7 ms·

RIP. Like so many of Google’s high profile efforts (anyone remember Wave? Glass, etc), a bunch of good ideas and great tech brought down by an utter failure to

RIP. Like so many of Google’s high profile efforts (anyone remember Wave? Glass, etc), a bunch of good ideas and great tech brought down by an utter failure to understand the human element/social psychology angle. Google+ was dead in the water from day one. You don’t beat Facebook at social by building a slightly different product with some cool ideas like Circles. Going for feature parity was a mistake. Instead they should have tried to identify a niche where Facebook was failing (say, intimate private sharing, or the antithesis of the narcissist fest) and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users, then slowly expanded from there. Kind of like how Facebook started out as a platform for elite universities, then high schools, then workplaces, then the world. This approach would have been hard to sell internally at Google given the pressure to release a “Facebook killer.” But people always forget that the way to build a platform is to start by nailing a niche use case and then expanding. Even the Apple App Store only came to dominate because it was based on a hit product, the original iPhone. Anyway, kudos to Google for finally admitting defeat. Hopefully management learned something and they hire some people who understand humans so that their brilliant engineering capacity doesn’t get wasted again.

stanmancan 8y ago
Big companies typically don't go after small niches. There are so many of them available they can't possibly pursue them all, because ultimately you don't know which one will take off. The book The Innovator's Dilemma focuses on this.
- mindgam3 8y ago
  Exactly. My point is that going after small niches until one works would have been a better strategy to come up with a viable Facebook competitor. This could probably only happen with a “startup within big company” model where they had the freedom to test out a bunch of crazy stuff for a long time without pressure from management.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Big companies typically don't go after small niches. Big companies go after niches all the time. Many microbrews are owned by massive multi-national breweries. Huge drug companies chase niches every day. Giant food companies release ethic niche foods every month. Whomever told you that there isn’t big money in niches or that they’re not worth going after is someone you should stop taking advice from.
  - dannyw 8y ago
    The typical SV wisdom is that you want to find a bit market you can monopolise. While good for startups, this doesn’t apply to big companies.
  - strictnein 8y ago
    > "Big companies go after niches all the time. Many microbrews are owned by massive multi-national breweries." AB Inbev, et al isn't targeting a niche by buying microbrews, they're building a portfolio that gives them access to growing and profitable craft brew market that's 1/4th of the total US beer market. Retail dollar sales of craft increased 8%, up to $26.0 billion, and now account for more than 23% of the $111.4 billion U.S. beer market. https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics/national-beer-sales-production-data/ https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics/national-beer-...
  - stanmancan 8y ago
    It very much depends on the market. This is the reason why Seagate and Western Digital aren’t big names in the SSD market. They dominated the mechanical drive market for years (and still do!) but by the time SSDs were worth pursuing, other companies were light years ahead of them. Google isn’t really in the business of filling small niches. That’s why they kill so many products that have small but passionate user bases. It’s just not worth their time and money so they shut the products down. This is why I can’t see them trying to start with a small social media niche and slowly expand to a bigger market. It’s a great idea; but seems to go against everything they do.
    - Deganta 8y ago
ryanwaggoner 8y ago
Why do you need to beat Facebook at social at all? Just focus on what you’re good at, it’s not like Facebook is going to suddenly dominate search.
- sdegutis 8y ago
  All large enough corporations expand until they can read email; those that don't are subsumed by ad-hoc implementations of 50% of Common Lisp. - Paul McCarthy (1956)
- mindgam3 8y ago
  Because social is/was such a fundamental aspect of the human experience. As proven by facebook’s continued explosive growth in the years since Google tried to compete. Not to mention FB’s ability to affect markets, attitudes, and politics at global scale. It would have been better if they had competitors to keep them honest.
  - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
    Disagree strongly. Lots of categories are a fundamental part of the human experience. No one company can or should try and compete in all of them. I really admire Apple here a lot more than Google. They seem to have a stronger sense of who they are and who they are not.
    - mindgam3 8y ago
