This post was meant to inform of Vic's departure from Google. It suddenly became a slug fest of Google +.
Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company
221–230 of 267 posts
Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
The engineers -- the ones down in the trenches -- practically revolted over it. The decision was purely from On High, i.e. managerial. It came down from the highest levels.
And that's why I now perceive Google to be rotten from the head.
Personally I feel, best of the companies can take rotten decision sometimes,specially when they are reactionary. IMHO That doesn't mean we can generalize it.
Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that right there strikes me as a symptom of a deep problem. I think the best use of executives is to support people in the trenches, because they're closest to the actual work. That support can include thoughtful questioning, advising, and mentoring. But when it becomes controlling, it often gets ugly. I just happened to chat today with a guy who built a large and successful construction company up from nothing.…
sounds interesting! who is this guy? or he prefers to be anonymous?
I'd feel weird naming him without asking. But if you want to read more about this sort of approach, there's a book called Servant Leadership, plus a lot of literature around it. It's also the basic approach in Lean Manufacturing.
Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company
#224> Former CEO Eric Schmidt admitted in an interview at the D conference in 2011 that he missed the boat on the rise of identity on the Internet. > “I clearly knew that I had to do something, and I failed to do it,” he said. “A CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up.” I think Eric screwed up in a deeper way that this quote admits. Google+ came up at a time of broader dissatisfaction with other social networks, pa…
Maybe the argument is right, but Eric Schmidt was replaced by Larry Page on April 4, 2010 and G+ was launched on September 20, 2011. So the former can not be responsible for how G+ works. What he failed was to not have created a social network sooner.
Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company
#225Is Vic moving to another company?
Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Circles seems like a good idea - but I find I don't use them.
I would use them more if I could assert a different identity/profile for each one.
I think this is the crux of why G+ failed. When I first started using it, circles seemed like a killer feature. I divided all my contacts into work, friends, family, by location, etc. So I could share programming stuff with tech friends, but local stuff with local friends.
But, instead, I find I just share everything I care to share public. I think what people share is part of how they present themselves, and if I'm always in the context of being myself, with my real name and the same picture, then I'm going to share the same set of stuff.
Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company
#227Oh, good. Vic, please make sure that a) you don't miss the door and b) you take away the comment function of youtube with you.
Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience is that the Real Names policy was hated by a small but vocal and influential group of users. I never heard about it from any of my friends who aren't reading sites like HN. Those people still don't use Google+, but it's because none of their friends were there, they found Circles confusing, and they didn't see any real benefit to taking the effort to learn about it. Social networks have a lot of inertia…
> I never heard about it from any of my friends who aren't > reading sites like HN. Anecdote: a decidedly non-technical friend of mine with the last name of "Star" had his Google+ profile disabled after having his name falsely classified as a pseudonym. The only Google+ service that he actually cared about using was Hangouts (a sentiment universal among my friends, it seems... despite its faults, Hangouts really is b…
When I tried to register for G+ (I only tried it because my non-tech friends pestered me .. and none of them is still using it) it told me that I was not a person but a shop. And that I should please use their shop accounts or whatever. And the only way to tell it that I was not a shop but a person was to scan in a passport, which probably would have been read by someone later who would (maybe?!) have activated my account.
I cannot even start to describe the hate I had for G+ from that moment on. It only got worse when a friend of mine used an absolute fake name to register an account without any problems. What an UI experience. And if they didn't have insisted on "real names" it wouldn't have happened.
Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
But therein lies the problem: people clearly want Reddit. Companies succeed when they find a significant niche where their interests happen to align with that of their users / customers in a significant way. When a company starts putting its own needs ahead of its users that's a huge danger sign for its future. Google arrogantly thought that they could put their own needs first and if they just shove it hard enough a…
Maybe it didn't topple facebook, but what other data do they have from it? Is searching this information fruitful in interesting ways? It might be.
About the Google+ vs. reddit, this is the best that I could find: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=google%2B%2C%20reddi...
I'm not a Google+ user (at least not by choice), but as a redditor for 7 years that chart seems to show the correct trends (as far as reddit's growth is concerned, at least).
Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
My impression was that G+ was stymied by a bad go-to-market strategy. I'm sure the real names issue didn't help, but I'm not certain it had the impact you're suggesting. Their go to market strategy was essentially the same as the Chinese government-run construction companies that build an entire city from farmland, cut the ribbon and expect a stampede. Getting it right is complicated and I couldn't do it justice in a…
I think that is really smart and makes a lot of sense. Facebook started out by servicing a niche, Twitter was used by tech nerds.
Twitter took off once it got a critical mass of celebrities using it, and this fact was published in mainstream media. Stephen Fry brought in a lot of people; now it's Justin Bieber.