481–490 of 733 posts
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…
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I could buy this on smaller or older grocery stores, but the Safeways near me have 2 full aisles of frozen goods (and one additional one of refrigerated goods). These aisles extend all the way from the back to the front of the store, and are located in the center of the floor plan. The milk is still in the back, along with perishable juices. The difference between them and the aisles is that processed foods (frozen d…
Frozen food doesn’t need to be stocked from the back because they don’t need to make sure the stock turns over very quickly.
I would bet on consumer psychology over logistics here.
Google+ was a top-down, scrambling response to Facebook's meteoric rise. I think it ultimately failed because it didn't naturally mesh with or arise from Google's natural strengths. Google has always had amazing scientists and engineers working for them, but building a new social network requires less math/science and more of a human focus. (Of course, Facebook's data centers and ops are now the 6th wonder of the tec…
> ...Facebook's data centers and ops are now the 6th wonder of the tech world ... At the risk of not being taken seriously, er, what are the first 5 wonders of the tech world? Is AWS #1? Is Google's huge swarm of web search indexing machines #1? What makes it onto that list?
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There is no way Facebook would ever implement something like this. The whole point of the Facebook feed tinkering is to force you to wade through a river of shit to find the nuggets you are interested in. The feed algorithm is all about making that river just slightly short of unbearable, because the river is where they stuff all the ads. If they provided you with useful filters it would make the revenue opportunitie…
This is a very cynical view of things. I'm not a product manager - but I can't imagine one sitting in a room thinking about all the evil ways to make the feed harder for people to find relevant posts. I can, however, perfectly imagine a PM who is "extremely numbers driven" to look a bad version of the algorithm that increases the time users spend shifting through shit and assume that the algorithm is a huge success b…
Increasing "time spent" means spreading out relevant posts. I'm sure that Facebook is tuned to optimize for some combination of "time spent without drop-off in engagement". This is a "Good" version of the algorithm because it nets them the most revenue, while still fulfilling the need for the larger user base.
It's milkshake marketing[0]. People don't want the most efficient method of content consumption. That's why most "feeds" are no longer chronological. People on Facebook want to scroll around, look at posts, comment on articles, like a few things, etc. for X minutes/day without seeing things they've seen before, and without seeing things that are boring.
The job-to-be-done isn't to consume a certain relevant piece of content, it's to waste time and not get too bored.
[0] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/clay-christensens-milkshake-marke...
Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over. The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances. Currently on Facebook the news feed is…
RIP. Like so many of Google’s high profile efforts (anyone remember Wave? Glass, etc), a bunch of good ideas and great tech brought down by an utter failure to understand the human element/social psychology angle. Google+ was dead in the water from day one. You don’t beat Facebook at social by building a slightly different product with some cool ideas like Circles. Going for feature parity was a mistake. Instead they…
As Google Reader history shows, Google does not care about the passionate users.
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Frozen food doesn’t need to be stocked from the back because they don’t need to make sure the stock turns over very quickly.
Still doesn't explain why the cheese/yogurt/eggs aisle is stocked from the front, why the fresh produce displays are stocked from the top, or why cashew/soy/almond milk (which doesn't need to be refrigerated at all , and is in fact stored unrefrigerated in another part of the store if you buy smaller containers) is in with the milk case. I would bet on consumer psychology over logistics here.
Logistics: because then you don't need rear access to the cooler shelves. That's square footage that you can better use in other ways. (In school I worked in a supermarket that put dairy in the beer/soda cooler, and we stocked it from the back.)
In YT they already had a massive user-based; (for a time, not sure if it's still true) the second most searched search engine in the world.
In Wave they had threaded conversations. That is a communications UX that was closer (than Slack et al) to natural / traditional human conversations.
Toss in some of the better G+ features (e.g., Circles) and they likely could have been a contender. The problem (I suspect) was they saw FB as "competition" instead of stepping over and beyond FB, as FB had done to MySpace and Friendster.
Further proof that Google isn't a product company, but an algorithm company (per Thiel, trying to hide from regulators)?