[oneshot908]

I was an IC6 at Google when Google+ launched...

From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone was the biggest problem. IMO this even foreshadows separating off Google Brain from the rest of Google and giving them resources not available to anyone else. Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time. I think the road to the Google we see today started then. It's also the year they paid too much for Motorola and started pushing Marissa Mayer out the door.

Then there was the changing story of the 2011 bonus. When I hired in, we were all told our 2011 bonus would be tied to the success of Google+. That's a fantastic way to rally your co-workers, except... Once they launched Google+, the Google+ Eliterati (so to speak) changed their minds and announced that any Google+ bonus was for Google+ people alone. Maximum emotionally intelligent genius IMO. Now your own co-workers have been burned. Also not very "googly."

Finally, there was "Real Names." The week of its launch everyone I knew wanted an invite and I used up every single one of them and continued to do so as more were made available to me. Then "Real Names" happened and people stopped asking for invites overnight. That's the moment for me when the tide turned against this thing.

I really liked the initial Google+ UI personally, but the UI ran head-on into the nonsensical "Kennedy" initiative wherein some brilliant designer seemed to decide that since monitors are now twice the size they used to be, they should add twice the whitespace to show the same amount of information as on a much smaller screen. Subversives within the company took to posting nearly blank sheets of printer paper on walls with the single word "Kennedy" in a tiny font you'd only see if you got close to the things. That said, my godawful company man manager would repeatedly proclaim how beautiful he thought the Kennedy layout was in our office for all to hear whenever they updated GMail or Search to use it.

Of course, there are other reasons beyond my tiny perspective here, but I did have a front row seat for this and it was really disappointing to see a potential Facebook killer die of a thousand papercuts like this.

[Nican]

The "Kennedy" comment really made me giggle. I have some dislike for some trends of applications addining great amounts of white space.

I have to agree that the interface, and the "Real Names" requirements were the two biggest hurdles for me to even to start to like Google+.

I really liked the concept of circles, but whenever I did get around to using the social network, it never felt as social and engaging as Twitter. Even when I did find an intersting discussion, it was hard to keep track of replies. Reddit/HNews/Twitter have a tree-like structure for the comments, but Google+ was mostly flat, and hard to keep track of any debate.

I would lose interest on Google+ as soon as I tried to read a comment thread, and close the application altogether.

[waqf]

If only Google could invent a discussion site with rich text and threaded discussions … they could call it "Google Wave" …

[stallmanite]

Or even https://groups.google.com

[curtis3389]

Or Google Buzz

[khazhou]

This reminds me of Wave. Wave team's isolationism didn't cause them to fail, but no one was inclined to help them when they struggled.

But these are symptoms. The Dark Tower was because of Vic, no? Maybe Bradley too, but mostly Vic. Vic was a virus against which Google had no immunity. "Do it my way or your career is over". Well, his direction sucked, and that's what you get when you give full trust and power to the wrong individual.

[hunter23]

Yea but the root problem lies in Larry's management. Larry gave Vic pure dictatorial powers for Google+ without holding him accountable for real results. They gave him way too much budget, control, engineers, etc. And they waited way way way too long before kicking him out when things weren't working.

The engineering headcount was ridiculous for Google+. It was also ridiculous to have OKRs for every team at Google to integrate with Google+. Facebook (or really any company) didn't start with Mark Zuckerberg hiring a 1000 engineers and start cranking. If a VC cut him a check for $500 million after his MVP Facebook would probably be a failure. Instead he built the MVP with a few engineers and increased headcount as he increased the user base and shifted vision. Google had this mistaken notion that they could just throw more engineers at the problem and skip the whole product discovery process.

[zootam]

what is this 'Dark Tower' that is being mentioned?

[khazhou]

One of the Googleplex buildings was dedicated to G+, and only G+ team was allowed entry, etc. Very different than the rest of Google at the time, which was a proudly-open culture.

[kryogen1c]

> From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone

I work in an IT MSP where we do business with lots of small-medium companies, and i am astounded at how much the leadership sets the culture for the company. A sarcastic and passive aggressive CEO will have a company of rude employees. An outgoing confident type A person will work with friendly extroverts.

Separating a team like this guarantees a different culture than the rest of Google, and imherent resentment between the two.

[koonsolo]

> how much the leadership sets the culture for the company.

Over the years this is exactly what I experienced. And even if there are a bunch of employees and middle managers that are pushing for a different culture, for the benefit of the company (this can happen in a fast growing company where things haven't settled down yet), it is an uphill battle for those people, and they will eventually leave.

