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Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

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Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#101

Post by danso »

rocqua wrote: post #11
sys_64738 wrote: post #3

They did this with Google Reader 5 years ago. I don't think you can trust the longevity of Google services beyond GMail and Google Search.

This is rather different from Google Reader. Reader was a popular service that was going strong, the discontinuation really was a hassle to a lot of people. Google+ was essentially not used at all, so this should affect very few people.

What’s the evidence that Google Reader was “a popular service that was going strong”? I don’t doubt there were a bunch of people in tech and media who were and still are vocally angry, but I don’t recall data showing that Reader was anything but a niche product.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#102

Post by ChuckMcM »

packets to packets, bits to bits.

I am not surprised they are killing the service, and I'm reminded of all the damage it did to the company both inside and out[1]. If there is one thing I could say I miss about not working at Google it is seeing how the organization internalizes what they did and why. These sorts of things can teach a lot of really good lessons to an organization if the retrospective is done well.

I was also thinking about the recent love letter to Google that came across here about Google Cloud. In it was the admission that Google tried to hard to "copy" or "follow" AWS in the early years.

Allo, Inbox, Gchat, Reader, Wave, Etc. It feels like they are trying to hard to be "amazing" and missing out on just being good at what they do. Meanwhile the beat of the jungle drums, "More ads, more ads, more ads..." continues on relentlessly.

[1] Inside there were good projects that got killed because they either conflicted with or competed with G+, outside the company it seemed Google was deathly afraid of Facebook and Twitter and had no credible answer, their real names fiasco, their forcing of people to use G+ if they used other services, all of it damaged the Google brand and user trust.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#103

Post by yuhong »

cletus wrote: post #99

This is Vic Gundotra's legacy and perhaps the first major strategic decision Larry Page made in the post-Eric Schmidt era and it was the design and launch of Google+ and (IMHO) it marked a turning point in the company's culture. Internal resistance to aspects of G+ was enormous. People outside the company get this idea that Google acts as some kind of singleminded (possibly nefarious) entity when "herding cats" is so…

Yea, I remember the debacle well. I think I had a few HN posts about it.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#104

Post by noja »

CPLX wrote: post #39

The use of the word "sunset" as a verb in posts like this is fucking infuriating. Yes, software types know what it means, but this is a consumer product with tens of millions of users, who have no familiarity with that term. It's a weasel word. The way to say this is in plain English. We're closing, shutting down, turning off, discontinuing, or something.

The whole post is a weasel word: they exposed data on hundreds of thousands of users THEN CHOSE NOT TO DECLARE THAT. Come on Google.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#105

Post by dekhn »

cletus wrote: post #99

This is Vic Gundotra's legacy and perhaps the first major strategic decision Larry Page made in the post-Eric Schmidt era and it was the design and launch of Google+ and (IMHO) it marked a turning point in the company's culture. Internal resistance to aspects of G+ was enormous. People outside the company get this idea that Google acts as some kind of singleminded (possibly nefarious) entity when "herding cats" is so…

As a Xoogler I agree completely. The whole social debacle distracted the company from a more important goal (cloud) and now google has to play catch up to AWS and Azure.

This was a case where a very large number of Googlers tried to advise leadership on some of its more boneheaded decisions and had to work overtime to deal with the problems and fallout.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#106

Post by 394549 »

cromwellian wrote: post #8
sys_64738 wrote: post #3

They did this with Google Reader 5 years ago. I don't think you can trust the longevity of Google services beyond GMail and Google Search.

Well, hardly anyone was using it. How long should a company maintain something for free that not many people are using? Where's the sadness over the death of Apple Ping, or MobileMe?

>> They did this with Google Reader 5 years ago. I don't think you can trust the longevity of Google services beyond GMail and Google Search.

> Well, hardly anyone was using it. How long should a company maintain something for free that not many people are using?

You misunderstand. He's not necessarily saying Google should maintain Google Reader or Google+ forever; he's saying that users can't trust Google to keep all but its most popular services online. If you like some new/niche Google service so much that you'll be unhappy when it's shut down, you should seriously consider not using it in the first place.

I'm not sad to see Google+ go, but the aggressive rate of metrics-driven product shutdowns by modern SaaS companies is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Users learn not get used to new services and hold of using them heavily, because they'll probably get shut down; that dampens adoption so services inevitably get shut down.

IMHO, SaaS companies need to embrace niche products, otherwise they're eventually going to kill off a lot of consumer appetite for innovation.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#108

Post by nathan_long »

jonknee wrote: post #49
mindcrime wrote: post #20

LOL, one more example of why one should never depend on anything from Google. developer adoption Gee, I wonder why? Maybe because they never released a usable write API and were basically just a little less developer-hostile than Twitter? G+ had a lot of potential, had Google chosen to truly embrace Open Standards, federation, and usable API's. As it is, they shot themselves in the foot by creating JAWG (Just Another…

> never depend on anything from Google They're shutting it down precisely because no one was depending on it. How would anyone depend on a social network without any users?

There can be death spiral here, though.

  Them: "We're shutting down X because too few people use it. Also, announcing Y!"
  Users: "I'm not using Y. You'll probably shut it down."
  [months pass] 
  Them: "We're shutting down Y because too few people use it."
The brand recognition that they hope will make Y successful might actually work against it.

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#109

Post by zokier »

mindcrime wrote: post #20

LOL, one more example of why one should never depend on anything from Google. developer adoption Gee, I wonder why? Maybe because they never released a usable write API and were basically just a little less developer-hostile than Twitter? G+ had a lot of potential, had Google chosen to truly embrace Open Standards, federation, and usable API's. As it is, they shot themselves in the foot by creating JAWG (Just Another…

10 year lifespan for failed product is not that bad. How long you think it would have lasted outside Google?

Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

#110

Post by Touche »

mindcrime wrote: post #75
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone always says "this always failed because it didn't do X," where X is anything they like. It's clear that it failed. It's less clear that the reason is necessarily any of the ones you gave. Every dominant social network has been a walled garden, and, contrariwise, every attempt to create a major social network based around federation and open standards has, so far, failed. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see o…

Everyone always says "this always failed because it didn't do X," where X is anything they like. I didn't say "it failed because it didn't do X". They said "... failed to gain developer adoption ....". To that specific point, I contend there is a clear and direct causal link between the decisions they made, and that lack of adoption. Of course I can't prove that in the strictest sense, but it's not hard to see that a…

You're missing (or ignoring) a lot of historical context in your analysis. Google spent many years trying to compete with Facebook assuming that open standards were the thing that would win. ActivityStreams and PubSubHubHub are just two examples of federated standards that they built to compete, and that failed.

Google+ came out, if you'll remember, at the time that Page became CEO again and pivoted the company's direction away from standards and more towards product. In the case of social that clearly failed. In the case of Android it did not.

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