8 ms·

I was an IC6 at Google when Google+ launched... From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healt

I was an IC6 at Google when Google+ launched... From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone was the biggest problem. IMO this even foreshadows separating off Google Brain from the rest of Google and giving them resources not available to anyone else. Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time. I think the road to the Google we see today started then. It's also the year they paid too much for Motorola and started pushing Marissa Mayer out the door. Then there was the changing story of the 2011 bonus. When I hired in, we were all told our 2011 bonus would be tied to the success of Google+. That's a fantastic way to rally your co-workers, except... Once they launched Google+, the Google+ Eliterati (so to speak) changed their minds and announced that any Google+ bonus was for Google+ people alone. Maximum emotionally intelligent genius IMO. Now your own co-workers have been burned. Also not very "googly." Finally, there was "Real Names." The week of its launch everyone I knew wanted an invite and I used up every single one of them and continued to do so as more were made available to me. Then "Real Names" happened and people stopped asking for invites overnight. That's the moment for me when the tide turned against this thing. I really liked the initial Google+ UI personally, but the UI ran head-on into the nonsensical "Kennedy" initiative wherein some brilliant designer seemed to decide that since monitors are now twice the size they used to be, they should add twice the whitespace to show the same amount of information as on a much smaller screen. Subversives within the company took to posting nearly blank sheets of printer paper on walls with the single word "Kennedy" in a tiny font you'd only see if you got close to the things. That said, my godawful company man manager would repeatedly proclaim how beautiful he thought the Kennedy layout was in our office for all to hear whenever they updated GMail or Search to use it. Of course, there are other reasons beyond my tiny perspective here, but I did have a front row seat for this and it was really disappointing to see a potential Facebook killer die of a thousand papercuts like this.

