[inthewoods]

Right on - for me, it is that they could not make the fundamental decision of whether or not Google+ was a place or connective tissue between places. I can only guess, but it seems to me like a reaction to Facebook - they felt the need to differentiate from them and thus created this awkward construct. As I mentioned above, I think the winning strategy would have been to define Google+ as a place - the place to share stuff from all your other Google apps/sites really easily - basically create a feed of all your stuff from across the Google universe.

They've got some of it, but it doesn't quite work (for me at least) because of small gaps - like the fact that Chromecast works with Youtube, but not with Google+ Photos - thus in order to use Chromecast to display the wonderful video I just took, I have to essentially download it and reupload it to Youtube. Google+ Photos likely leverages the same tech as Youtube, but they're clearly being developed separately and that just seems silly.

Other people have put the fault on designers - to me this is a failure of product management and ultimately management to pull together the various forces that I'm sure exist within Google. And I don't think that was easy and that's why I say that Vic has some measure of success.

Google+ is, for me, almost really good - but it falls down in enough places that I would consider switching, for instance, if Dropbox came up with a full office suite to match Google Drive (which they seem to be working on).