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Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

This is how you make decisions quickly: "Fuckit, youtube is the biggest video site, gmail is the biggest mail server, and people have accounts on there! What's Facebook got that we don't! From now on errybody gets a Google+ account. Want to post on YouTube - bam, there's your real name. Do you have a gmail? Now you have Google+. Let's see Facebook compete with that! That's it, decision made. Go!"

I think on the surface this kind of a decision is a fantastic quick, touch decision, and one that fast-moving, risk-taking, companies can quickly try and implement. Unfortunately for Google, sometimes making tough decisions quickly is the wrong kind of quick.

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It does however make the person making those decisions look "dynamic" and "decisive", which means by the time the damage they have caused starts getting noticed they'll already have been promoted out of the blast zone.

In the end it didn't cost them anything though did it? They gave it a decent shot and ultimately perhaps the only other decision to take was not to try and make a social network at all.

I for one don't think they gave it a decent shot. What I mean is that I, and others, were annoyed by the heavy-handed attempt, and didn't see its value. This is despite the fact that Facebook leaves loads to be desired - even Facebook internal propaganda says "People don't use facebook because they like facebook - they use facebook because they like their friends."

Of course, all of my friends are on YouTube or Gmail. But I'm not social networking with them on Google+. Something was missing.

Opportunity cost and a lot of good will, but it's hard to measure both of those things.

There's always a cost. Time, effort, losing people that didn't want everything to be connected, exposing privacy (remembered that people weren't aware when G+ names were replacing youtube ones and exposed their comments).

Lots of goodwill, brand equity, and trust lost. Particularly among thought leaders and the technorati. The amount of dysfunction revealed by the G+episode is pretty staggering, really.

Having Snowden's disclosures hit in the midst of that didn't help either.

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