[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.).