5 ms·

Probably because the last product they put full commitment into was Google Plus.

by mckeed 6y ago

ruined 6y ago
no they didn't. google plus was half-assed, underhanded, and self-destructive. profiles were automatically created if you had another google profile, pissing everyone off. they provided essentially no feature advantage over other social networks, which means they had no weapon to fight against network effect. they enforced a real name policy even as facebook became notorious for doing the same. they aggressively banned business accounts, with obvious results. google hasn’t done anything in earnest since gmail. youtube doesn’t count, that’s an acquisition.
- zestyping 6y ago
  I was there. I'd say they did fully commit, and that included committing other teams by force. Everything was going to be integrated with Google Plus come hell or high water. Unfortunately, the evident intensity of their commitment did not correlate with the wisdom of their decisions. Perhaps it was inversely correlated, because boy were there a lot of terrible decisions in that product.
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    Can you tell us any more about what happened?
  - exikyut 6y ago
    A few random very curious and potentially-rhetorical questions: - what was the situation around the shutdown? Was the whole thing knowingly on life support and just waiting for the right excuse, or...? - was the shutdown effectively coincidental, in the sense of "ok everyone's making a scene about $random_thing, kill it" (where $random_thing just happened to be what the internet interpreted as a data leak) - did the data get purged from the very last backup, or does it still get used to finetune improve AI models etc? - does G+ still exist in its original form anymore? Trying to visit https://plus.google.com/apps/activities https://plus.google.com/apps/activities still works, but only in the form of Google Currents, and visiting via an old Google Apps (yep :D) account that's somehow still eking along (for how long???) also works, but that's Currents too. It looks/feels just about identical to G+ though (https://imgur.com/a/rqvF03t https://imgur.com/a/rqvF03t). Is it being used for education or something?
    - thu2111 6y ago
      I was also there. G+ was born into an environment of fear. Google leadership had convinced themselves that Facebook would dominate tech forever in every product area because all you had to do to make something successful was make it social, and boom, it won. They were over-generalising from Facebook's success in photo hosting vs Picasa, as well as a few other products. The big fear was that Facebook would do email and it'd not be as good as Gmail but everyone would use it because it was social, that Facebook could even do maps or web search, same thing. So G+ became seen as a "save the company" hail mary move. After some years passed Facebook rapidly reached middle age, their attempt at email sort of flopped, they didn't launch dozens of new products and the ones they did launch didn't replicate their earlier success, and the fear ebbed away. Meanwhile the G+ product managers (mostly Vic Gundotra) had burned a lot of bridges by forcing G+ into everything. Whilst Larry/Sergey/Eric were afraid of Facebook he had absolute power because they felt only G+ could save the firm. When it became clear that was an over-reaction he lost his protection and was out.
      - exikyut 6y ago
        Thanks for this insight and retrospective. It pretty much answers the questions that I didn't know how to articulate, behind the questions I actually asked. :)
- eitland 6y ago
  > no they didn't. google plus was half-assed, underhanded, and self-destructive. Google+ the social network was surprisingly nice to use especially towards the end. > profiles were automatically created if you had another google profile, pissing everyone off. Yep, that was part of the commitment. They were fully committed and did it even how many people the annoyed along the way. > they provided essentially no feature advantage over other social networks, Towards the end it had a lot of advantages like one login account but still true pseudonymity wrt to other users as well as at least one advantage towards each other network. Of course by then they'd made everyone angry and made everyone here shun them > which means they had no weapon to fight against network effect. Probably more what I wrote above IMO. Mixing the brilliant Google+ social network with the despised Google+ identity solution wasn't the most brilliant thing they did. Of course hindsight is 20/20 but still. > they enforced a real name policy even as facebook became notorious for doing the same. Yep. And when they finally created the best solution the web have seen so far it was too late. > they aggressively banned business accounts, with obvious results. Can't remember it but wouldn't surprise me at all.
  - CaptainZapp 6y ago
    > Towards the end it had a lot of advantages like one login account but still true pseudonymity How is that compatible with their enforced (and disastrous) real name policy?
    - mulmen 6y ago
      Privacy from other users, not privacy from big G. I don’t recall the specifics but I remember the whole thing being very confusing as a user. It was definitely when I started losing trust in Google because there was never a clear benefit to me as a user.
      - CaptainZapp 6y ago
        Thanks for the clarification.
      - eitland 6y ago
- TheKarateKid 6y ago
  Actually, G+ was full force UNTIL there was an agreement for Google to back off in exchange for Facebook not competing with certain ads products. All the dirty laundry is coming out in the antitrust suits.
  - h0l0cube 6y ago
    Is there a source you can point to, or is it hearsay?
    - catmanjan 6y ago
      I want to know this too, I'd love it to be true, very Hollywood
    - TheKarateKid 6y ago
      From the NYT article [1]: >Facebook was going to compete with Google for some advertising sales but backed away from the plan after the companies cut a preferential deal, according to court documents. >Facebook executives outlined the company’s options to Mark Zuckerberg...: hire hundreds more engineers and spend billions of dollars to compete against Google; exit the business; or do the deal. It's one of many things FB and G did together. Even more are listed in the antitrust lawsuit against Google. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/technology/google-facebook-ad-deal-antitrust.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/technology/google-faceboo...
      - h0l0cube 6y ago
        It's not exactly what you were implying. The article seems to be talking purely about the ad auctions. That G+ was a bargaining chip might be a tantalizing speculation, but still speculation.
- jasonkester 6y ago
  Ugh. Google Plus. My phone contacts are still screwed up because I made the catastrophic blunder of joining a public “circle”, and google decided that everybody in it must be my best friend so it imported them into my address book. So even today, I’ll try to send a message to an actual friend and it’ll give me the drop down of sixteen Mike’s to choose from. 15 I’ve never heard of (thought their names are getting familiar over the years) or interacted with and somewhere randomly in the middle is the one I’ve sent hundreds of messages to over the years.
h0l0cube 6y ago
Well now I'm curious to know how Glass is doing.
- brutus1213 6y ago
  Spent 2K on Glass when it came out. Horribly pissed at Google to this day. I thought I knew what I was getting except they literally turned features off after I got it (e.g. video hangouts). Their rational was dumbass that it drained too much battery .. the fix .. turn off the feature. Seriously?? They did not open up the SDK fully after they stopped dev/pivoted to enterprise .. maybe if some form of this tech takes off one day, I can sell it as a collector's item.
- rnotaro 6y ago
  Not so bad actually. Glass for business is a thing.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    It's a thing, but it's barely a product (i.e. a market).

