[plainnoodles]

> so he drives to the Google parking lot on a weekend and finds no one there. Obviously Google+ wasn't a serious enough concern to Google that would require weekend hours so the author concluded (correctly) that its not the existential threat that Facebook thought it was.

This line of reasoning was viscerally distressing for me to read. Both for what it implies the FB guy thinks about what productivity/seriousness looks like, and for the brittleness of the reasoning used to draw his conclusion.

[UncleMeat]

Especially with the benefit of hindsight, imagine thinking that the reason why Google+ failed was because the engineers weren't working enough hours.

[marssaxman]

Did Google+ really fail, though? It seemed to me that their primary goal was less about building a social network and more about preventing Facebook from owning the whole digital identity space: that is, Google+ was a response to the wave of "Log in with Facebook" buttons sweeping the web at the time. While the social network never took off, Google did successfully prevent Facebook from becoming a gateway to the web.

[md_]

Very much what you said.

I'd love an explanation of what technical delivery failures--not the right functionality, or delivered too late--the author thinks led to G+ not beating Facebook.

[bko]

I think its a bit of a resources curse. Google+ goes live and instantly they have tens to hundreds of millions of users.

If you bootstrapped a social media company and you have that many users, you'd likely read it as a signal that you're doing something right. But with Google that's baked in to their brand and connections with existing services. So it takes a lot of skill to tease out signal from noise. How many people actually find this valuable and how can we iterate? Again, its relatively straight forward for most companies by tracking a few key metrics, but with Google the dataset it just polluted.

It also wasn't existential for their survival. If Facebook failed, it would have brought down everything, so they were very much invested in the product and geared all resources to ensure survival. With Google+ it was just a feather in the cap and not a priority

[md_]

I think the "resource curse" hypothesis is interesting, but there's also a simpler explanation: social networking is an _extremely_ sticky, winner-take-all market.

Google+ isn't the only competitor to fail to unseat Facebook. I think that says far more about Facebook than it does about Google+.

[dekhn]

The FB guy demonstrated how thoughtless his mental model of successful companies was, and eventually got what he deserved.

Google+ worked differently from the rest of the company and definitely had a few all-nighters and all-weekenders (those folks had haunted eyes) but only because people thought they could parlay their efforts into promotions or more influence at work.

Amusingly, Google+ got turned into a commercial product (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Currents) which is being slowly wound down. The only successful Google+ community i ever saw was inside google (in the internal corp Google+) and even then, almost nobody who joined after ~2018 even knew it existed (instead, most people just used memegen). My current employer had it, and it was a ghost town.