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Comment by Cheyana | Hacker News Reader

It amazes me that a company with all the resources that Google has repeatedly coming up with ideas and doing absolutely nothing effective with them. They've had some winners, like Chrome, and their acquisition of Youtube eventually paid off, but something as simple as a social media site and the best they can come up with from scratch is Google+.

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As I understand it, Google is not well optimized for putting out new mass market customer-facing services and keeping them going. Their entire organizational hierarchy actually runs counter to this very idea, and you know, people at Google are just like people everywhere else. That is to say, they are just people.

The fact that every now and then they have a success speaks better of the specific team driving it than it does of Google as a whole organization. That is usually the case with any corporation though.

So basically, you can have all the resources in the world, but if you’re not organized well, then you will not accomplish your goals more efficiently than your smaller competitors. The fact that your competitors are comparatively resource starved probably helps them optimize better than you can, because what is just a side project to you is their entire existence to them.

> As I understand it, Google is not well optimized for putting out new mass market customer-facing services and keeping them going.

I've been reading the threads about Google killing off products - to the point where it's become a meme. Lost in this are the number of products killed off by other large tech firms. A shame because sometimes objectivity is lost in the analysis.

Your phrasing got me thinking about some of Google's successes (off the top of my head):

They have old successes in search and gmail. In these cases, they climbed their way to the top. The have google.docs, youtube (oldish) but entering TV/Movies now, android (not that old), Chrome Browser, ChromeOS & their entry into schools, translate, google.storage, maps, that dohickey used to stream video to TV sets (can't remember the name:)...

Google Plus probably deserves a quick death. I just wouldn't underestimate Google by downplaying their successes.

Youtube - Aquisition

Android - Aquisition

Maps - Aquisition

Docs - Aquisition

Google is great at scaling up aquisitions and optimizing them for the audience.

Survivorship bias here. There are lots of other Google acquisitions that sank without a trace.

It seems the hit rate is low whether inside or outside Google.

The hit rate isn't as important as how well the hits perform. The list above has done quite well, and I highly doubt that Google has spent as much on the losers as the winners have made for them. If so, Google would be out of business (or close to it).

> Google is great at scaling up aquisitions and optimizing them for the audience.

I'm not sure if I buy this line of thinking related to Google only. It just sounds like another dig. Most big tech companies are fairly good at either scaling acquisitions or buying them for their IP/Talent. Some big tech companies can't even get this right.

I'm still forced to ask myself: what was Android or Maps before the acquisition?

If we compare, for example, the hacked version of CP/M (that later become DOS) with Windows 10... can we not say the same for Android - pre-acquisition? Google has certainly done much more than simply optimizing it.

If it's basically an idea that Google's buying: the idea of a hut. Optimizing that hut might be akin to building a skyscrapper. At what point does Google get credit for actually building something useful vs "optimizing and scaling" (which I think has become another meme)?

This also still leaves us with Chrome, ChromeOS, Entry into schools, some hardware, and a host of other stuff someone more in tune with Google could address.

If the response is that Chrome is based on Linux, then the counter is that macOS is based on BSD. The question remains, what is Google doing differently from other tech firms. Might they actually be building a better mousetrap (re: their successes)?

Not a fan of Google. Just think that too often people box companies in and disparage the actual work they do while, in the meantime... they take over the world.

To make it clearer:

Maps - Acquired 14 years ago

Android - Acquired 13 years ago

Docs - Acquired 12 years ago

YouTube - Acquired 12 years ago

Are we assuming Google didn't change or innovate with those at all in last 10 years?

Maps - mainly cosmetic changes, though most of that was significant improvements

Android - significantly improved all over

Docs - never a big user, don't really know

YouTube - significantly better video quality, significantly worse user experience with everything else

Maps and Youtube got worse.

Well, he did add that they were scaled up and optimized. That's where most of Google's innovation and engineering hours are spent on those products.

> that dohickey used to stream video to TV sets (can't remember the name:)...

Chromecast and it's probably one of the best things Google has built in recent years. It's entirely removed the need for me to hook up a media PC to the TV, and now I can just stream content from the home server. Also multi-participant Youtube parties are a thing, and work well (everyone can add things to a shared queue).

> Chromecast and it's probably one of the best things Google has built in recent years.

Yes, I love mine … and yet, why doesn't it have a remote. No, my phone is not a suitable remote: it's locked, so I must unlock it before I can do TV stuff with it. Also, for some reason Chromecast & my phone tend to desync a fair amount of time.

I've never been happy with the Apple TVs I've used, either (the UI is pretty painful), but at least they have remotes.