Probably because the last product they put full commitment into was Google Plus.

by mckeed 6y ago

Probably because the last product they put full commitment into was Google Plus.

no they didn't. google plus was half-assed, underhanded, and self-destructive. profiles were automatically created if you had another google profile, pissing everyone off. they provided essentially no feature advantage over other social networks, which means they had no weapon to fight against network effect. they enforced a real name policy even as facebook became notorious for doing the same. they aggressively banned business accounts, with obvious results. google hasn’t done anything in earnest since gmail. youtube doesn’t count, that’s an acquisition.

zestyping 6y ago
I was there. I'd say they did fully commit, and that included committing other teams by force. Everything was going to be integrated with Google Plus come hell or high water. Unfortunately, the evident intensity of their commitment did not correlate with the wisdom of their decisions. Perhaps it was inversely correlated, because boy were there a lot of terrible decisions in that product.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  Can you tell us any more about what happened?
- exikyut 6y ago
  A few random very curious and potentially-rhetorical questions: - what was the situation around the shutdown? Was the whole thing knowingly on life support and just waiting for the right excuse, or...? - was the shutdown effectively coincidental, in the sense of "ok everyone's making a scene about $random_thing, kill it" (where $random_thing just happened to be what the internet interpreted as a data leak) - did the data get purged from the very last backup, or does it still get used to finetune improve AI models etc? - does G+ still exist in its original form anymore? Trying to visit https://plus.google.com/apps/activities https://plus.google.com/apps/activities still works, but only in the form of Google Currents, and visiting via an old Google Apps (yep :D) account that's somehow still eking along (for how long???) also works, but that's Currents too. It looks/feels just about identical to G+ though (https://imgur.com/a/rqvF03t https://imgur.com/a/rqvF03t). Is it being used for education or something?
  - thu2111 6y ago
    I was also there. G+ was born into an environment of fear. Google leadership had convinced themselves that Facebook would dominate tech forever in every product area because all you had to do to make something successful was make it social, and boom, it won. They were over-generalising from Facebook's success in photo hosting vs Picasa, as well as a few other products. The big fear was that Facebook would do email and it'd not be as good as Gmail but everyone would use it because it was social, that Facebook could even do maps or web search, same thing. So G+ became seen as a "save the company" hail mary move. After some years passed Facebook rapidly reached middle age, their attempt at email sort of flopped, they didn't launch dozens of new products and the ones they did launch didn't replicate their earlier success, and the fear ebbed away. Meanwhile the G+ product managers (mostly Vic Gundotra) had burned a lot of bridges by forcing G+ into everything. Whilst Larry/Sergey/Eric were afraid of Facebook he had absolute power because they felt only G+ could save the firm. When it became clear that was an over-reaction he lost his protection and was out.
    - exikyut 6y ago
      Thanks for this insight and retrospective. It pretty much answers the questions that I didn't know how to articulate, behind the questions I actually asked. :)
eitland 6y ago
