Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

Microsoft is the biggest offenders in this, since time immemorial, with an almost sad sort of attention-seeking "Look look we made this!" by prefixing every product and service with their name.

Of course I see why they would want to do this; it entices your existing fans to check it out and bolsters confidence.

But the problem is that your company's reputation and "image" is then immediately projected onto your new product before anyone even tries it.

In Microsoft's case it's their sterile 90s-suit-and-tie-office-workplace, wannabe-cool /r/fellowkids image (in my view at least.)

Even Apple does this and it adversely affects their new products too (like Apple Music) for people who hold some kind of brand grudge against them.

I and I'll assume many people use Google out of necessity than any brand loyalty, and in spite of disagreeing with their privacy-hostile core model. If they hadn't bought YouTube and if other search engines were as fast and provided as relevant results (though Google Search has been slowly crapping out in that regard since the past couple years), I would be using no Google products or services.

Google were hardly associated with the word "social" and "Google+" doesn't say anything about anything social. The first impressions of most people when hearing about it very probably did nothing favorable for the service.

I can't think of one piece of Google software, except maybe YouTube that is enjoyable to use or at least decent. Even then, this doesn't exempt Google from being idiots with how they treat content creators on YouTube. Everywhere you look they do some absolutely terrible thing, or some completely incompetent thing.

Take email. I loved Inbox. They killed it. Like most of their acquisitions or other projects, they kill everything. It would make sense if they integrated Inbox features into Gmail mobile and desktop apps and then killed it, but no. They just killed the useful application and kept Gmail an ancient turd of a client the way it is.

So you would think it's no big deal - just switch to another email client. The only problem, they all suck. Edison molests your data unless you opt out of every app install for sharing your email or useage data, and then if you want to scrub your info from their servers (which I'm pretty sure is BS) you can't actually use their app. So... Switch to Spark and it seems decent but you can't do inline images in emails on mobile - only attachments. I need to send customers inline images while on the go so that's the end of Spark. Meanwhile on the Mac you CAN send in-line images. But guess what? The Spark Mac app has every option EXCEPT a taskbar icon and badge count (you can look in your MenuBar but are SOL if you prefer to have it hidden. Next up, AirMail3 is another turd. AirMail3 seemed awesome, but the first time I tried composing a simple email to family it found every damn contact EXCEPT the everyday contact I would use. Maybe it needs to learn over time so I give it some time... Well, it still decides to match every possible iteration of something I search for - for any type of search. I think I'm typing an email from "XXXX YYYYY" and I get back every email or contact from every duration that somehow even every possible match that might include a variation of XX YY.

Jebus. Seriously Google - F U. It's incredible to me that they don't seem to give a S@#$ that they're making people go through all this. People are spend monthly on email clients from some 3rd party that is doing god knows what with our data and Google refuses to improve their own stupid products but also insists on killing any they own that are actually useful.

Forget "Don't be Evil" you clowns, maybe just focus on "Make Uncompromised Products" - Google: you suck at writing decent software applications. Period.

Let me throw wood on fire ... the reason Google+ is a failure has nothing to do with any of its features:

1. they killed Google Reader for it, which was more successful than Google+ ever hoped to be, forever tarnishing Google's reputation

2. they had the Real Name Policy ... by the time they reversed and apologized for it, the damage was already done

3. they shoved Google+ down on everybody's throats, like YouTube users, exposing their real identities in the process

There are no other reasons that matter. Google+ could have been at least at Twitter's scale. Twitter still understands their audience, but Google never did.