[hangonhn]

"That said, my godawful company man manager would repeatedly proclaim how "

I've never worked at Google but am friends with many Googlers. Someone I know was one of these awful company man manager who worked there would just keep defending G+ with these awful spoon fed comments. I stopped bothering trying to say anything about it since it became obvious that the group think has set. He's doing great at Google these days from what I can tell from his LinkedIn profile. I guess the culture has really changed if those are the Googlers who get promoted.

[raverbashing]

It's not surprising the biggest innovations comes from people who leave Google instead of coming from the ones who stay there.

[woah]

I have people on facebook who work at Tesla, and “spoonfed” is a great description for some on their arguments about autopilot etc

[AJ007]

Thanks for the insight on this from an internal point of view.

I've been trying to figure out how Google transitioned from being viewed as having the moral high ground over most other public companies, tech and otherwise, to the sad state it is in today. Based on everything I've read to this point, my best guess has been dysfunctional management. What you describe sounds like basic blunders rather than any sort of mistake due to complexity or bad luck.

[s09dfhks]

Too many MBAs in management who've been told they're world changers because of where their degree is from.

[nradov]

The classic business management book The Innovator's Dilemma specifically recommends moving groups working on potentially disruptive new products into separate facilities. That helps them avoid distractions and makes it harder for "corporate antibodies" to kill the new initiative. Most people think that the IBM PC project succeeded in creating a microcomputer that disrupted the mainframe and minicomputer markets at least partly because they had a separate office in Boca Raton instead of at HQ in Armonk.

http://claytonchristensen.com/books/the-innovators-dilemma/

Of course having a separate facility doesn't guarantee success, and can certainly cause other problems if poorly managed.

[WalterBright]

The classic of this is the Lockheed Skunkworks. It's success has never been repeated - lots of companies try to create a skunkworks clone, but try to fix it, and wind up thereby breaking it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works

[marcosdumay]

Google+ would never be disruptive to Google. It is in a completely different market from anything else, it wouldn't have to destroy any other Google project to succeed.

[mavelikara]

I had to look up what the "Kennedy" initiative was.

It was redesign of all Google products to get a unified look [1]. The lead designer, Jon Wiley, named it Kennedy as a reference to Larry Page's Moonshot Strategy [2]. [3] compares the redesign mockups (in blue) against how the products looked before.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-h...

[2]: https://www.wired.com/2013/01/ff-qa-larry-page/

[3]: https://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2058367/googleredesign_10...

[Izkata]

On 3, are you sure? The blue-shaded image search results is what it looked like a long time ago.

[mavelikara]

Kennedy Initiative was done in 2013.

[Izkata]

I'm thinking back while I was in college, which would've been before 2010...

[johnnycab]

>Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time. I think the road to the Google we see today started then.

Thanks for providing a great insight. I kept away from Google+ due to it's initial aggressiveness of opting in and linking it across other services. There was already a growing disillusionment around investing time and effort into various concepts, which ended up getting culled[1]. It was Google Reader, which made me realise not to take any Google service for granted or rely on them long-term and only use them in a disposable format.

[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/

[tracker1]

Reader was the shot that killed any trust in Google's service for me as well... Today it's mostly my gmail account that is mostly bulk mail, fallback search when ddg fails me, and maps on my phone. And even the gmail I've been contemplating how to best get away from it.

[stcredzero]

Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time. I think the road to the Google we see today started then. It's also the year they paid too much for Motorola and started pushing Marissa Mayer out the door.

Something about this rings true.

it was really disappointing to see a potential Facebook killer die of a thousand papercuts like this.

From my POV, the Google+ launch was doomed by the way it was foisted on Google users. Because of that, my feelings of cynicism towards the product started in less than a second.

[nashashmi]

Plus one. For everything you said.

I hated Google plus for how open they forced everyone on it to be. VS Facebook was private in its beginning.

I hated Google plus because they forced all of their services to begin to rely on it. They forced various logins to use it.

I have stopped using play store comments and YouTube for this very reason.

Had they split Google plus into parts where people adopted it slowly they would have fared better. Parts like friend network-1, forum network-2, news network-3, share page-4, posts page-5, etc.

I still remember when they replaced Facebook and Twitter search results with GOOGLE plus results.

And the bonuses part is why this makes so much sense about why they did it.

[Balgair]

Tahrir Square in 2011 was the high water mark for a lot of tech. It was the time when we all thought that SV really really was going to change the world for the better this time, no for real reals.

