rots from the head" is relevant to Chinese? I cannot find any explanation of that connection. Just curious.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
gojomo 8y ago
When I search Google for [fish rots from head], the top 3 results each mention some Chinese connection – one calls it a "Chinese proverb", others say it's been variously attributed to many traditions, often Turkish, Greek, or Chinese. (So: maybe that's an origin. Or perhaps there's something vaguely similar in some Chinese traditions. Or perhaps it's just a common mal-attribution, as there's a tendency in the west to ascribe various highly-figurative or riddle-like pearls of wisdom to "the Chinese", or "the Arabs", or "the Buddhists", etc.)
- monomyth 8y ago
  https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fish-rot-from-the-head-down.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fish-rot-from-the-head-d...
anyfoo 8y ago
I cannot answer that question, but I can add that it's a common German saying as well, in a slightly different form: "The fish smells from the head."
vl 8y ago
It's widely used in Russia and considered to be a classical Russian proverb.
- paganel 8y ago
  It's also very much used in Romania, so I suspect we either got it from the Turkish (the source mentioned by someone above) or it comes from our Slavic roots (from where it might have originated in modern Russian, too). Living at the crossroads of different civilizations and migration routes can be fun like that.

tomjen3 8y ago

>Leadership ignoring user feedback as people start to attribute luck Funny, that YCs motto is "make something people want".

dwc 8y ago

> It's unfortunate how much Google-hate is on HN these days because I think it's largely unjustified. There are definitely some bad (IMHO) leadership decisions but the rank-and-file are still culture carriers for a lot of the things that made Google great. The fairly small number of people I know who are Googlers or Xooglers are all pretty awesome as techies and as people. That does little to change my opinion of Google itself. Sometimes it makes me even more cynical, thinking that management might take special care in internal messaging lest the rank-and-file revolt. But from my perspective, from the outside, what Google does as a company is what counts for me and for society. All the good people inside don't ameliorate the external behavior of the company.

ubernostrum 8y ago
lest the rank-and-file revolt The rank-and-file are extremely well compensated, with cash, with stock, with on-the-job perks. Why would they bite the hand that feeds them? A lot of people will put up with incredible violations of their principles before they'll risk losing a comfortable position.
- dleslie 8y ago
  This is one of many reasons why it is worthwhile to compensate well, at all levels: loyalty can be purchased.
- lrem 8y ago
  Googlers will and have on multiple occassions revolted. Many have resigned when their personal red lines were crossed, usually over things the external world would not have noticed. Various top-down decisions have been reverted due to this, up to walking back an announcement that already went public. Big part of the reason is that finding the next job after Google is nowhere near a hard problem. Chances are you might even get paid more by the next place. Source: I'm a Googler that has signed some of these petitions, never got his red lines crossed and is still happy to work here.

agumonkey 8y ago

I lost my original youtube account due to the merger. The idea of social mirror of society using a single point of identity is (in hindsight) totally ridiculous. We liked so much having pseudos and different personas depending on the context.

CamperBob2 8y ago
That's a very important point, IMHO, and an underrated one. The next big social network -- the one that turns Facebook into MySpace 2.0 -- will be one that lets users maintain not just multiple 'circles' but multiple identities. I don't just want to separate what my parents see from what my coworkers see, or separate what my (hypothetical) friends from church see from what my (hypothetical) fellow members at the local underground S&M club see. I want to be different people as far as they're all concerned. This will scale in interesting ways. For one thing, advertisers will actively benefit from this model because it will let them target individual personae. The notion of keeping the name you were born with and using it forever, everywhere, is the original "single sign-on" paradigm. To the extent single sign-on, single identity is suboptimal in cyberspace, it will eventually be seen as such in real life. The use of real names online already ranges from a useless practice to a hazardous one, depending on how common or how obscure your name is.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  I kinda doubt that. It's not in those networks best interests. They need as complete a picture of _you_ as possible to sell you shit. You can have semi-multiple identities based on the pages you manage/control, but most sites don't want to make it easy to switch accounts because it could lead to ambiguity to their data. For example, to use multiple accounts on Reddit, you need either The Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) plugin or some type of cookie isolator like container tabs in Firefox or multiple browsers. I think you need to do something similar for Twitter (or use a desktop client). Federated Social networks that use either ActivityPub or OStatus (like Mastodon, Pleroma and GNUSocial) are interesting because you can have independent accounts on multiple instances, and be logged into all of them without browser tricks (since they're all on different domains).

jedberg 8y ago

> Leadership ignoring user feedback as people start to attribute luck to skill and vision I think a lot of this is because of Steve Jobs. He did this but was for the most part successful at it. Everyone wants to think they are the next Jobs.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Nelson69 8y ago

Google "hate" is a product of their success. IBM, MS, Apple, they all get it or have had it too. What is frustrating with plus though, it was clear from outside Google that the company wasn't completely behind it. It also seems like it was good enough that they could have played with it to find the right recipe. I haven't followed it that closely, but from the outside, it looks like it launched, it didn't achieve facebook-like popularity immediately, they just sort of babysit it for a while and now it's shutting down. I know better, but it doesn't seem like the company tried very hard... Where were the stupid drug dealer games or some kind of fantasy football apps? It was only part social or something.

kkarakk 8y ago
except when they did throw their weight behind it they did it in weird ways - requiring google+ for youtube but then keeping all youtube tools on youtube and google+ as an abstracted login entity that had some old version of your data(google+ profile didn't pull your youtube banner or details in any way nor did it facilitate creator growth by automatically suggesting contacts based on the type of content you create - which is very much in the realm of possibility for google)