Nican 7y ago
The "Kennedy" comment really made me giggle. I have some dislike for some trends of applications addining great amounts of white space. I have to agree that the interface, and the "Real Names" requirements were the two biggest hurdles for me to even to start to like Google+. I really liked the concept of circles, but whenever I did get around to using the social network, it never felt as social and engaging as Twitter. Even when I did find an intersting discussion, it was hard to keep track of replies. Reddit/HNews/Twitter have a tree-like structure for the comments, but Google+ was mostly flat, and hard to keep track of any debate. I would lose interest on Google+ as soon as I tried to read a comment thread, and close the application altogether.
- waqf 7y ago
  If only Google could invent a discussion site with rich text and threaded discussions … they could call it "Google Wave" …
  - stallmanite 7y ago
    Or even https://groups.google.com https://groups.google.com
  - curtis3389 7y ago
    Or Google Buzz
kryogen1c 7y ago
> From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone I work in an IT MSP where we do business with lots of small-medium companies, and i am astounded at how much the leadership sets the culture for the company. A sarcastic and passive aggressive CEO will have a company of rude employees. An outgoing confident type A person will work with friendly extroverts. Separating a team like this guarantees a different culture than the rest of Google, and imherent resentment between the two.
- koonsolo 7y ago
  > how much the leadership sets the culture for the company. Over the years this is exactly what I experienced. And even if there are a bunch of employees and middle managers that are pushing for a different culture, for the benefit of the company (this can happen in a fast growing company where things haven't settled down yet), it is an uphill battle for those people, and they will eventually leave.
znpy 7y ago
> I was an IC6 at Google IC6 meaning... ?
- maybecorrect 7y ago
  I think it means Individual Contributor (level) 6 - which is described as "Staff SWE" by https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engi...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bduerst 7y ago
  Job level. At Google the different job roles are separated into ladders, with the number representing the how high you've climbed. IC6 isn't director level but it's far from entry-level. Invoking their job level like this at the opening of their comment is an appeal to authority. Edit: This comment is being misunderstood. Not saying it's a fallacy - appealing to authority is not always illogical.
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    A tangent, but a true "appeal to authority" would be using the fact that someone is an expert on a subject as the evidence for the assertions. I don't think merely mentioning that you or your source is an expert of a subject is necessarily an appeal to authority falacy. In this case they provide their opinion and then provide the reasons and evidence for their reasoning.
  - horsawlarway 7y ago
    I don't see it as an appeal to authority but rather as context. There's quite a bit of context shift as you go up the ladder within an organization. The reason "why" something happened often looks very different from different perspectives.
  - ultraluminous 7y ago
    The GP is providing their personal insider view regarding what they perceived as mismanagement of G+, and is starting of with describing the vantage the had at the time. There are many (many) instances of appeal-to-authority on HN, but this is just plain `ol context. Apologies if I read too much into your comment, but Appeal to Authority is a name of a logical fallacy and ascribes some sort of intellectual failure to the poster, when there's clearly none.
unreal37 7y ago
Blaming the failure of Google+ on "they had their own cafeteria that we weren't allowed to go to" and "they got bonuses we didn't get" seems really really inside baseball. Shows the problems inside Google, yes. But that's not why it never really took off.
- jfarmer 7y ago
  I took `oneshot908 as saying that the Google+ team had a broadly isolationist attitude. Their distance from both co-workers / potential internal contributors and customers/users was a reflection of this and that trickled down into poor product decisions.
  - iamnotacrook 7y ago
    I doubt it. There's just no connection between them at all. Think about all the bad things you read about Amazon - how Bozo treats people, how employees are treated, especially the warehouse staff, plus a website the HTML hairdressers love to hate on. It's still the first choice for retail and cloud services for millions of people around the world. Separate cafeteria! I love Hacker News!
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      If the full story is death by a thousand cuts, do you want a thousand-paragraph comment?
  - oneshot908 7y ago
    Yes, you got it. I made up the "Dark Tower" remark because they sat the Google+ team on the top floor of the only semi-highrise on the main Mountain View campus. This separated them both literally and figuratively from the rest of the Googlers and in 2011, that was just not "googly." And yes, this was a Vic Gundotra move. I love a good skunkworks project. But Google+ needed Google to succeed. Apparently Vic felt otherwise and the rest is history, no?
- pjc50 7y ago
  I worked at a place that did this - separate team for the new project with their own eating area - and the amount of goodwill it blew was amazing. People who'd worked together for years became resentful of each other. It created a "we know best" attitude in the new team, who then spent months playing with cool tech and failed to launch. They were months late by the time I left.
hangonhn 7y ago