> no they didn't. google plus was half-assed, underhanded, and self-destructive. Google+ the social network was surprisingly nice to use especially towards the end. > profiles were automatically created if you had another google profile, pissing everyone off. Yep, that was part of the commitment. They were fully committed and did it even how many people the annoyed along the way. > they provided essentially no feature advantage over other social networks, Towards the end it had a lot of advantages like one login account but still true pseudonymity wrt to other users as well as at least one advantage towards each other network. Of course by then they'd made everyone angry and made everyone here shun them > which means they had no weapon to fight against network effect. Probably more what I wrote above IMO. Mixing the brilliant Google+ social network with the despised Google+ identity solution wasn't the most brilliant thing they did. Of course hindsight is 20/20 but still. > they enforced a real name policy even as facebook became notorious for doing the same. Yep. And when they finally created the best solution the web have seen so far it was too late. > they aggressively banned business accounts, with obvious results. Can't remember it but wouldn't surprise me at all.
- CaptainZapp 6y ago
  > Towards the end it had a lot of advantages like one login account but still true pseudonymity How is that compatible with their enforced (and disastrous) real name policy?
  - mulmen 6y ago
    Privacy from other users, not privacy from big G. I don’t recall the specifics but I remember the whole thing being very confusing as a user. It was definitely when I started losing trust in Google because there was never a clear benefit to me as a user.
    - CaptainZapp 6y ago
      Thanks for the clarification.
    - eitland 6y ago
TheKarateKid 6y ago
Actually, G+ was full force UNTIL there was an agreement for Google to back off in exchange for Facebook not competing with certain ads products. All the dirty laundry is coming out in the antitrust suits.
- h0l0cube 6y ago
  Is there a source you can point to, or is it hearsay?
  - catmanjan 6y ago
    I want to know this too, I'd love it to be true, very Hollywood
  - TheKarateKid 6y ago
    From the NYT article [1]: >Facebook was going to compete with Google for some advertising sales but backed away from the plan after the companies cut a preferential deal, according to court documents. >Facebook executives outlined the company’s options to Mark Zuckerberg...: hire hundreds more engineers and spend billions of dollars to compete against Google; exit the business; or do the deal. It's one of many things FB and G did together. Even more are listed in the antitrust lawsuit against Google. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/technology/google-facebook-ad-deal-antitrust.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/technology/google-faceboo...
    - h0l0cube 6y ago
      It's not exactly what you were implying. The article seems to be talking purely about the ad auctions. That G+ was a bargaining chip might be a tantalizing speculation, but still speculation.
jasonkester 6y ago
Ugh. Google Plus. My phone contacts are still screwed up because I made the catastrophic blunder of joining a public “circle”, and google decided that everybody in it must be my best friend so it imported them into my address book. So even today, I’ll try to send a message to an actual friend and it’ll give me the drop down of sixteen Mike’s to choose from. 15 I’ve never heard of (thought their names are getting familiar over the years) or interacted with and somewhere randomly in the middle is the one I’ve sent hundreds of messages to over the years.

h0l0cube 6y ago

Well now I'm curious to know how Glass is doing.

brutus1213 6y ago
Spent 2K on Glass when it came out. Horribly pissed at Google to this day. I thought I knew what I was getting except they literally turned features off after I got it (e.g. video hangouts). Their rational was dumbass that it drained too much battery .. the fix .. turn off the feature. Seriously?? They did not open up the SDK fully after they stopped dev/pivoted to enterprise .. maybe if some form of this tech takes off one day, I can sell it as a collector's item.
rnotaro 6y ago
Not so bad actually. Glass for business is a thing.
- coldtea 6y ago
  It's a thing, but it's barely a product (i.e. a market).