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Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

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Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#131

Post by pwang »

guelo wrote: post #113
aasarava wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're definitely not the only one. Trying to understand the interaction between the various Google properties makes me feel like an idiot -- and yet I'm a Web developer with a CS degree who has been using the Web just about every day since 1994. For example, have you ever tried to schedule a Google Hangout chat? As far as I can tell, there's no way to do it from Google Hangouts. You need to first sign in to Google+,…

I feel that Google made better, more usable interfaces before they were taken over by designers. Modern designers are obsessed with removing features because that's the Apple religion. The new Maps is ruined because of this. Larry should fire all their designers and let engineers take over the interfaces again.

I find the new Maps to be so unusably slow, laggy, finnicky, and overall not an improvement over what Google Maps had been for the 4 years before.

And I can't figure out how to show traffic WHILE displaying directions or a location that I searched for. Seems like such a simple, commonly used thing... "Where is this place? What's the traffic outlook for the routes there?" Sigh

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#132

Post by ZoFreX »

bradbeattie wrote: post #103
cookiecaper wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, circles mandate additional cognitive load. They should've been implemented such that each user had 2-3 circles max, like "Work", "Friends", and "Family", and it was almost always invisible (meaning you'd almost always share with all). Prompting the user each time they want to post something and making them choose from their 8-10 circles greatly increases the friction of posting.

That, and the decision is one-sided. Say I want to post something publicly about some new technology. Do I post it publicly and have it go into my family's feeds where it will be considered akin to spam? What if one of my friends actually _is_ interested in new tech but I don't know it? I get that it would be an added layer of indirection, but to allow each user to have multiple subject personas for posting and let o…

I think it would work better one-way if you could separate "visible to" and "posted to". I would like to post to "public" and "techy people", which would mean it appears in the feeds of people I don't have in my circles who have me in theirs, and people I have in my tech circle. It would like it to still be visible to people in my other circles if they went looking for it, but it wouldn't appear in their feeds.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#133

Post by watwut »

wtbob wrote: post #116
npizzolato wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll concede they're a small but loud group of users. I'm not convinced the type of people who will refuse to use a service because of a lack of pseudonyms are necessarily influential. I would attribute Google+'s failures much more to their abysmal launch strategy, which massively restricted otherwise-excited users from ever joining Google+ until it became a barren wasteland.

> I'm not convinced the type of people who will refuse to use a service because of a lack of pseudonyms are necessarily influential. Or worth being influenced by…

Any time you use your real name, real HR or potential employer sees what you did. I do not want my chance to find work be influenced by random HRs opinions on what google play games I rated or which youtube videos I have in playlist. Nothing really controversial there, but people tend to be judgmental about details.

Forcing me to use real name means that I suddenly must be super careful about everything and control everything the same way as I control work. Not worth it.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#134

Post by npizzolato »

mynewwork wrote: post #127
npizzolato wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll concede they're a small but loud group of users. I'm not convinced the type of people who will refuse to use a service because of a lack of pseudonyms are necessarily influential. I would attribute Google+'s failures much more to their abysmal launch strategy, which massively restricted otherwise-excited users from ever joining Google+ until it became a barren wasteland.

But, Google+ showed that they were incredibly influential. The real-name policy was the primary narrative about Google+. Feminist bloggers complained it would expose women to stalkers and abusive ex's. Journalists wrote about the underlying racism of the algorithm assuming Anglo-Saxon naming conventions and highlighted people barred from the service for having names from a different ethnic or cultural background. Tec…

Perhaps I'm misremembering how the Google+ story unfolded, but I wouldn't exactly call feminist bloggers the most influential. They're loud and often make PR waves (the dickwolves incident comes to mind), but I don't think that's what killed Google+ (PA is still going strong). If what the tech community thought was incredibly influential, no one would be using Facebook or Snapchat due to privacy concerns (comments that so-often get brought up on Hacker News).

I'm not saying the real name policy didn't hurt Google+. I'm sure it did, but I think it could have weathered that storm if it wasn't weak in much more important areas like their launch strategy.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#135

Post by rjf1990 »

DannyBee wrote: post #82
rjf1990 wrote: post #28

I don't understand why people have to try and read so much into someone leaving a company. High-ranking execs and employees change jobs all the time for numerous reasons.

They really don't. What you just wrote is like saying "This is nothing out of the unusual. Cows turn themselves inside out all the time" ( http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/149573/inside-out-cows )

They really do. Anybody who's been at a big company sees it all the time. Most don't make news stories because they aren't at a sexy company like Google, leading up a division that's well-known among consumers.

You wouldn't hear about something like the head of fraud detection at American Express leaving his job. I've seen it before (not at Amex, but other large companies).

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#136

Post by watwut »

guelo wrote: post #113
aasarava wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're definitely not the only one. Trying to understand the interaction between the various Google properties makes me feel like an idiot -- and yet I'm a Web developer with a CS degree who has been using the Web just about every day since 1994. For example, have you ever tried to schedule a Google Hangout chat? As far as I can tell, there's no way to do it from Google Hangouts. You need to first sign in to Google+,…

I feel that Google made better, more usable interfaces before they were taken over by designers. Modern designers are obsessed with removing features because that's the Apple religion. The new Maps is ruined because of this. Larry should fire all their designers and let engineers take over the interfaces again.

I agree too. Google tend to generate hard to use interfaces. Especially when you have small monitor, it is as if they did not eve tried them on such device.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#137

Post by timothya »

npizzolato wrote: post #130
timothya wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was in the invite-only stage for less than 3 months.

You say that like it's a short amount of time. Three months is more than enough time for hype to build, peek, and wither, which can -- and did, I would agrue -- kill a social network.

I don't disagree; I think that slow rollouts of large products make sense from a technical standpoint (you can make sure that nothing breaks down at the large scale, and fix problems before they become a big issue), but I think that invite-only betas which last weeks or months can often hurt product uptake.

I was just clarifying that the invite-only stage didn't last more than a year.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#138

Post by joe_the_user »

cookiecaper wrote: post #86
qq66 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real-name policy itself was only known by a small group of people. However, the idea that G+ would be a place for a your One True Identity was directly attacking Facebook, which is not the way in which Facebook was vulnerable. If they had built the entire product (not just the real-name policy) around the idea of pseudonyms or ephemeral identities or multiple identities like Reddit, they may have found more succe…

Google doesn't want to be reddit.

Indeed,

I imagine at that point, the "Google identity" dictated what kind of "Internet neighborhood" they felt they had to situate their social network in.

But thinking about it that way, it seems clear that rolling out a product based on "what Google needs to offer" rather than "what people want" is recipe for failure.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#140

Post by nostrademons »

niix wrote: post #87

It appears that many employees did not like working with him. This was posted on Secret "One of the worst execs I've ever worked with. Completely skirted the design process and got designers to do one off projects for him that would derail plans for weeks on end and kill team trust". Interesting, since there is much praise from Page.

He's a polarizing figure. I know people who used to work in Social (and elsewhere in the company) that hated working for them, and now they don't work in Social. I also know people in Social who really admire him as a visionary leader who's not afraid to take a lot of personal flack to get the job done.

I think this is common to many people with strong opinions and the confidence to act on them. Marissa was very similar: some people absolutely hated her, while others really respected her.

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