We've got a Chromecast and a Chromecast audio and whenever something is playing on either of them any Android phone in the house gets the ability to pause, skip or change the volume from the lock screen.

A remote doesn't make sense for it honestly.

It's still faster to pick up a remote & hit a physical button (possibly without even looking at it) than to pick up a phone, tap it to awaken it, wait for the screen to power on, look at it, find the button to pause & then hit it.

I would pay $20–$50 for a decent remote. I'd also love for the Chromecast to have the ability to use my accounts to play entertainment directly from that remote.

Sounds like you want an Android TV, or a Fire TV with Kodi+Plex+Kore+NewPipe+etc

I don't know what you mean? The G+ UI is pretty good, certainly a lot better than Facebook was at the time when G+ launched. For a while, a lot of people were happy there, particularly in certain niches like photography.

It's a shame the implementation was so complex (apparently) that now it can't be easily maintained. This does seem to happen to Google a lot. It probably has more to do with too many resources, rather than not enough.

But maybe it's not simple to compete with Facebook. Maybe this has little to do with technology.

I don't know, but the whole Circles things was overcomplicated and average users didn't bother to put their followers into different circles, I am not sure how they thought this would work.

Well, that's true. But being able to follow people (like on Twitter, not like friending on Facebook) is nice. As is not having character limits.

Circles was fantastic, and continues to be what I wish for in a lot of other networks. Mainly because there are people I follow loosely (don't mind seeing the occasional update from), and people I follow religiously (because I know them personally or care about every single thing they say). I used to maintain really primarily two feeds. One I cared to always read all the time, and one I'd browse when I was bored.

G+ mostly mitigated the frustration of it for people who didn't care years ago: You can just click follow and it puts them in a default following circle.

Circles is great for geeks who like to have such fine-grained control over their lives, both online and offline. For the rest of the world it doesn't really matter, and even if it does it is too difficult to set up and maintain. A company called Hyves in the Netherlands did much the same thing (but with a fairly crappy UI) long before Google+ came along. That fell to FB as well.

Perhaps I'm not average, but I certainly liked the ideas of separating my posts to family, close-friends, friendly-friends, and work-friends! Not because of secrecy, but just to be relevant/inoffensive. Not to mention people who DO have parts of their life they want to have, but also have separate. If a student wants to come out of the closet among close friends and discuss things openly without having that in their parents/grandparents/that one uncle's face, that seems like a pretty solid idea.

The only reason I didn't use it on G+ is that no one outside of my RPG circles was on it in the first place.

Are you seriously implying that concept of groups of people is too complicated for most human beings? O.o

I believe they're saying the interface was bad, not that the concept was hard. Friend lists are used all the time on Facebook.

> as simple as a social media site

um "simple"? walks off cackling maniacally into the sunset

I've never worked at Google, but some of the commentary I've seen from people who have worked there suggests that performance reviews and promotions (at the senior levels) are heavily gated on your roles in releasing new products to users, with maintenance of existing products factoring in very little, if at all.

They should modify it so after launch it is based on active users. That will keep good things growing.

G+ wasn't that bad, technically speaking. They just failed at managing the political aspects of it, focusing too brutally on their own requirements, to the detriment of users' own: "we want your real names, so we can be the authority of record for everything! And we won't let you hack anything of importance on top of the platform, because we want our content clean!"... Compare with the free-for-all hacking bonanza that early twitter was, or the spam machine that Facebook is - social networks are powered by oversharing, an activity that G+ actively resisted in many different ways.

But technically speaking, they had the best support for high-quality photos, good features for private groups, and a few other wins on features like Hangouts.

RealNameGate was the tipping point from OK to bad IMHO. When they forced the issue, they lost a lot of goodwill. They should have done something similar to the optimal implementation of Twitter verified, merely to authenticate identity if the user desires (without bungling it as badly as Twitter has done).

doesn’t facebook require real name? that was g+ competition, and everything was referenced to that.

Not really. I think it was policy back when it was for colleges, when they exploded they basically renounced it because it was a hassle to check. Most people simply kept doing it, because if your friends use their name why should you hide?

something as simple as a social media site

Ironically, this is exactly the attitude that led Google to fail in social media! Why do you think it's simple? Because you think it's technologically simple?

Old Chinese proverb: He who chases two rabbits catches none.

Well, Apple failed with Ping, so I sometimes think that social media is a lot harder than any of us think.

According to my taste and requirements Google+ is (or was before they started adding unnecessary complexity to its model) by far the best social network I've ever seen. In fact "It amazes me that a company with all the resources that Google has repeatedly…" behaved like "the president of Madagascar" shutting down everything...[1]

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shut-down-everything

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