"That said, my godawful company man manager would repeatedly proclaim how " I've never worked at Google but am friends with many Googlers. Someone I know was one of these awful company man manager who worked there would just keep defending G+ with these awful spoon fed comments. I stopped bothering trying to say anything about it since it became obvious that the group think has set. He's doing great at Google these days from what I can tell from his LinkedIn profile. I guess the culture has really changed if those are the Googlers who get promoted.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  It's not surprising the biggest innovations comes from people who leave Google instead of coming from the ones who stay there.
- woah 7y ago
  I have people on facebook who work at Tesla, and “spoonfed” is a great description for some on their arguments about autopilot etc
Eug894 7y ago
Isn't it funny that people still don't use a messenger with decent filters, which assess personal ratings of posters to show you more relevant results first? Even Discourse doesn't have personal blacklists. Though its search is more advanced than Reddit's. Isn't that strange in 2019?
stcredzero 7y ago
Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time. I think the road to the Google we see today started then. It's also the year they paid too much for Motorola and started pushing Marissa Mayer out the door. Something about this rings true. it was really disappointing to see a potential Facebook killer die of a thousand papercuts like this. From my POV, the Google+ launch was doomed by the way it was foisted on Google users. Because of that, my feelings of cynicism towards the product started in less than a second.
- nashashmi 7y ago
  Plus one. For everything you said. I hated Google plus for how open they forced everyone on it to be. VS Facebook was private in its beginning. I hated Google plus because they forced all of their services to begin to rely on it. They forced various logins to use it. I have stopped using play store comments and YouTube for this very reason. Had they split Google plus into parts where people adopted it slowly they would have fared better. Parts like friend network-1, forum network-2, news network-3, share page-4, posts page-5, etc. I still remember when they replaced Facebook and Twitter search results with GOOGLE plus results. And the bonuses part is why this makes so much sense about why they did it.
- Balgair 7y ago
  Tahrir Square in 2011 was the high water mark for a lot of tech. It was the time when we all thought that SV really really was going to change the world for the better this time, no for real reals. After the Arab spring turned into winter, a lot of the air went out of the tech balloon. It never was really the same. Cynicism crept in along with the MBAs and the Generals.
zippergz 7y ago
I hate responding to anecdata with anecdata, but my experience is that Real Names was a HUGE DEAL in a very small and specific sector of the internet (some of which has clear overlap with HN), and an absolute non-story in the rest of the world. I worked at G at that time also, and while I agree that Real Names was a dumb decision, at the time I did not see any direct impact on interest or engagement from my friends because of it, aside from the small pocket who we truly incensed. While the incensed group was extremely loud, they were also a tiny, tiny minority, and I don't think we should mistake their volume level as an indicator of quantity.
- damnyou 7y ago
  What about as an indicator of impact?
- phicoh 7y ago
  G+ sometimes resembles the way Mozilla develops Firefox: Lots of aspects make just a small group unhappy. However, taken together all of those unhappy groups mean that you have no early adopters left and the project fails to get traction.
- Marazan 7y ago
  Realnames stopped influencers who didn't use their Realnames from signing up. If you didn't have contact with either marginalised groups who as a matter of survival didn't use their real name or ancient extremely online people who for the entirety of their internet experience had been known as a handle it wouldn't have crossed your radar. But it was a huge thing.
  - cannonedhamster 7y ago
    The irony here is that no one in this comment chain is using their real name, which proves the point that there are indeed chilling effects on speech when you could be punished for a simple difference of opinion. Real names is what made me drop g+. If I want to publish something as me, I don't want another platform controlling that for me. I absolutely concur with your comment that for the people this was big for, it was huge. For the rest of the population there was no compelling reason to switch.
AJ007 7y ago
Thanks for the insight on this from an internal point of view. I've been trying to figure out how Google transitioned from being viewed as having the moral high ground over most other public companies, tech and otherwise, to the sad state it is in today. Based on everything I've read to this point, my best guess has been dysfunctional management. What you describe sounds like basic blunders rather than any sort of mistake due to complexity or bad luck.
- s09dfhks 7y ago
  Too many MBAs in management who've been told they're world changers because of where their degree is from.
ggggtez 7y ago
> the biggest problem was getting their own super-healthy cafeteria That's a really bizarre position to take. Every other thing you mentioned sounds a lot more impactful than that.
- ska 7y ago
  Psychology. When companies make moves to mark groups and projects as different in some way, it's not really that important what the mechanism is. It could be something objectively cheap and superficial, but still end up being a critical factor in moral and dynamics.
pier25 7y ago
I think the worst problem was the terrible UI. For example I remember how odd the two column layout looked. I'm not sure anyone has studied this, but it seemed obvious to me from the first day it was a huge mistake. It seems like a small thing but I think there is a reason everyone (Facebook, Twitter, etc) is using a single narrow column to feed content to the scrolling user. My hypothesis is that it takes less cognitive effort to parse.
- knorker 7y ago