      Sure. But I never said Google should try to compete in all of them. Just social, given that it is up there as a fundamental human need, hardwired into our brains like the need for food or sex. Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful.” You really can’t fault them for trying to organize the world’s social information when it became clear to everyone that social was powerful enough to become one of the dominant computing paradigms. My take is, they were justified in going for it, but it’s simply not in their DNA. Social information is different from the non-human information where Google dominates (eg search, maps, etc). I do share your admiration for Apple vs Google. But I wonder how long they will be able to keep it up without a Jobsian product visionary to define their identity. Tim Cook is doing a good job so far but there is only so long they can coast on iPhone dominance and strong operations. Apple’s identity revolves around defining the future, and I’m not sure they still have that ability.
Krasnol 8y ago
FYI: Google Glass Enterprise Edition is still alive.
- mindgam3 8y ago
  Yes. But still a non player in the much more important consumer market. Arguably Google still has a stake in consumer glasses via their massive investment in Magic Leap. But whether that has any chance of succeeding is a whole other story.
  - r00fus 8y ago
    What "important" market is there? It's far from certain that VR/AR hardware is going to amount to anything for the next 10 years.
    - mindgam3 8y ago
      The important market is when smartglasses replace smartphones as the dominant form of human computer interaction. Which will happen in the next 10 years.
      - kkarakk 8y ago
        here's to hoping it happens in the next 5
      - Spellchamp 8y ago
        Are you sure of this? I would find that surprising. Is there some market research somewhere that points to this?
        mindgam3 8y ago
        There’s a lot of market research readily available, admittedly of questionable quality. But the more reliable weather vane is estimating when Apple will launch their smartglasses. Add 5 years to that for when glasses disrupt smartphones. At the rate Apple is buying up AR and VR companies you can expect them to launch in late 2019 or 2020.
ihuman 8y ago
> anyone remember Wave? Doesn't Google Wave live on as Google Docs?
- mindgam3 8y ago
  I believe Docs has always been an entirely separate product. They may have had a version of it inside Wave. Not 100% sure on this but that’s what I remember.
- ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
  Individual features from Wave were ported over to Docs, from what I read. Eg some of the collaborative editing etc.
- ytjohn 8y ago
  Google Docs predates Wave and has since been rebranded as Google Drive. Various blogs have pointed out how certain aspects of Wave have been integrated into Docs/Sheets/Drive. The big concept with wave was that you did operations. "Go to row 12 and bold characters 15 through 38" as an operation within a document, as opposed to synchronizing an entire object. So when you set your cursor on a word in the document, it sent that as an operation, and any other clients editing the document could see where your cursor was at. Operations at the individual character level would sync to all attached clients and you can see edits in realtime. It's really interesting when a team at work is all looking at and modifying the same spreadsheet. The box they are editing is highlighted so you naturally stay away from it. If you are "idle", you might click your cursor away from all the activity as a common courtesy. Good Docs had this to a degree before Wave, but it was unpolished. Two people could definitely edit a sheet together, but editing a document was more cumbersome (whole blocks of text would update at once). After Wave, they took the concepts and you could then see everyone editing the document as they typed or simply moved around the document.
JepZ 8y ago
I still miss Wave... In my opinion, Googles biggest failure was the missing real-world federation. They promised us, that there will be a server to run on your own hardware and yet it took them years to release anything that was usable. Even years after the open source release the software was quite unstable. Paired with the missing backward compatibility with email those two are the most important aspects of why Wave failed IMHO.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Personally, visual clutter and poor performance were two major factors why Wave didn't work for me. Visually they were cramming too much stuff on the page, with loads of avatars / icons for participants and the like - IMO unnecessary information to have on the landing page. And performance wise it was just not good enough, maybe if they made it an optimized native app instead of a webapp. At least they could incorporate the tech they developed and used for Wave in other products, notably Docs and G+.
class4behavior 8y ago