After the Arab spring turned into winter, a lot of the air went out of the tech balloon. It never was really the same. Cynicism crept in along with the MBAs and the Generals.

[unreal37]

Blaming the failure of Google+ on "they had their own cafeteria that we weren't allowed to go to" and "they got bonuses we didn't get" seems really really inside baseball.

Shows the problems inside Google, yes. But that's not why it never really took off.

[jfarmer]

I took `oneshot908 as saying that the Google+ team had a broadly isolationist attitude. Their distance from both co-workers / potential internal contributors and customers/users was a reflection of this and that trickled down into poor product decisions.

[oneshot908]

Yes, you got it. I made up the "Dark Tower" remark because they sat the Google+ team on the top floor of the only semi-highrise on the main Mountain View campus. This separated them both literally and figuratively from the rest of the Googlers and in 2011, that was just not "googly." And yes, this was a Vic Gundotra move.

I love a good skunkworks project. But Google+ needed Google to succeed. Apparently Vic felt otherwise and the rest is history, no?

[iamnotacrook]

I doubt it. There's just no connection between them at all. Think about all the bad things you read about Amazon - how Bozo treats people, how employees are treated, especially the warehouse staff, plus a website the HTML hairdressers love to hate on. It's still the first choice for retail and cloud services for millions of people around the world. Separate cafeteria! I love Hacker News!

[whatshisface]

If the full story is death by a thousand cuts, do you want a thousand-paragraph comment?

[pjc50]

I worked at a place that did this - separate team for the new project with their own eating area - and the amount of goodwill it blew was amazing. People who'd worked together for years became resentful of each other. It created a "we know best" attitude in the new team, who then spent months playing with cool tech and failed to launch. They were months late by the time I left.

[shostack]

It's a fine line to walk to carve out a team to "move fast and break things."

It can be valuable in an org that has gotten bogged down with process that is often in place for good reason, or that needs to focus on longer-term things.

But when you do carve out that team, extra care needs to be spent figuring out how to integrate their efforts and culture with existing teams they need to interface with at various points. Likewise, it really needs to be positioned as a benefit for everyone.

[dman]

Saw the same thing happen.

[mcguire]

Ditto, more or less. In a university computer science department.

[crumpets]

Conway's law. If you fuck up the org of a project, the project will be just as fucked up. For something that is supposed to integrate across google products, it should never be so isolated.

[coldtea]

Problems inside Google's and a disconnect from the reality of the company could very well be why they never really took off.

[lnanek2]

That's how they treated developers too, though. For Facebook, they give you an API where you can post generic things. For updating my apps to Google Plus, I found they forced you to only use certain verbs, and ignored requests to add more. So they just felt they knew better than the third party developers and ended up making their platform difficult to post from apps (games, tools, etc.).

[zippergz]

I hate responding to anecdata with anecdata, but my experience is that Real Names was a HUGE DEAL in a very small and specific sector of the internet (some of which has clear overlap with HN), and an absolute non-story in the rest of the world. I worked at G at that time also, and while I agree that Real Names was a dumb decision, at the time I did not see any direct impact on interest or engagement from my friends because of it, aside from the small pocket who we truly incensed. While the incensed group was extremely loud, they were also a tiny, tiny minority, and I don't think we should mistake their volume level as an indicator of quantity.

[hyperman1]

For me, the real names debacle was a wake up call that too much of my online life depended on Google. What if using a new product caused my email to disappear without any recourse? What if Google subscribed me for something I didn't need or care for, then wiped out my digital life because of it?

I was interested in google+, but it wasn't worth the risk. This was also the point where I stopped playing with new Google stuff, and started logging in only for email, and logging out.

Now there is no way for Google to know all this, so I assume I got classified under the 'no big deal' group in your analysis.

[Marazan]

Realnames stopped influencers who didn't use their Realnames from signing up.

If you didn't have contact with either marginalised groups who as a matter of survival didn't use their real name or ancient extremely online people who for the entirety of their internet experience had been known as a handle it wouldn't have crossed your radar.

But it was a huge thing.

[cannonedhamster]

The irony here is that no one in this comment chain is using their real name, which proves the point that there are indeed chilling effects on speech when you could be punished for a simple difference of opinion. Real names is what made me drop g+. If I want to publish something as me, I don't want another platform controlling that for me. I absolutely concur with your comment that for the people this was big for, it was huge. For the rest of the population there was no compelling reason to switch.