  It was obvious. Vic even promised "oh just you wait, we have great plans for that space", followed by years of nothing. But surely vicg wouldn't tell a lie?!
khazhou 7y ago
This reminds me of Wave. Wave team's isolationism didn't cause them to fail, but no one was inclined to help them when they struggled. But these are symptoms. The Dark Tower was because of Vic, no? Maybe Bradley too, but mostly Vic. Vic was a virus against which Google had no immunity. "Do it my way or your career is over". Well, his direction sucked, and that's what you get when you give full trust and power to the wrong individual.
- hunter23 7y ago
  Yea but the root problem lies in Larry's management. Larry gave Vic pure dictatorial powers for Google+ without holding him accountable for real results. They gave him way too much budget, control, engineers, etc. And they waited way way way too long before kicking him out when things weren't working. The engineering headcount was ridiculous for Google+. It was also ridiculous to have OKRs for every team at Google to integrate with Google+. Facebook (or really any company) didn't start with Mark Zuckerberg hiring a 1000 engineers and start cranking. If a VC cut him a check for $500 million after his MVP Facebook would probably be a failure. Instead he built the MVP with a few engineers and increased headcount as he increased the user base and shifted vision. Google had this mistaken notion that they could just throw more engineers at the problem and skip the whole product discovery process.
- zootam 7y ago
  what is this 'Dark Tower' that is being mentioned?
  - khazhou 7y ago
    One of the Googleplex buildings was dedicated to G+, and only G+ team was allowed entry, etc. Very different than the rest of Google at the time, which was a proudly-open culture.
johnnycab 7y ago
>Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time. I think the road to the Google we see today started then. Thanks for providing a great insight. I kept away from Google+ due to it's initial aggressiveness of opting in and linking it across other services. There was already a growing disillusionment around investing time and effort into various concepts, which ended up getting culled[1]. It was Google Reader, which made me realise not to take any Google service for granted or rely on them long-term and only use them in a disposable format. [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tracker1 7y ago
  Reader was the shot that killed any trust in Google's service for me as well... Today it's mostly my gmail account that is mostly bulk mail, fallback search when ddg fails me, and maps on my phone. And even the gmail I've been contemplating how to best get away from it.
alextp 7y ago
How is brain separate from the rest of google?
nradov 7y ago
The classic business management book The Innovator's Dilemma specifically recommends moving groups working on potentially disruptive new products into separate facilities. That helps them avoid distractions and makes it harder for "corporate antibodies" to kill the new initiative. Most people think that the IBM PC project succeeded in creating a microcomputer that disrupted the mainframe and minicomputer markets at least partly because they had a separate office in Boca Raton instead of at HQ in Armonk. http://claytonchristensen.com/books/the-innovators-dilemma/ http://claytonchristensen.com/books/the-innovators-dilemma/ Of course having a separate facility doesn't guarantee success, and can certainly cause other problems if poorly managed.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  The classic of this is the Lockheed Skunkworks. It's success has never been repeated - lots of companies try to create a skunkworks clone, but try to fix it, and wind up thereby breaking it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  Google+ would never be disruptive to Google. It is in a completely different market from anything else, it wouldn't have to destroy any other Google project to succeed.
EdiX 7y ago
> Kennedy Glad to finally know that cancer actually has a name. Kennedy made me stop using Google Reader and the GMail web UI.
mavelikara 7y ago
I had to look up what the "Kennedy" initiative was. It was redesign of all Google products to get a unified look [1]. The lead designer, Jon Wiley, named it Kennedy as a reference to Larry Page's Moonshot Strategy [2]. [3] compares the redesign mockups (in blue) against how the products looked before. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-how-larry-page-engineered-beautiful-revolution https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-h... [2]: https://www.wired.com/2013/01/ff-qa-larry-page/ https://www.wired.com/2013/01/ff-qa-larry-page/ [3]: https://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2058367/googleredesign_1020.jpg https://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2058367/googleredesign_10...
- Izkata 7y ago
  On 3, are you sure? The blue-shaded image search results is what it looked like a long time ago.
  - mavelikara 7y ago
    Kennedy Initiative was done in 2013.
    - Izkata 7y ago
      I'm thinking back while I was in college, which would've been before 2010...
gerash 7y ago
Here is my version of a post mortem: Google plus interface was modern but clunky at the time. It was a Facebook clone with just a cleaner implementation. The RealName policy wasn't as big of a deal as a loud group make it out to be. The circles, though sounds good on paper, wasn't enough of a differentiator. Maintaining them takes time and is work which only a few do. Finally, internal politics perhaps also stopped the team from iterating fast enough to the feedback.
- nojvek 7y ago
  Well Facebook got circles like functionality in no time. They knew the relationships, cities, schools, jobs. Basically Facebook got to be Google+ parity faster than other way around. Same thing with Snapchat. Instagram and WhatsApp replicated more of Snapchat than the other way around. Insta won. WhatsApp won. They are growing even though main FB.com is stagnant.