>RIP. Like so many of Google’s high profile efforts (anyone remember Wave? Glass, etc), a bunch of good ideas and great tech brought down by an utter failure to understand the human element/social psychology angle. Absolutely this. It is, however, not the marketing strategy that failed them. G+ was hyped for some time before release and it became a hit since day one. With the level of attention any Google product gained at that time, there was no need to focus on a niche. The issue were their horrendous decisions in UI and product design as well as feature integration. In short, it was a product for the tech savy user, yet aimed at the mainstream. It wasn't satisfying anyone. I still can't understand why they would not cap the most valuable resource they had, GMail, GDocs, GCalendar, GReader, etc. Zero integration.
- mindgam3 8y ago
  I don’t remember many particularly egregious failures in UI and product design. In my experience it was well designed, but served no purpose whatsoever given that it was almost a complete clone of Facebook features, thus no reason for any of my facebook addicted friends to start using it, thus no reason for me to use it, thus dead in the water due to marketing fail and not product. Maybe I missed some specific UX or design issues that you are referring to? I do agree that there was a missed opportunity to integrate their other awesome products you mentioned. But to me even with those integrated Google+ would have needed a raison d’etre that was substantially different than facebook.
  - pantalaimon 8y ago
    When it launched I had several friends on g+ that were not on Facebook. Facebook already had a bad rep, but Google was still cool. The circles were a great idea. I didn't see any problems with the ui either. But there was simply not much to do, contrary to what you'd expect with all the other Google services available.
    - mindgam3 8y ago
      “Friends on G+ that weren’t on Facebook” <== this was an opportunity I was still very high on Facebook kool aid at that time. It may have had a bad rep to some people, but this sentiment was years away from reaching people like me. Note that I am about as much of a Facebook insider as possible without actually having worked there. I personally know most of their top execs, Zuck interviewed me in 2007, turned down a PM offer to join Bebo but stayed close with a number of them for years. I would have loved to be filthy rich with those options, but if I had joined I would feel guilty for the destruction I contributed to.
yks 8y ago
> Instead they should have tried to identify a niche where Facebook was failing and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users As Google Reader history shows, Google does not care about the passionate users.
- JauntTrooper 8y ago
  I still miss Reader. :( I basically stopped following most blogs when it shut down, and reverted to individual bookmarks.
  - gt640k 8y ago
    I wonder if that's in their interest or not
    - kkarakk 8y ago
      the feature is basically replicated on android phones that have the google now launcher page that shows you customised results based on how you search.
  - mkarnicki 8y ago
    Have a look at Feedly. I, too, loved Reader. Feedly filled the void for me :).
bcherny 8y ago
> Instead they should have tried to identify a niche where Facebook was failing (say, intimate private sharing, or the antithesis of the narcissist fest) and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users, then slowly expanded from there. Great advice for a YC startup, but not how big companies that already have large user bases operate. Big companies have a metric they want to drive, then look for big opportunities, simply because dominating a “niche” is too small an opportunity to make a dent in a big-company metric like DAU, time spent, etc. If you do want to start with a niche, it can be super hard to justify continued investment from management, given that there are so many other bets that can drive larger near-term changes to metrics.
- mindgam3 8y ago
  Right. But the reason big companies fail at this is because they don’t have the balls to pursue optimal longterm strategy in the face of quicker near term wins. There’s nothing preventing a big company from thinking like a nimble startup, other than fear/lack of vision coming from the top. If the CEO stuck to his or her guns, they could outcompete startups for these opportunities.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Then they shouldn’t have tried starting a social network at all.
pantalaimon 8y ago
> Going for feature parity was a mistake But there was no feature parity, not even close. When G+ launched it was more like a tech demo, interest died down when people discovered that there really was not much to do. They added more features over time, but at that point the hype was already dead.
- mindgam3 8y ago
  They had the important stuff. Posting content, a feed, friends. This is what drove Facebook. All the other stuff was icing on the cake.
  - pantalaimon 8y ago
    There were no events, no pages. If I just want to chat with friends I might just a well use a messenger with a group chat.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    The existence of core features does not a compelling argument for switching make.
buboard 8y ago
