I don't know that I am going to trust google's consumer product offerings anymore. Inbox became central to my life, now this. I am now going to operate under the presupposition that a google product is not a reliable product.
Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
661–670 of 733 posts
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#662Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to think that's not true, but it wouldn't be the first time such a technique has been used, apparently successfully. Witness the local TV news which is always teasing that some story is coming up next, only to put it at the very end of the broadcast so that you have to watch the whole 30 minute program (including commercials) to hear the 1 minute you care about.
> I'd like to think that's not true, but it wouldn't be the first time such a technique has been used, apparently successfully. It's also why Twitter wants to 'curate' your timeline, instead of simply displaying tweets from people you follow in temporal order.
I believe this is why recently Twitter reverted the change and now allows you to browse in chronological order.
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#663RIP. 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…
>say, intimate private sharing, or the antithesis of the narcissist fest) and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users
Kind of describes Google Wave in a sense - private collaboration and passionate users. But it couldn't expand out of that niche set of users/use-cases.
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#664Number of project failures and cuts under Larry Page is just amazing. Normally you would expect that founder CEO insist on long term vision and loves to go after big bets. Under Larry Page, X had been cut. Boston Dynamics was lost. Robotics effort was shutdown. And now G+. After all these time no one at Google's highly paid smartest on Earth visionaries were able to experiment, try something new and continue fight fo…
After all these time no one at Google's highly paid smartest on Earth visionaries were able to experiment, try something new and continue fight for social. What? They spent a decade on G+, launched it with much fanfare, annnd it just didn't pan out. Sure, they didn't drive it down Google users' throats as aggressively as they could have (via e.g. Search, Chrome or Gmail) but that really wouldn't have helped them - Fa…
No, they left it to rott. No innovations, no new strategy, no new leadership, no new bold moves. Nothing. If G+ was startup outside Google we would have ripped it off for not even pretending to compete.
Social is absolutely the most important space for Google, even more so than cloud. FB is eating up large chunk of their ad money and putting biggest chunk of content out of their reach. For a company out to organize world's information, this is unthinkable. And this is a company with $100B in bank, accumulation of largest talent pool, ability to attract the best. And it's not that FB is perfect and strongest at this point.
There is no "cutting losses" in tech when product category is this important. It takes years of struggle, experimentation, patience and competition to win. They gave up within an year after G+ release, left it on "maintenance mode" and now finally kissing good bye.
To me, Google has lost its charm as company that makes big bets and goes all-in until they win. Now they are company which does half-assed product and if they don't see traction right away, they cut off the oxygen and then just kill it. There is little or no reflections, learning and applying it to do course corrections.
After Larry Page arrived at the scene and flew out to his Caribbean island on extra-extended vacations, the company has failed to produce any big new product category. Eric Schmidt was able to start new product category virtually every year and become undisputed leader in it. That wasn't coincidence or luck but sheer drive to win. For example, in maps they had to invest huge amount of money with multi-year milestones and constant innovations to displace existing players.
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#665Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's unfortunate how much Google-hate is on HN these days because I think it's largely unjustified. There are definitely some bad (IMHO) leadership decisions but the rank-and-file are still culture carriers for a lot of the things that made Google great. The fairly small number of people I know who are Googlers or Xooglers are all pretty awesome as techies and as people. That does little to change my opinion of Goo…
lest the rank-and-file revolt The rank-and-file are extremely well compensated, with cash, with stock, with on-the-job perks. Why would they bite the hand that feeds them? A lot of people will put up with incredible violations of their principles before they'll risk losing a comfortable position.
Googlers will and have on multiple occassions revolted. Many have resigned when their personal red lines were crossed, usually over things the external world would not have noticed. Various top-down decisions have been reverted due to this, up to walking back an announcement that already went public.
Big part of the reason is that finding the next job after Google is nowhere near a hard problem. Chances are you might even get paid more by the next place.
Source: I'm a Googler that has signed some of these petitions, never got his red lines crossed and is still happy to work here.
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#666[deleted]
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#667Google+ was not at all a bad product. It had some functionality that other networks didn't have at the time. I used to browse through Google+ because of Linus Torvalds and the Linux community.
I think that if Google had decoupled it from the Google platform and developed G+ as an independent entity within the umbrella, things would have been different.
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#668Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
None of that stuff moves as much raw volume of product as milk.
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"There is no way Facebook would ever implement something like this." Except they did in 2011 in response to Google+ by adding Friend Lists, which you can use to filter your News Feed down to stories and news items from just friends in certain lists curated by you. This is still in existence today in 2018.
And in subsequent years they've done everything to hide this feature from the users and make it much harder to access (it used to be on the left navigation bar, now it's under 'Friend lists' (which also has been renamed at least twice) and also it disappeared from the mobile app)
Re: Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers
#670Number of project failures and cuts under Larry Page is just amazing. Normally you would expect that founder CEO insist on long term vision and loves to go after big bets. Under Larry Page, X had been cut. Boston Dynamics was lost. Robotics effort was shutdown. And now G+. After all these time no one at Google's highly paid smartest on Earth visionaries were able to experiment, try something new and continue fight fo…
After all these time no one at Google's highly paid smartest on Earth visionaries were able to experiment, try something new and continue fight for social. What? They spent a decade on G+, launched it with much fanfare, annnd it just didn't pan out. Sure, they didn't drive it down Google users' throats as aggressively as they could have (via e.g. Search, Chrome or Gmail) but that really wouldn't have helped them - Fa…
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