Nican 7y ago

The "Kennedy" comment really made me giggle. I have some dislike for some trends of applications addining great amounts of white space. I have to agree that the interface, and the "Real Names" requirements were the two biggest hurdles for me to even to start to like Google+. I really liked the concept of circles, but whenever I did get around to using the social network, it never felt as social and engaging as Twitter. Even when I did find an intersting discussion, it was hard to keep track of replies. Reddit/HNews/Twitter have a tree-like structure for the comments, but Google+ was mostly flat, and hard to keep track of any debate. I would lose interest on Google+ as soon as I tried to read a comment thread, and close the application altogether.

waqf 7y ago
If only Google could invent a discussion site with rich text and threaded discussions … they could call it "Google Wave" …
- stallmanite 7y ago
  Or even https://groups.google.com https://groups.google.com
- curtis3389 7y ago
  Or Google Buzz

kryogen1c 7y ago

> From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone I work in an IT MSP where we do business with lots of small-medium companies, and i am astounded at how much the leadership sets the culture for the company. A sarcastic and passive aggressive CEO will have a company of rude employees. An outgoing confident type A person will work with friendly extroverts. Separating a team like this guarantees a different culture than the rest of Google, and imherent resentment between the two.

koonsolo 7y ago
> how much the leadership sets the culture for the company. Over the years this is exactly what I experienced. And even if there are a bunch of employees and middle managers that are pushing for a different culture, for the benefit of the company (this can happen in a fast growing company where things haven't settled down yet), it is an uphill battle for those people, and they will eventually leave.

znpy 7y ago

> I was an IC6 at Google IC6 meaning... ?

maybecorrect 7y ago
I think it means Individual Contributor (level) 6 - which is described as "Staff SWE" by https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engi...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bduerst 7y ago
Job level. At Google the different job roles are separated into ladders, with the number representing the how high you've climbed. IC6 isn't director level but it's far from entry-level. Invoking their job level like this at the opening of their comment is an appeal to authority. Edit: This comment is being misunderstood. Not saying it's a fallacy - appealing to authority is not always illogical.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  A tangent, but a true "appeal to authority" would be using the fact that someone is an expert on a subject as the evidence for the assertions. I don't think merely mentioning that you or your source is an expert of a subject is necessarily an appeal to authority falacy. In this case they provide their opinion and then provide the reasons and evidence for their reasoning.
- horsawlarway 7y ago
  I don't see it as an appeal to authority but rather as context. There's quite a bit of context shift as you go up the ladder within an organization. The reason "why" something happened often looks very different from different perspectives.
- ultraluminous 7y ago
  The GP is providing their personal insider view regarding what they perceived as mismanagement of G+, and is starting of with describing the vantage the had at the time. There are many (many) instances of appeal-to-authority on HN, but this is just plain `ol context. Apologies if I read too much into your comment, but Appeal to Authority is a name of a logical fallacy and ascribes some sort of intellectual failure to the poster, when there's clearly none.

unreal37 7y ago

Blaming the failure of Google+ on "they had their own cafeteria that we weren't allowed to go to" and "they got bonuses we didn't get" seems really really inside baseball. Shows the problems inside Google, yes. But that's not why it never really took off.

jfarmer 7y ago
I took `oneshot908 as saying that the Google+ team had a broadly isolationist attitude. Their distance from both co-workers / potential internal contributors and customers/users was a reflection of this and that trickled down into poor product decisions.
- iamnotacrook 7y ago
  I doubt it. There's just no connection between them at all. Think about all the bad things you read about Amazon - how Bozo treats people, how employees are treated, especially the warehouse staff, plus a website the HTML hairdressers love to hate on. It's still the first choice for retail and cloud services for millions of people around the world. Separate cafeteria! I love Hacker News!
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    If the full story is death by a thousand cuts, do you want a thousand-paragraph comment?
- oneshot908 7y ago
  Yes, you got it. I made up the "Dark Tower" remark because they sat the Google+ team on the top floor of the only semi-highrise on the main Mountain View campus. This separated them both literally and figuratively from the rest of the Googlers and in 2011, that was just not "googly." And yes, this was a Vic Gundotra move. I love a good skunkworks project. But Google+ needed Google to succeed. Apparently Vic felt otherwise and the rest is history, no?
pjc50 7y ago
I worked at a place that did this - separate team for the new project with their own eating area - and the amount of goodwill it blew was amazing. People who'd worked together for years became resentful of each other. It created a "we know best" attitude in the new team, who then spent months playing with cool tech and failed to launch. They were months late by the time I left.

hangonhn 7y ago

"That said, my godawful company man manager would repeatedly proclaim how " I've never worked at Google but am friends with many Googlers. Someone I know was one of these awful company man manager who worked there would just keep defending G+ with these awful spoon fed comments. I stopped bothering trying to say anything about it since it became obvious that the group think has set. He's doing great at Google these days from what I can tell from his LinkedIn profile. I guess the culture has really changed if those are the Googlers who get promoted.

raverbashing 7y ago
It's not surprising the biggest innovations comes from people who leave Google instead of coming from the ones who stay there.
woah 7y ago
I have people on facebook who work at Tesla, and “spoonfed” is a great description for some on their arguments about autopilot etc

Eug894 7y ago

Isn't it funny that people still don't use a messenger with decent filters, which assess personal ratings of posters to show you more relevant results first? Even Discourse doesn't have personal blacklists. Though its search is more advanced than Reddit's. Isn't that strange in 2019?

stcredzero 7y ago

Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time. I think the road to the Google we see today started then. It's also the year they paid too much for Motorola and started pushing Marissa Mayer out the door. Something about this rings true. it was really disappointing to see a potential Facebook killer die of a thousand papercuts like this. From my POV, the Google+ launch was doomed by the way it was foisted on Google users. Because of that, my feelings of cynicism towards the product started in less than a second.

