[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.