341–350 of 375 posts
They were concerned about driving metrics, and only tangentially building a product.
As if you could shove a half baked social product down on enough peoples throat by inorganic means, then hope that the network effect will do most of the work for you.
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 cul…
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-h...
[2]: https://www.wired.com/2013/01/ff-qa-larry-page/
[3]: https://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2058367/googleredesign_10...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s “don’t be evil”, not “do no evil”. There’s a subtle but important difference.
Really? How does one distinguish being from doing in that sense? Scoring actions on an evilness scale and taking an average?
I think what they should have done is add functionality into Chrome that would allow and encourage you to automatically import all the data in your Facebook account into Google+ and then post to both accounts. At the time, Google had much more goodwill than today and there's a chance people would have used it just so they could use Google instead of Facebook.
Trying to use your dominance in one space (search, or browsers, say) to actively steal data from a competitor (scrape Facebook!) with the intention to destroy that competitor is something lawyers have wet dreams about. I mean, Facebook would have destroyed them in court.
Too late to the party and no compelling reason to switch for normal people.
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 cul…
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…
I think a lot of it came down to their "invite-only" launch. I remember a lot of my friends were excited to try it. Some of us were able to get invites, some weren't. Eventually the people who couldn't get on right away just said "screw it" and went back to Facebook. The rest of us followed because that's where we could interact with everyone and not just the people who happened to get on Google+. By the time it open…
The main reason Google launches popular products by invitation only is to manage server load. Otherwise you get situations like the Pokemon Go launch, where the service was unreliable for the first few months.
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 cul…
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 l…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
what is this 'Dark Tower' that is being mentioned?
Nah dawg, Google+ failed because it didn't try to do any of the things that people who desired a different kind of social space might have wanted but couldn't get on Facebook at the time, perhaps things like anonymous accounts, private groups that didn't transitively leak information, or a space for collaboration on Google Docs. In other words, it made zero innovation over the incumbent, except for "circles", which w…
