The other big thing was Larry pushed social on the company without really understanding social as a product, and was absolutely unable to handle the huge negative response both internally and externally to that push. This all happened at the same time Microsoft and Amazon committed to Cloud (which Google has only tepidly adopted).
The one time I met with Schmidt to explain my cloud project, he was delighted and encouraging and helped shape the design in a way that made it much more effective. He was a very effective leader (although not everybody agrees- some people think he's an arrogant asshole).
I think Page had the right idea, because if you look nowadays at people under 30 for them the Internet is represented by social networks, be it Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or even Snapchat, the internet/web represented by the browser and by visiting different websites via Google is no longer that important. I think Page realized that if Google doesn't hop on the social train they'll end up looking from the outside at a flowering walled garden in which they will have almost no relevance.
I think they had a similar idea after Apple's iPhone started gaining traction, it's only that in the case of Android Google's execution was an order of magnitude better compared to what they did with Google+. I wouldn't put the blame for the failure of Google+ on Page only, I'd also assign it to Gundotra, after all he was the man directly in charge of it all, Page's fault is that he chose and supported the wrong man for the job.
None of G+ was Page's idea. There was a product manager (who left for facebook!) who did the big pitch deck that got it rolling. Then they put Vic Gundotra in charge and gave him carte blanche to modify multiple products. I agree that was the wrong person for the job. But you can't even imagine the amount of groupthink and ego that Vic surrounded himself with.
I don't think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but social has turned out to be a growth product that led to a minefield for the successful companies (look at Twitter and Facebook now) because the growth strategies were so sketchy that people and the government ultimately had to reject them.
Ultimately, it's on Page, though. He stood up at TGIF and told all the player to "get along" when Search had made a coherent argument that coupling the Social brand with search was brand suicide. I think Google could have made a much less obnoxious social network, maybe it would have been good, but without aggressive growth strategies, it wouldn't have been popular (a lot changed since the Orkut days, most people forget Google had a social network with half a billion users at one point!)
> None of G+ was Page's idea. There was a product manager (who left for facebook!)
Didn't know that, it's cool to learn about it.
About Twitter and FB being on a minefield I agree, but I don't think that will lead to any serious consequences for them, because there's almost no political will to make things right and that happens because the voters themselves (those FB and Twitter users) have almost no interest in how those companies reached their present size. In the end any skilled politician can smell that there's no sense in going to war against a company (or against a communication medium) that consumes at least 3 or 4 hours per day, on average, of their voters' time, it's like a US politician going to war against television in the 1960s, backed when TV had just emerged, it would be public opinion suicide.
Retrospectively I still do think that Page had the right idea to try and force Social (back at that time I also thought it as a crazy idea), like I said, I think that he had sensed that Search will be of almost no use in a world where the internet/web is not represented by websites anymore. I do agree though that even as seen from the outside Page could have done a much better job of getting the Google employees behind him and behind his idea, I think that that wood and arrows metaphor he used was really, really poor and, frankly speaking, quite condescending.
Nah. Larry doesn't get a pass on this one. I was there at the time, and this (unlike, say, Cloud) clearly was one of "his" projects, something he pushed relentlessly and cared about a lot. That's why G+ was where you went if you wanted a quick and easy promo: you could launch a total embarrassing turd and just because Larry liked G+ that turd would be promotion worthy nevertheless.
Seeing the FB revenue figures today I can see why he cared, but I think he undermined the long term prospects of the company with this shit quite a bit, and distracted it from more valuable pursuits as well. That's all on him, not on Gundotra.
Google is not going to sell every g*damn email you ever sent for $$$, but Facebook will and does. So there was never as much profit there for Google as for Facebook because Google was run more ethically.
Never say never. Companies pretty routinely do surprisingly underhanded/unethical things once they begin to experience financial difficulties, if not on their own then under pressure from investors.
That was because you couldn't "sign up" for Orkut. You had to receive an invitation from someone who already has an account. Therefore it spread in regions where people knew one another, instead of spreading smoothly.
The reason why they kept it like that was because of the processing power that was needed to serve the pages. That was more than search. Every individual had to be served a different page. And computing at that time weren't as cheap.