[skinnymuch]

That’s because HN culture isn’t to use real names or post too much in your description. Hell thats the only public thing you get. One description box. HN not using real names means nothing. They essentially and culturally have pushed that through.

[phicoh]

G+ sometimes resembles the way Mozilla develops Firefox: Lots of aspects make just a small group unhappy. However, taken together all of those unhappy groups mean that you have no early adopters left and the project fails to get traction.

[FooHentai]

>small pocket who we truly incensed. While the incensed group was extremely loud, they were also a tiny, tiny minority

Thing is, that small group is your grassroots, influencer base without which you fail to thrive. G+ never got beyond the starter 'tech nerds' blogger type adoption and out into mainstream headspace.

You don't have to bow to that crowd to succeed, but at the very least you have to avoid annoying them away from your offering.

[damnyou]

What about as an indicator of impact?

[pier25]

I think the worst problem was the terrible UI.

For example I remember how odd the two column layout looked. I'm not sure anyone has studied this, but it seemed obvious to me from the first day it was a huge mistake.

It seems like a small thing but I think there is a reason everyone (Facebook, Twitter, etc) is using a single narrow column to feed content to the scrolling user. My hypothesis is that it takes less cognitive effort to parse.

[knorker]

It was obvious. Vic even promised "oh just you wait, we have great plans for that space", followed by years of nothing.

But surely vicg wouldn't tell a lie?!

[EdiX]

> Kennedy

Glad to finally know that cancer actually has a name. Kennedy made me stop using Google Reader and the GMail web UI.

[ggggtez]

> the biggest problem was getting their own super-healthy cafeteria

That's a really bizarre position to take. Every other thing you mentioned sounds a lot more impactful than that.

[ska]

Psychology. When companies make moves to mark groups and projects as different in some way, it's not really that important what the mechanism is. It could be something objectively cheap and superficial, but still end up being a critical factor in moral and dynamics.

[znpy]

> I was an IC6 at Google

IC6 meaning... ?

[maybecorrect]

I think it means Individual Contributor (level) 6 - which is described as "Staff SWE" by https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engi...

[bduerst]

Job level. At Google the different job roles are separated into ladders, with the number representing the how high you've climbed. IC6 isn't director level but it's far from entry-level. Invoking their job level like this at the opening of their comment is an appeal to authority.

Edit: This comment is being misunderstood. Not saying it's a fallacy - appealing to authority is not always illogical.

[ultraluminous]

The GP is providing their personal insider view regarding what they perceived as mismanagement of G+, and is starting of with describing the vantage the had at the time. There are many (many) instances of appeal-to-authority on HN, but this is just plain `ol context.

Apologies if I read too much into your comment, but Appeal to Authority is a name of a logical fallacy and ascribes some sort of intellectual failure to the poster, when there's clearly none.

[horsawlarway]

I don't see it as an appeal to authority but rather as context.

There's quite a bit of context shift as you go up the ladder within an organization. The reason "why" something happened often looks very different from different perspectives.

[jjeaff]

A tangent, but a true "appeal to authority" would be using the fact that someone is an expert on a subject as the evidence for the assertions. I don't think merely mentioning that you or your source is an expert of a subject is necessarily an appeal to authority falacy.

In this case they provide their opinion and then provide the reasons and evidence for their reasoning.

[mikestew]

It's not an "appeal to authority", it's a qualification to speak on the subject. I used to work at Microsoft, but why would you care about my guess as to the internal workings of the Google+ team?

[gerash]

Here is my version of a post mortem:

Google plus interface was modern but clunky at the time. It was a Facebook clone with just a cleaner implementation. The RealName policy wasn't as big of a deal as a loud group make it out to be. The circles, though sounds good on paper, wasn't enough of a differentiator. Maintaining them takes time and is work which only a few do. Finally, internal politics perhaps also stopped the team from iterating fast enough to the feedback.

[nojvek]

Well Facebook got circles like functionality in no time. They knew the relationships, cities, schools, jobs.

Basically Facebook got to be Google+ parity faster than other way around.

Same thing with Snapchat. Instagram and WhatsApp replicated more of Snapchat than the other way around. Insta won. WhatsApp won. They are growing even though main FB.com is stagnant.

[alextp]

How is brain separate from the rest of google?

[Eug894]

Isn't it funny that people still don't use a messenger with decent filters, which assess personal ratings of posters to show you more relevant results first? Even Discourse doesn't have personal blacklists. Though its search is more advanced than Reddit's. Isn't that strange in 2019?