> finally admitting defeat. Not so much defeat , but more avoiding future liability. They sure could afford to run it , but under the current circumstances, a data leak like the one they claim they didn't have would be very damaging to their image and their moneymakers.
- mindgam3 8y ago
  If shuttering a consumer product and relegating it to enterprise isn’t admitting defeat, then I don’t know what you mean by defeat.
  - buboard 8y ago
    defeat happened a decade ago, i don't think it was the hope of "victory" that was keeping it alive. Rather, it was not enough of a trouble/liability (until april), and a small number of people/communities still used it.
    - mindgam3 8y ago
      “defeat happened a decade ago“ ...right. Hence, them finally “admitting defeat” which you objected to for some reason in your previous comment.
newscracker 8y ago
Actually, Google+ never aimed at feature parity with Facebook. At least not in the way of having the same set of features and accessible as easily as they were/are on Facebook. Having used both platforms for a long time, this was a huge barrier to doing anything on Google+ even if one didn't mind many people not being on it. If it had copied Facebook shamelessly, it would've given an alternative for all those people fed up with Facebook for the last decade or so, and thus increased usage too.
- mindgam3 8y ago
  Uh, they kinda did copy Facebook shamelessly on the core features and basic UI, with the exception of Circles. I log in, I see a feed, I have a way to add “friends”, I can share text/photos/videos/links and comment. It basically looked and felt like logging in to Facebook with no friends on there, less features, and a few interesting UI differences. If they had done something different, like say restricted you to X number of friends, for any small X, or focused on groups, or done something anonymous like Secret - now that at least would have been different. It may have still failed but at least it would have been trying to scratch a different itch on the social spectrum.
  - Leace 8y ago
    I think the parent meant that Facebook had more features so Google+ didn't really aim at "feature parity".
    - mindgam3 8y ago
      I get that. My point is that Google aimed at “core feature parity,” which was a mistake.
eksemplar 8y ago
Are they admitting defeat, or are they simply removing another bit of their business that can’t be profitable without exploiting privacy? To me it seems like google is forcing more and more on selling services rather than user information.
- mindgam3 8y ago
  Not to beat a dead horse on this defeat thing, but it's defeat from the perspective of trying and failing to have a competing social network. I like your optimism and I wish Google's reasons were that noble. But it's hopelessly naive to say that they are shutting it down as part of a trend of selling services rather than info. #1, they're shutting it down to avoid a massive backlash after being hacked, because otherwise they might steal the crown of "most disreputable Big Tech co" from Facebook, which could begin to affect their stock price much like it has Facebook's. #2, they are making inroads in every other part of their business sacrificing user privacy for nebulous features/benefits. See the recent debacle over Chrome auto-sign in. They basically tried to change the definition of Chrome from "it's a browser" to "it's Google" without anybody noticing. Not particularly consistent with a company ostensibly moving away from a business model relying on targeted advertising.
ryen 8y ago
>say, intimate private sharing, or the antithesis of the narcissist fest) and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users Kind of describes Google Wave in a sense - private collaboration and passionate users. But it couldn't expand out of that niche set of users/use-cases.
akerro 8y ago
I'm pretty sure Google would have more luck in making and keeping these technologies if they found some middle-ground on spying, tracking and profiling. I almost bought Google Glass, but after reading review that it makes picture every few seconds and each time you blink and uploads it to Google, I decided not to ever buy something like this. It's not only harmful for my privacy, but literally everyone else around me.
- bun_at_work 8y ago
  > but after reading review that it makes picture every few seconds and each time you blink and uploads it to Google This is a ridiculous claim and should be discarded without sources. Do you have any?
  - akerro 8y ago
    Yea, two seconds of DuckDuckDucking https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/24/google_glass_spyware/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/24/google_glass_spywar...
cxseven 8y ago
> But people always forget that the way to build a platform is to start by nailing a niche use case and then expanding. The median Googler works there for something like 1.1 years, and gets recruited straight out of college. Combine this with the fact that Larry Page almost immediately abdicated after being handed back the reins from Eric Schmidt around this time, and a lot of other influential old timers like Marissa Mayer are long gone, it's no small wonder, I guess, that the sensibilities and follow-through of early Google are dead.