nashashmi 7y ago
Plus one. For everything you said. I hated Google plus for how open they forced everyone on it to be. VS Facebook was private in its beginning. I hated Google plus because they forced all of their services to begin to rely on it. They forced various logins to use it. I have stopped using play store comments and YouTube for this very reason. Had they split Google plus into parts where people adopted it slowly they would have fared better. Parts like friend network-1, forum network-2, news network-3, share page-4, posts page-5, etc. I still remember when they replaced Facebook and Twitter search results with GOOGLE plus results. And the bonuses part is why this makes so much sense about why they did it.
Balgair 7y ago
Tahrir Square in 2011 was the high water mark for a lot of tech. It was the time when we all thought that SV really really was going to change the world for the better this time, no for real reals. After the Arab spring turned into winter, a lot of the air went out of the tech balloon. It never was really the same. Cynicism crept in along with the MBAs and the Generals.

zippergz 7y ago

I hate responding to anecdata with anecdata, but my experience is that Real Names was a HUGE DEAL in a very small and specific sector of the internet (some of which has clear overlap with HN), and an absolute non-story in the rest of the world. I worked at G at that time also, and while I agree that Real Names was a dumb decision, at the time I did not see any direct impact on interest or engagement from my friends because of it, aside from the small pocket who we truly incensed. While the incensed group was extremely loud, they were also a tiny, tiny minority, and I don't think we should mistake their volume level as an indicator of quantity.

damnyou 7y ago
What about as an indicator of impact?
phicoh 7y ago
G+ sometimes resembles the way Mozilla develops Firefox: Lots of aspects make just a small group unhappy. However, taken together all of those unhappy groups mean that you have no early adopters left and the project fails to get traction.
Marazan 7y ago
Realnames stopped influencers who didn't use their Realnames from signing up. If you didn't have contact with either marginalised groups who as a matter of survival didn't use their real name or ancient extremely online people who for the entirety of their internet experience had been known as a handle it wouldn't have crossed your radar. But it was a huge thing.
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  The irony here is that no one in this comment chain is using their real name, which proves the point that there are indeed chilling effects on speech when you could be punished for a simple difference of opinion. Real names is what made me drop g+. If I want to publish something as me, I don't want another platform controlling that for me. I absolutely concur with your comment that for the people this was big for, it was huge. For the rest of the population there was no compelling reason to switch.

AJ007 7y ago

Thanks for the insight on this from an internal point of view. I've been trying to figure out how Google transitioned from being viewed as having the moral high ground over most other public companies, tech and otherwise, to the sad state it is in today. Based on everything I've read to this point, my best guess has been dysfunctional management. What you describe sounds like basic blunders rather than any sort of mistake due to complexity or bad luck.

s09dfhks 7y ago
Too many MBAs in management who've been told they're world changers because of where their degree is from.

ggggtez 7y ago

> the biggest problem was getting their own super-healthy cafeteria That's a really bizarre position to take. Every other thing you mentioned sounds a lot more impactful than that.

ska 7y ago
Psychology. When companies make moves to mark groups and projects as different in some way, it's not really that important what the mechanism is. It could be something objectively cheap and superficial, but still end up being a critical factor in moral and dynamics.

pier25 7y ago

I think the worst problem was the terrible UI. For example I remember how odd the two column layout looked. I'm not sure anyone has studied this, but it seemed obvious to me from the first day it was a huge mistake. It seems like a small thing but I think there is a reason everyone (Facebook, Twitter, etc) is using a single narrow column to feed content to the scrolling user. My hypothesis is that it takes less cognitive effort to parse.

knorker 7y ago
It was obvious. Vic even promised "oh just you wait, we have great plans for that space", followed by years of nothing. But surely vicg wouldn't tell a lie?!

khazhou 7y ago

This reminds me of Wave. Wave team's isolationism didn't cause them to fail, but no one was inclined to help them when they struggled. But these are symptoms. The Dark Tower was because of Vic, no? Maybe Bradley too, but mostly Vic. Vic was a virus against which Google had no immunity. "Do it my way or your career is over". Well, his direction sucked, and that's what you get when you give full trust and power to the wrong individual.

