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Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

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Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#91

Post by hangonhn »

yid wrote: post #38
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…

> 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…

"It was an understandable, safe, and wrong decision at the time."

That's such a good way to describe a bad decision. The accumulation of decisions with those characteristics will sink any company.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#93

Post by smackfu »

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.

And in the end, it turns out that YouTube comments with real names are just as terrible.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#94

Post by ww520 »

inthewoods wrote: post #69

Vic did a pretty great job getting Google+ in decent shape, but am I the only one that finds the overall strategy among these properties confusing? I know that whenever I talk with a normal, non-tech civilian they are always confused by the service. They have Youtube (where you can upload videos), Google+ Photos (where you can upload videos and stream as well), Google Drive (where you can also upload pictures and vid…

Google+ became just like .Net of Microsoft. It's a umbrella for a number of confusing services forced together. Depending on whom to talk to and the favorite of the month, it can be different things.

It was social connect before. Now it's unified login. Next it's going to be whatever. Sounds awfully like .Net in the old days.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#95

Post by amaks »

trhway wrote: post #70
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…

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?

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#96

Post by npizzolato »

daeken wrote: post #74
ericras wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. I don't think that anyone will argue that pseudonyms are important to the average user. However, they are important to a small but influential group of users. The type of early adopter that otherwise could've driven G+ upward.

I'll concede they're a small but loud group of users. I'm not convinced the type of people who will refuse to use a service because of a lack of pseudonyms are necessarily influential.

I would attribute Google+'s failures much more to their abysmal launch strategy, which massively restricted otherwise-excited users from ever joining Google+ until it became a barren wasteland.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#97

Post by [deleted] »

pekk wrote: post #44
libria wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy who "built" my house never lifted a hammer. I think our egos can take the abbreviated form of "assembled/managed the team that built G+" in stride. Context, dude.

You paid someone to build you a house. Therefore you built the house! It wouldn't have happened without you to pay, would it? It's not dishonest, it's just shorthand. Context, dude.

[deleted]

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#98

Post by kibwen »

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…

  > 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 best-in-class as far as I can tell). The end result was that he missed out on spending time with his friends because of an unanswerable algorithm attempting to enforce a dubious policy. From a user's point of view, this is incredibly frustrating.

To this day, his Google+ profile picture is the same photographic proof that he had to send in to convince them of his name's legitimacy. His rationale is that if his profile gets disabled again, he can just point to his profile picture.

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#99

Post by npizzolato »

niix wrote: post #87

It appears that many employees did not like working with him. This was posted on Secret "One of the worst execs I've ever worked with. Completely skirted the design process and got designers to do one off projects for him that would derail plans for weeks on end and kill team trust". Interesting, since there is much praise from Page.

I'd be careful extrapolating an anonymous post from a single person on a public forum to "many".

Re: Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company

#100

Post by kibwen »

yid wrote: post #38
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…

> 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.

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