stanmancan 8y ago

Big companies typically don't go after small niches. There are so many of them available they can't possibly pursue them all, because ultimately you don't know which one will take off. The book The Innovator's Dilemma focuses on this.

mindgam3 8y ago
Exactly. My point is that going after small niches until one works would have been a better strategy to come up with a viable Facebook competitor. This could probably only happen with a “startup within big company” model where they had the freedom to test out a bunch of crazy stuff for a long time without pressure from management.
reaperducer 8y ago
Big companies typically don't go after small niches. Big companies go after niches all the time. Many microbrews are owned by massive multi-national breweries. Huge drug companies chase niches every day. Giant food companies release ethic niche foods every month. Whomever told you that there isn’t big money in niches or that they’re not worth going after is someone you should stop taking advice from.
- dannyw 8y ago
  The typical SV wisdom is that you want to find a bit market you can monopolise. While good for startups, this doesn’t apply to big companies.
- strictnein 8y ago
  > "Big companies go after niches all the time. Many microbrews are owned by massive multi-national breweries." AB Inbev, et al isn't targeting a niche by buying microbrews, they're building a portfolio that gives them access to growing and profitable craft brew market that's 1/4th of the total US beer market. Retail dollar sales of craft increased 8%, up to $26.0 billion, and now account for more than 23% of the $111.4 billion U.S. beer market. https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics/national-beer-sales-production-data/ https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics/national-beer-...
- stanmancan 8y ago
  It very much depends on the market. This is the reason why Seagate and Western Digital aren’t big names in the SSD market. They dominated the mechanical drive market for years (and still do!) but by the time SSDs were worth pursuing, other companies were light years ahead of them. Google isn’t really in the business of filling small niches. That’s why they kill so many products that have small but passionate user bases. It’s just not worth their time and money so they shut the products down. This is why I can’t see them trying to start with a small social media niche and slowly expand to a bigger market. It’s a great idea; but seems to go against everything they do.
  - Deganta 8y ago

ryanwaggoner 8y ago

Why do you need to beat Facebook at social at all? Just focus on what you’re good at, it’s not like Facebook is going to suddenly dominate search.

sdegutis 8y ago
All large enough corporations expand until they can read email; those that don't are subsumed by ad-hoc implementations of 50% of Common Lisp. - Paul McCarthy (1956)
mindgam3 8y ago
Because social is/was such a fundamental aspect of the human experience. As proven by facebook’s continued explosive growth in the years since Google tried to compete. Not to mention FB’s ability to affect markets, attitudes, and politics at global scale. It would have been better if they had competitors to keep them honest.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  Disagree strongly. Lots of categories are a fundamental part of the human experience. No one company can or should try and compete in all of them. I really admire Apple here a lot more than Google. They seem to have a stronger sense of who they are and who they are not.
  - mindgam3 8y ago
    Sure. But I never said Google should try to compete in all of them. Just social, given that it is up there as a fundamental human need, hardwired into our brains like the need for food or sex. Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful.” You really can’t fault them for trying to organize the world’s social information when it became clear to everyone that social was powerful enough to become one of the dominant computing paradigms. My take is, they were justified in going for it, but it’s simply not in their DNA. Social information is different from the non-human information where Google dominates (eg search, maps, etc). I do share your admiration for Apple vs Google. But I wonder how long they will be able to keep it up without a Jobsian product visionary to define their identity. Tim Cook is doing a good job so far but there is only so long they can coast on iPhone dominance and strong operations. Apple’s identity revolves around defining the future, and I’m not sure they still have that ability.