hunter23 7y ago
Yea but the root problem lies in Larry's management. Larry gave Vic pure dictatorial powers for Google+ without holding him accountable for real results. They gave him way too much budget, control, engineers, etc. And they waited way way way too long before kicking him out when things weren't working. The engineering headcount was ridiculous for Google+. It was also ridiculous to have OKRs for every team at Google to integrate with Google+. Facebook (or really any company) didn't start with Mark Zuckerberg hiring a 1000 engineers and start cranking. If a VC cut him a check for $500 million after his MVP Facebook would probably be a failure. Instead he built the MVP with a few engineers and increased headcount as he increased the user base and shifted vision. Google had this mistaken notion that they could just throw more engineers at the problem and skip the whole product discovery process.
zootam 7y ago
what is this 'Dark Tower' that is being mentioned?
- khazhou 7y ago
  One of the Googleplex buildings was dedicated to G+, and only G+ team was allowed entry, etc. Very different than the rest of Google at the time, which was a proudly-open culture.

johnnycab 7y ago

>Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time. I think the road to the Google we see today started then. Thanks for providing a great insight. I kept away from Google+ due to it's initial aggressiveness of opting in and linking it across other services. There was already a growing disillusionment around investing time and effort into various concepts, which ended up getting culled[1]. It was Google Reader, which made me realise not to take any Google service for granted or rely on them long-term and only use them in a disposable format. [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

deleted 7y ago
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tracker1 7y ago
Reader was the shot that killed any trust in Google's service for me as well... Today it's mostly my gmail account that is mostly bulk mail, fallback search when ddg fails me, and maps on my phone. And even the gmail I've been contemplating how to best get away from it.

alextp 7y ago

How is brain separate from the rest of google?

nradov 7y ago

The classic business management book The Innovator's Dilemma specifically recommends moving groups working on potentially disruptive new products into separate facilities. That helps them avoid distractions and makes it harder for "corporate antibodies" to kill the new initiative. Most people think that the IBM PC project succeeded in creating a microcomputer that disrupted the mainframe and minicomputer markets at least partly because they had a separate office in Boca Raton instead of at HQ in Armonk. http://claytonchristensen.com/books/the-innovators-dilemma/ http://claytonchristensen.com/books/the-innovators-dilemma/ Of course having a separate facility doesn't guarantee success, and can certainly cause other problems if poorly managed.

WalterBright 7y ago
The classic of this is the Lockheed Skunkworks. It's success has never been repeated - lots of companies try to create a skunkworks clone, but try to fix it, and wind up thereby breaking it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works
marcosdumay 7y ago
Google+ would never be disruptive to Google. It is in a completely different market from anything else, it wouldn't have to destroy any other Google project to succeed.

EdiX 7y ago

> Kennedy Glad to finally know that cancer actually has a name. Kennedy made me stop using Google Reader and the GMail web UI.

mavelikara 7y ago

I had to look up what the "Kennedy" initiative was. It was redesign of all Google products to get a unified look [1]. The lead designer, Jon Wiley, named it Kennedy as a reference to Larry Page's Moonshot Strategy [2]. [3] compares the redesign mockups (in blue) against how the products looked before. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-how-larry-page-engineered-beautiful-revolution https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-h... [2]: https://www.wired.com/2013/01/ff-qa-larry-page/ https://www.wired.com/2013/01/ff-qa-larry-page/ [3]: https://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2058367/googleredesign_1020.jpg https://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2058367/googleredesign_10...

Izkata 7y ago
On 3, are you sure? The blue-shaded image search results is what it looked like a long time ago.
- mavelikara 7y ago
  Kennedy Initiative was done in 2013.
  - Izkata 7y ago
    I'm thinking back while I was in college, which would've been before 2010...

gerash 7y ago

Here is my version of a post mortem: Google plus interface was modern but clunky at the time. It was a Facebook clone with just a cleaner implementation. The RealName policy wasn't as big of a deal as a loud group make it out to be. The circles, though sounds good on paper, wasn't enough of a differentiator. Maintaining them takes time and is work which only a few do. Finally, internal politics perhaps also stopped the team from iterating fast enough to the feedback.

nojvek 7y ago
Well Facebook got circles like functionality in no time. They knew the relationships, cities, schools, jobs. Basically Facebook got to be Google+ parity faster than other way around. Same thing with Snapchat. Instagram and WhatsApp replicated more of Snapchat than the other way around. Insta won. WhatsApp won. They are growing even though main FB.com is stagnant.