Facebook was the first large practical social network among these where you can actually go and signup an account on your own when it was fully open. And they did it by heavily optimizing their code and hardware. That was a separate challenge, which seemed to me Google was unwilling to take for Orkut or anything social at that time.
>Facebook was the first social network where you can actually go and signup an account on your own.
That's doubly false :)
First, all social networks that preceded it (LiveJournal and MySpace were big amongst my peers) had open sign-ups.
Second, Facebook became popular because the sign-up was not open. You needed to have an .edu email address to sign up. This was a feature, as it kept parents and younger siblings off the networks. Having a FB account was a literal right of passage, something you can only get once you go to college. It spread because of that; those were the great days of FB.
Very interesting. Social media today is a much more refined offering than google+. Google feels like microsoft nowadays. It’s something for adults to get things done. Your personal stuff happens on DM’s, instagram, snapchat, tiktok... much more so for young people. Therefore keeping search and social separated was a good thing.
That’s interesting. I think Google would have been better aiming for something closer to Twitter instead of trying to copy and mimic Facebook with Google+. Google’s core strength has been organizing information as a data first company versus facilating social connections.
The original pitch deck for G+ (https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-presentation-that-...) really laid out a compelling view for a social network that worked well for people who had multiple distinct subnetworks ad they didn't want to cross the streams. Personally I thought the presentation was brilliant and I was behind the general strategy until Vic took over and started to wield the plus-hammer.
That strategy is dumb because in practice people don't mind or prefer using distinct apps for each of their subnetworks; and when these networks start overlapping in the same app, they start posting less (Facebook's problem), creating multiple accounts ("finstas" on Instagram), or bifurcating their real friends to another app (Snapchat 3 years ago).
Hell the fact that Snapchat succeeded in growing a credible threat to Facebook with a fraction of the engineering and marketing resources as Google+ should tell you how wrong that strategy was...
Each of the networks grew initially by providing an insanely better experience specific to a subnetwork (FB for alumni networks, Insta for narcissistic hobby photographers with its filters, Snapchat for horny teens who want to send nude pics, or who want to be goofy with its funny face filters...)
There were a few niches where Google+ unintentionally ended up being successful, such as internal to enterprise, and for pro photographers who liked that pictures had an option to be hosted uncompressed. But the vision overall had poor market fit and would never have latched on to a dense enough subnetwork to succeed IMO.
I for one would like to thank Larry for messing this up.
While current situation is far from perfect (looking at you Mark Z), I don't think having the Borg being the top dog on both Search and Social would have been a great thing at all.
You mean: "the top dog in search, online videos, web analytics, web ads, and social".
It could have been a bit worse. It could have been a lot better as well: google already has one of its fingers on about half the pages of the Internet.
Yes, but imagine what could have happened if Google had gone all-in on cloud instead of social in 2011. Instead of seeing some lackluster earnings from a still totally dominated-by-ads-revenue Google, we would have seen a roaring revenue engine fuelled by cloud growth. TBH that was really Google's market to win because they had all the infrastructure to do it in 2011, but didn't want to expand in cloud because it was perceived as low-profit-margin compared to ads.
"if you look nowadays at people under 30 for them the Internet is represented by social networks, be it Facebook"
I'm not under 30, and can't really say, but I've read frequently in the media that young people don't use Facebook. I use it to a limited extent, and I think everyone I know that uses it is 30-40ish.
I'm sure Larry Page is a smart guy, and Page Rank was clever, but I'm not really sure there's any particular reason to believe he knows where any industry is moving. Schmidt could predict technology trends well, while Page seems to just throw acquisitions at a wall, see what sticks, then sunset anything that doesn't.
most of pagerank predates larry; several people were already looking at using centrality measures for page ranking before him. And I think Brin contributed a lot more of the math and theory than Page ever did.
Yeah, Sergey was better with numbers. Like that time when a PM was showing a new payment product on stage and he asked "was that your real credit card number?". She confirmed it was, to which he replied "Anyone could have memorized it... [starts reciting the digits, with the demo already at the next screen]".
The one time I met with Schmidt to explain my cloud project, he was delighted and encouraging and helped shape the design in a way that made it much more effective. He was a very effective leader (although not everybody agrees- some people think he's an arrogant asshole).