Krasnol 8y ago

FYI: Google Glass Enterprise Edition is still alive.

mindgam3 8y ago
Yes. But still a non player in the much more important consumer market. Arguably Google still has a stake in consumer glasses via their massive investment in Magic Leap. But whether that has any chance of succeeding is a whole other story.
- r00fus 8y ago
  What "important" market is there? It's far from certain that VR/AR hardware is going to amount to anything for the next 10 years.
  - mindgam3 8y ago
    The important market is when smartglasses replace smartphones as the dominant form of human computer interaction. Which will happen in the next 10 years.
    - kkarakk 8y ago
      here's to hoping it happens in the next 5
    - Spellchamp 8y ago
      Are you sure of this? I would find that surprising. Is there some market research somewhere that points to this?
      - mindgam3 8y ago
        There’s a lot of market research readily available, admittedly of questionable quality. But the more reliable weather vane is estimating when Apple will launch their smartglasses. Add 5 years to that for when glasses disrupt smartphones. At the rate Apple is buying up AR and VR companies you can expect them to launch in late 2019 or 2020.

ihuman 8y ago

> anyone remember Wave? Doesn't Google Wave live on as Google Docs?

mindgam3 8y ago
I believe Docs has always been an entirely separate product. They may have had a version of it inside Wave. Not 100% sure on this but that’s what I remember.
ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
Individual features from Wave were ported over to Docs, from what I read. Eg some of the collaborative editing etc.
ytjohn 8y ago
Google Docs predates Wave and has since been rebranded as Google Drive. Various blogs have pointed out how certain aspects of Wave have been integrated into Docs/Sheets/Drive. The big concept with wave was that you did operations. "Go to row 12 and bold characters 15 through 38" as an operation within a document, as opposed to synchronizing an entire object. So when you set your cursor on a word in the document, it sent that as an operation, and any other clients editing the document could see where your cursor was at. Operations at the individual character level would sync to all attached clients and you can see edits in realtime. It's really interesting when a team at work is all looking at and modifying the same spreadsheet. The box they are editing is highlighted so you naturally stay away from it. If you are "idle", you might click your cursor away from all the activity as a common courtesy. Good Docs had this to a degree before Wave, but it was unpolished. Two people could definitely edit a sheet together, but editing a document was more cumbersome (whole blocks of text would update at once). After Wave, they took the concepts and you could then see everyone editing the document as they typed or simply moved around the document.

JepZ 8y ago

I still miss Wave... In my opinion, Googles biggest failure was the missing real-world federation. They promised us, that there will be a server to run on your own hardware and yet it took them years to release anything that was usable. Even years after the open source release the software was quite unstable. Paired with the missing backward compatibility with email those two are the most important aspects of why Wave failed IMHO.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Personally, visual clutter and poor performance were two major factors why Wave didn't work for me. Visually they were cramming too much stuff on the page, with loads of avatars / icons for participants and the like - IMO unnecessary information to have on the landing page. And performance wise it was just not good enough, maybe if they made it an optimized native app instead of a webapp. At least they could incorporate the tech they developed and used for Wave in other products, notably Docs and G+.

class4behavior 8y ago

>RIP. Like so many of Google’s high profile efforts (anyone remember Wave? Glass, etc), a bunch of good ideas and great tech brought down by an utter failure to understand the human element/social psychology angle. Absolutely this. It is, however, not the marketing strategy that failed them. G+ was hyped for some time before release and it became a hit since day one. With the level of attention any Google product gained at that time, there was no need to focus on a niche. The issue were their horrendous decisions in UI and product design as well as feature integration. In short, it was a product for the tech savy user, yet aimed at the mainstream. It wasn't satisfying anyone. I still can't understand why they would not cap the most valuable resource they had, GMail, GDocs, GCalendar, GReader, etc. Zero integration.

