The Great Google Goat Rodeo

It would take Samsung forever to start up a factory to make a new kind of washing machine, for example. If the new washing machines don't sell, Samsung could discontinue the product line without pissing off very many customers because all of the washing machines they already sold would continue working.

Google has the opposite problem where it's easy to start a new product but discontinuing even a minor product pisses off thousands of people. If they cared about customer happiness and trust, they'd get better at choosing products to release and they'd move more quickly to killing off unsuccessful ones. (Honestly, I'm not sure they care about customers enough to change. They may place more value on flexibility than they do on customer happiness and trust.)

Exactly. Google needs a way to identify and canonicalize people and organizations. I think they've tried various automated and smart techniques to limited success, and it's much easier to say that if you create a profile so that you tell us what your identity is and what your websites are, then we can attribute your work in searches much better. You don't ever have to use G+ the web site after that.

I think that there's a basic misunderstanding of what G+ is, even inside Google, and it's our fault for not making it more clear. Maybe things needed different names.

Google+ is really three main things:

At it's core G+ is an identity service. It knows who you are because you have a profile. Authorship requires this I guess.

Then it's a sharing service. Google needed a way to enable sharing in all it's products.

Finally, it's a web site with a social stream.

It's possible they should have stuck with "Google Profile" for the first part, and then the author might not be so upset that Google needs some information to attribute correctly.

Also, it'd be ideal if there were standards for these things. Google definitely used to go more that route, like Open Social, but those attempts failed against proprietary systems like Facebook. I think things are just moving to fast right now for the slow process of standardization to be competitive. I hope that when certain _features_ of identity, sharing, messaging, etc. standardize again, then new protocols can be standardized around those features. New XMPP extensions, or an entirely new protocol, to support the features of Hangouts would be great for example. A system for securely asserting identity and profile information (not log-ins) in the way that people use Twitter, Facebook and G+ would be wonderful too.

Well no, it's not anti competitive because when a user logs into a service she implicitly expresses interest in it, making it more relevant to her in a search scenario, and since it's personalised that "prominence" is unique to said user.

I believe that as a googler you have an obligation to be somewhat objective when google comes up. Googlers have been accused in the past of coming into discussions about google and downvoting critical comments, and I believe that happened here. There are enough employees at google that it can really affect the ordering of comments in these threads.