[michaelochurch]

Facebook succeeded in a crowded space, full of mediocre but wealthy competition, because of where it started. It began at Harvard, moved out to the Ivies, then the top 100 universities, then all universities, then everyone. By this point, it had iterated its way out of the technical failings of the initial product (except for the use of PHP, which still hasn't been entirely undone).

Google+, when it started, was superior in almost every way to Facebook in its first few years. (That's not a fair comparison. Facebook was a startup social network; Google+ came out of the gate at 120 mph.) It had Hangouts, which would have been a killer app if people had actually used them as a sharable social space (i.e. to "hang out") as the execs thought they would. The problem was that Google thought its muscle would allow it to take a greatest-fixed-point approach (i.e. a "stay popular once popular" strategy) whereas any social network needs to focus on the least fixed point, because that's where it's going to land. It had wealth but no users and no credibility, and it wasn't able to get those.

Hangouts are genuinely useful and there was some guy at Google who argued that courting independent game developers (and getting high quality products, rather than third-string products and Zyngarbage from mainstream publishers who expected Google+ to fail and weren't going to use their best stuff) would have allowed Google+ to grow organically and inductively, with the same "cognitively upscale" initial user base that made Facebook, thus proving Hangouts and moving to progressively larger subsets of the population. It became obvious that the failure of Google Games (and, possibly, of Google+ in its entirety) came from Google's leadership not listening to him. I wonder whatever happened to that guy.

[powera]

The one person at Google more wrong than Vic Gundotra still thinks that G+ failed because people didn't listen to HIM enough. How shocking. (and seriously, do you really think one person could have fixed the turd of G+ even with a billion dollar idea?)

[sheepmullet]

Listening to him couldn't have made G+ any more of a failure.

[michaelochurch]

Google+ needed to establish a core group of users who (a) weren't associated with Google, and (b) liked their offering better than Facebook, and (c) were in a space that Facebook would have trouble taking over. Games was prime territory, because Facebook fucked it up by letting Zynga be its tapeworm for so long. If we could show caution and attention to quality in this space, people would have been more likely to trust us in a time when they were (much moreso than now) upset with Facebook.

U.S. Facebook engagement was actually dropping in 2011 and the Zynga games were the reason why. People hated those games.

Google+ could have gotten some more air time with that idea. What they did with it, I can't predict. Sometimes, more air time means not crashing; sometimes, it just means crashing later. It would have had a chance with Real Games, though, and I'll take "a chance" over "no chance" any day of the week.

Anyway, I'm glad that Google lost. A closed-allocation company with stack ranking deserves to get beaten. So there.

[S4M]

> U.S. Facebook engagement was actually dropping in 2011 and the Zynga games were the reason why. People hated those games.

That doesn't make any sense. Facebook goal is to have people staying connected to Facebook as much time as possible. Be it to check their friends status, the fan page of their idols or to play whatever game is trending. If Zynga's games are popular, the better for them since they monetize that popularity, and the better for Facebook since people spend more time on their platform, and they can water their virtual crops or whatever in between checking the cat pictures some friend posted and reading about the new thing some other friend's baby did. If Zynga's games lose their popularity, someone else will overtake them (it was King with Candy Crush) and Facebook will not be impacted.

[dredmorbius]

Why nobody gets the Harvard connection and phased growth through Ivies and selective universities I just don't get.

Games I'm not so sure. Addictive yes. But so's crack, and that doesn't make for a good neighborhood.

I cheared, loudly, when Games died.