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Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

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Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#231

Post by alextingle »

r0h1n wrote: post #213

Google+ and Gundotra's lasting, and perhaps perverse, legacy to Google is the "social glue" that forcibly connects together most Google services. That Google+ never quite managed to take on Facebook is obvious. A much bigger and intangible cost, IMHO, is the falling trust in much bigger Google products like search, YouTube etc. as Google+ was shoved down user's throats. To wit, I don't use Google+, but thanks to its…

Absolutely. I now block all of Google's cookies, and just don't bother with the few services (e.g. Docs) that I used to have an account for.

I'm an AdSense publisher, so occasionally I need to log in to see how much they've been screwing me. I just have an alternative browser for that.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#232

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

zippergz wrote: post #65
saidajigumi wrote: post #34

> 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…

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…

> My experience is that the Real Names policy was hated by a small but vocal and influential group of users.

Another way of putting this is that most people don't need pseudonyms, but the people who need them really need them. Search for .e.g. "google outed me".

Google missed the boat on that, big time.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#233

Post by merrua »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #218
dredmorbius wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish more had protested more strongly or simply walked. I know it's easy to project actions on others, but really, that was a BAD decision.

Unfortunately, not everyone had that sort of mobility. Mortgage holders, people on visas who needed to find another sponsor (and couldn't just go anywhere) and the rest have a harder time moving on. That has to suck: knowing something is rotten but having to stick with it due to external constraints.

If they had full freedom to move around in the company, it would have become obvious as people would have bailed from the project.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#234

Post by Angostura »

kibwen wrote: post #100
yid wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And _all_ of that interest was shot dead due to attempts to own identity by enforcing the use of real names[1]. It was an understandable, safe, and wrong decision at the time. Facebook's commercial power was widely attributed to the fact that for the first time, wide swaths of people were using their real identity online. With the investment that Google put into +, the risk of having another sea of MetalHead444s wa…

In addition to being safe, understandable, and wrong, it was completely out of touch. Did nobody stop to think why people would ever elect to use MetalHead444 over their real name in the first place? The only explanation I can fathom was that it was a decision motivated by engineers and marketers rather than by anyone genuinely concerned about user experience.

I think that's thinking about it the wrong way. Google's aim is to organise the world's information in a structured way and then capitalise on it. It seems to be that with Google + they had decided to use identity as a primary key to hang stuff off. They were determined that architecturally, they wanted it this way.... at almost any cost.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#235

Post by InclinedPlane »

saidajigumi wrote: post #34

> 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…

When you come in as a secondary competitor, especially with something like a social network that is utterly dependent on network effect, you have to avoid making even small mistakes and you need several big advantages over the competition. G+ failed on both accounts. Mostly it was just another facebooky thing, and the few missteps they made turned out to actually be rather big ones.

Nevertheless, I think the biggest problem google made with g+ is thinking that it was necessary at all. Social can be important but not every major tech company needs their own brand of facebook, it's just not necessary from any perspective, even a business one. Microsoft made the same mistake when they tried to out-google google. That sort of thing is dumb, and indicative of excess vanity. Let google be google, let facebook be facebook. If you think you actually have a better product offering that overlaps with some other company, great, put it out there. But don't set it as your google to stand toe to toe product wise with all the other tech giants. Concentrate on your own strengths, don't try to be something you're not.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#236

Post by davidgerard »

kibwen wrote: post #161
scrame wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hangouts really is best-in-class as far as I can tell My S4 updated from gtalk to hangouts, and I loathe it. It now crashes quite regularly, sometimes multiple times in a single chat session, and included a stupid button that starts a video chat on my phone, a feature I have never wanted and never will want, but manages to get fat-thumbed, or randomly turn itself on when I am trying to communicate with someone.

I should have clarified: best-in-class for what my friends and I need, which is essentially simultaneous multi-user voice chat that doesn't require installing an external program (if they have Chrome, it doesn't require installing anything at all), works on all platforms, doesn't mandate a laborious microphone calibration on first use, and has pretty decent echo cancellation. We were just looking to replace Vent/Team…

"doesn't require installing an external program"

I had to install a .deb to use it in Firefox on Linux.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#237

Post by davidgerard »

amaks wrote: post #95
trhway wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real Names is the best illustration of how Google tried to copy FB instead of offering a better one. "Circles"? only sound of it is already too high-brow for average Joe. Have you heard a taxi driver using word "circle" to describe his taxi driving buddies?

AFAIK the real names policy is largely not in effect anymore, contrary to Facebook?

Nope, it bites people in the arse to this day. A month ago: http://www.buzzfeed.com/joeflood/what-happens-when-google-do...

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#238

Post by Udo »

sgift wrote: post #228
kibwen wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ac…

Google is incredibly bone-headed and if there's something wrong with your account, there is generally no way to fix it.

More than ten years ago, I signed up for Adsense - it didn't work. Despite using my Google account for a ton of stuff, I kept getting obscure error messages. When they changed the interface about 3 years ago, I tried again. This time, the UI sent me into a Kafkaesque endless loop. A few months ago I tried again, this time I was put into review and haven't heard from them since. I'm certain there is some horrible, deadly flag somewhere deep in the metadata Google keeps of me, but I have no way of finding out why or what to do about it.

The frustration Google casually inflicts upon its users is infuriating, and I'm not only talking about this account stupidity.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#239

Post by davidgerard »

keypusher wrote: post #212
zippergz wrote: post #65

Earlier 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…

The thing is that these sites (as with many things) grow from a core of early tastemakers. In some circles these people know the hottest bands, the best new books, wear the coolest clothes, or know about the new restaurants in town before everyone else. In tech they know the best sites, and where they go the rest will follow. "People reading HN" might be a small minority in the grand scheme of things, but I would be…

This is what happened as far as I could tell: the techie world (friends of Googlers) joined, then crashed head first into the Real Name Policy and told their friends to stay the hell away. It never recovered.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#240

Post by Narretz »

ericras wrote: post #58
saidajigumi wrote: post #34

> 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…

In all honesty I probably would have pursued the same real names policy if I had been running Google+. They were trying to avoid having it immediately devolve into the YouTube comments section - aka the scourge of the Internet. I also think the real name policy is one of those things that we give too much weight too in analyzing the service. Lacking pseudonyms is not the reason "average" people have not used it.

> the YouTube comments section - aka the scourge of the Internet

Two things: As far as I know most people are fine with using their real name on Facebook, so real names on Google+ would not have been the big problem, it was real names on Youtube made a lot of people angry. Also, now that people can comment on Youtube with Google+, the quality of discussions hasn't improved, it's merely become different inane stuff like "Hey x, check this out" and other excerpts from chat-like conversations that have nothing to do with the video playing.

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