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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 hel

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. :)

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. :)