mindgam3 8y ago
I don’t remember many particularly egregious failures in UI and product design. In my experience it was well designed, but served no purpose whatsoever given that it was almost a complete clone of Facebook features, thus no reason for any of my facebook addicted friends to start using it, thus no reason for me to use it, thus dead in the water due to marketing fail and not product. Maybe I missed some specific UX or design issues that you are referring to? I do agree that there was a missed opportunity to integrate their other awesome products you mentioned. But to me even with those integrated Google+ would have needed a raison d’etre that was substantially different than facebook.
- pantalaimon 8y ago
  When it launched I had several friends on g+ that were not on Facebook. Facebook already had a bad rep, but Google was still cool. The circles were a great idea. I didn't see any problems with the ui either. But there was simply not much to do, contrary to what you'd expect with all the other Google services available.
  - mindgam3 8y ago
    “Friends on G+ that weren’t on Facebook” <== this was an opportunity I was still very high on Facebook kool aid at that time. It may have had a bad rep to some people, but this sentiment was years away from reaching people like me. Note that I am about as much of a Facebook insider as possible without actually having worked there. I personally know most of their top execs, Zuck interviewed me in 2007, turned down a PM offer to join Bebo but stayed close with a number of them for years. I would have loved to be filthy rich with those options, but if I had joined I would feel guilty for the destruction I contributed to.

yks 8y ago

> Instead they should have tried to identify a niche where Facebook was failing and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users As Google Reader history shows, Google does not care about the passionate users.

JauntTrooper 8y ago
I still miss Reader. :( I basically stopped following most blogs when it shut down, and reverted to individual bookmarks.
- gt640k 8y ago
  I wonder if that's in their interest or not
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    the feature is basically replicated on android phones that have the google now launcher page that shows you customised results based on how you search.
- mkarnicki 8y ago
  Have a look at Feedly. I, too, loved Reader. Feedly filled the void for me :).

bcherny 8y ago

> Instead they should have tried to identify a niche where Facebook was failing (say, intimate private sharing, or the antithesis of the narcissist fest) and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users, then slowly expanded from there. Great advice for a YC startup, but not how big companies that already have large user bases operate. Big companies have a metric they want to drive, then look for big opportunities, simply because dominating a “niche” is too small an opportunity to make a dent in a big-company metric like DAU, time spent, etc. If you do want to start with a niche, it can be super hard to justify continued investment from management, given that there are so many other bets that can drive larger near-term changes to metrics.

mindgam3 8y ago
Right. But the reason big companies fail at this is because they don’t have the balls to pursue optimal longterm strategy in the face of quicker near term wins. There’s nothing preventing a big company from thinking like a nimble startup, other than fear/lack of vision coming from the top. If the CEO stuck to his or her guns, they could outcompete startups for these opportunities.
Aeolun 8y ago
Then they shouldn’t have tried starting a social network at all.

pantalaimon 8y ago

> Going for feature parity was a mistake But there was no feature parity, not even close. When G+ launched it was more like a tech demo, interest died down when people discovered that there really was not much to do. They added more features over time, but at that point the hype was already dead.

mindgam3 8y ago
They had the important stuff. Posting content, a feed, friends. This is what drove Facebook. All the other stuff was icing on the cake.
- pantalaimon 8y ago
  There were no events, no pages. If I just want to chat with friends I might just a well use a messenger with a group chat.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  The existence of core features does not a compelling argument for switching make.

buboard 8y ago

> finally admitting defeat. Not so much defeat , but more avoiding future liability. They sure could afford to run it , but under the current circumstances, a data leak like the one they claim they didn't have would be very damaging to their image and their moneymakers.

mindgam3 8y ago
If shuttering a consumer product and relegating it to enterprise isn’t admitting defeat, then I don’t know what you mean by defeat.
- buboard 8y ago
  defeat happened a decade ago, i don't think it was the hope of "victory" that was keeping it alive. Rather, it was not enough of a trouble/liability (until april), and a small number of people/communities still used it.
  - mindgam3 8y ago
    “defeat happened a decade ago“ ...right. Hence, them finally “admitting defeat” which you objected to for some reason in your previous comment.

newscracker 8y ago

Actually, Google+ never aimed at feature parity with Facebook. At least not in the way of having the same set of features and accessible as easily as they were/are on Facebook. Having used both platforms for a long time, this was a huge barrier to doing anything on Google+ even if one didn't mind many people not being on it. If it had copied Facebook shamelessly, it would've given an alternative for all those people fed up with Facebook for the last decade or so, and thus increased usage too.

mindgam3 8y ago
Uh, they kinda did copy Facebook shamelessly on the core features and basic UI, with the exception of Circles. I log in, I see a feed, I have a way to add “friends”, I can share text/photos/videos/links and comment. It basically looked and felt like logging in to Facebook with no friends on there, less features, and a few interesting UI differences. If they had done something different, like say restricted you to X number of friends, for any small X, or focused on groups, or done something anonymous like Secret - now that at least would have been different. It may have still failed but at least it would have been trying to scratch a different itch on the social spectrum.
- Leace 8y ago
  I think the parent meant that Facebook had more features so Google+ didn't really aim at "feature parity".
  - mindgam3 8y ago
    I get that. My point is that Google aimed at “core feature parity,” which was a mistake.

eksemplar 8y ago

Are they admitting defeat, or are they simply removing another bit of their business that can’t be profitable without exploiting privacy? To me it seems like google is forcing more and more on selling services rather than user information.

mindgam3 8y ago
Not to beat a dead horse on this defeat thing, but it's defeat from the perspective of trying and failing to have a competing social network. I like your optimism and I wish Google's reasons were that noble. But it's hopelessly naive to say that they are shutting it down as part of a trend of selling services rather than info. #1, they're shutting it down to avoid a massive backlash after being hacked, because otherwise they might steal the crown of "most disreputable Big Tech co" from Facebook, which could begin to affect their stock price much like it has Facebook's. #2, they are making inroads in every other part of their business sacrificing user privacy for nebulous features/benefits. See the recent debacle over Chrome auto-sign in. They basically tried to change the definition of Chrome from "it's a browser" to "it's Google" without anybody noticing. Not particularly consistent with a company ostensibly moving away from a business model relying on targeted advertising.

ryen 8y ago

>say, intimate private sharing, or the antithesis of the narcissist fest) and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users Kind of describes Google Wave in a sense - private collaboration and passionate users. But it couldn't expand out of that niche set of users/use-cases.

akerro 8y ago

I'm pretty sure Google would have more luck in making and keeping these technologies if they found some middle-ground on spying, tracking and profiling. I almost bought Google Glass, but after reading review that it makes picture every few seconds and each time you blink and uploads it to Google, I decided not to ever buy something like this. It's not only harmful for my privacy, but literally everyone else around me.

bun_at_work 8y ago
> but after reading review that it makes picture every few seconds and each time you blink and uploads it to Google This is a ridiculous claim and should be discarded without sources. Do you have any?
- akerro 8y ago
  Yea, two seconds of DuckDuckDucking https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/24/google_glass_spyware/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/24/google_glass_spywar...

cxseven 8y ago

> But people always forget that the way to build a platform is to start by nailing a niche use case and then expanding. The median Googler works there for something like 1.1 years, and gets recruited straight out of college. Combine this with the fact that Larry Page almost immediately abdicated after being handed back the reins from Eric Schmidt around this time, and a lot of other influential old timers like Marissa Mayer are long gone, it's no small wonder, I guess, that the sensibilities and follow-through of early Google are dead.