Why Google can’t build Instagram | Hacker News Reader

Why Google can’t build Instagram

scobleizer.com

137 pointsedanm47 comments

I'm not sure I agree with everything Scoble wrote, but it's definitely interesting. One thing I think he doesn't really talk about: whether Google wants to build things like Instagram.

The Google Wave example is a telling one - Wave wasn't the success Google wanted, so they scratched it. Nevermind that there were great uses for Google Wave, and there were probably hundreds of thousands of users on it, at least, who really liked it. In Google's eyes, Wave didn't succeed in becoming the huge hit they wanted, so it was a failure.

A small startup would have considered it a huge deal and pivoted on Wave's good uses until they turned it into a much larger project, IMO.

> "...and there were probably hundreds of thousands of users on it"

I'd be really surprised if usage was that high. I'd believe there being maybe a few thousand using it regularly.

I know 3 completely separate (and non-tech focused) groups of people (each 30+) that were/are running on Wave and are each pretty upset that its going away. I know that each of them came to swear by Wave for almost all intra-team communication.

It wouldnt be a stretch for active users to run into the high tens of thousands. Unfortunately, thats tiny compared to the usage of Google's high-profile projects, so it gets killed.

If you want a conversation between more than two people, Wave kicks everything's ass. And unless you're the kind of group that's comfortable with setting yourself up a phpBB, I can't even think of anything that comes close.

Wave's problem wasn't that it's not useful, it's that nobody knew about it (of people I know, it had 0 adoption outside of computer geeks), and it couldn't integrate with desktop applications. A lot of us are stubbornly hanging on to Mail.app and Entourage because they integrate with our workflow better than web based solutions.

If google had come out with a a desktop Wave client that worked with OSX's address book, photo libraries, etc, it would have had a lot more draw. That sort of integration is less expected on Windows, but I'm sure they could have come up with some compelling features that the website didn't offer.

I completely agree. I know from my experience that if I could have just put in my normal Google Apps email and pushed everything through Wave, I would never look back. The fact that it was a self-contained, closed system killed a lot of its usefulness.

The technology behind it seems to have made it into Google Docs (real time collaborative editing). There are plenty of people using Google Docs.

Great article, but I'd like to contest a few points.

4. Google forces its developers to use its infrastructure, which wasn’t developed for small social projects

One of the advantages of working for Google is that you get access to this infrastructure. At times I wish Google would start offering a raw BigTable service alongside/instead of the richer, but, limited App Engine services.

6. Google’s engineers can’t use any Facebook integration or dependencies like Instagram does.

I don't know if such a policy exists, but it certainly doesn't seem to apply to projects like YouTube which integrate fine with YouTube.

7. Google can’t iterate in semi-public.

If anything, Google have proven that a large company can iterate publicly. I can't think of a single other company that has had as many perpetual betas as Google...

P.S. Corrected link to Instagram: http://instagr.am/

4 is particularly interesting to me. When I worked at Yahoo! back in 2005 I was constantly jealous of Google's infrastructure stuff - Yahoo! stuff was all replicated MySQL, PHP, memcached and Java while Google appeared to be creating infrastructure that totally changed the way you approached large scale development.

In the past five years, it feels like the world outside Google has mostly caught up - in part through open source equivalents of Google's secret sauce. Hadoop, EC2, S3, the various NoSQL engines, RabbitMQ, Thrift, Scribe... access to the Google stack may not be as big an advantage.

I spoke to a Google engineer recently who complained that the Google stack was actually something of a pain to build agains, with a very steep learning curve and a great deal of innertia to work around.

Totally agreed that the world outside Google has mostly caught up. An equivalent for BigTable and associated libraries is still missing though. Hypertable, HBase, KDI and even Cassandra are extremely poor substitutes. I often end up resorting to App Engine for many projects but wish that there was a true open source substitute.

Another one:

5. Google’s services need to support every platform

Google services need to support every platform eventually, but nothing stops them from releasing something working on a single platform first. As I recall, Google Chrome was available only for Windows when it was first released.

I think this article suffers from hindsight bias. No, Google is not going to come with with every successful app or web service in the industry, and no, not every product it releases is going to be wildly successful. But saying Google has an innovation problem because it can't build an app like Instagram is like saying Warren Buffet has an investing problem because he didn't buy stock in Apple right before the iPhone was released.

Google's process isn't geared to create novelty hits in the app store, and Buffet's method doesn't lead him to pick high flying tech stocks. But Google and Buffet are still doing fine.

Agree that #7 is off. Scoble mentions bug testing and engagement from the outside community and says that "Google can't do this", but the fact is that they do. Just the other day here on HN there was a post by a Google engineer on the Chromium project asking for code commits from outside, and asking junior programmers to build Chrome and start committing bug fixes: http://www.aaronboodman.com/2010/10/wherein-i-help-you-get-g...

I am relatively new here, not based in US, and a bit confused: why is Instagram considered somewhat a huge success in the tone of the article, that Google HAS to learn from it? There has been free iPhone Apps with similar growth before. There's no clear monetization method. There's nothing that competitors can't copy in a week. So what am I missing? Is there something I fail to see here, in the context of what makes it a successful startup?

Scoble routinely equates buzz in the SF PR scene with commercial success.

meh, Instagram seems pretty useless to me. Google builds more cool stuff in an average month than Instagram ever has.

This is the key I think. For every instagram there are hundreds of half baked products that never make it past the initial stages (hell, I have tried to build a few..)

At Google such things often do get past the initial stages, and then flop. Even more probably gets shoved under the carpet.

Google are quite openly trying out the different projects, looking for a hit. Classic example; Gmail. Slightly different because that was a "hit" internally first, but the basic idea applies. A project that ended up working well, resources got thrown at it and, some hiccups later, a really huge success.

Instagram seems to have made something people want.

> Tonight I was talking with an exec at Google and I brought up the success of Instagr.am (they’ve gotten more than 500,000 downloads in just a few weeks) and asked him “why can’t Google do that?”

First of all the number of downloads, especially during the period of initial hype, is not a very useful metric. But even assuming that Instagram is an amazingly successful product, it's still a little fish comparing to Google. This company is more interested in developing Android, a platform on which toys like that can be built, which by the way has more than 200,000 activations per day.

You beat me to the punch on this. I am very impressed with Instagram's success, but to say 'why can't Google build a product with half a million users?' is so completely wrong-headed that I don't even know where to begin.

huh?

Google have built instagram. It's standard on any Android phone. [photo] -> [share] -> picasa/twitter/facebook/gmail/etc

Unless I'm missing something, instagram is a 'feature' that should be on any smartphone. Not surprising it's not on the iPhone though.

(First I'd heard of instagram as well. This is an interesting way to get PR).

instagram applies vintage filters, so digital modern photos look like the ones from a cheap used old camera

that is a problem for instagram - it isn't defensible atm. I imagine the Android team will look at it and think 'really, so people want to do that - ok, lets add filters in the next release' and done.

I know, I wouldn't use instagram or these filters anyways, but people seem to like this hipster stuff. Bigger problem for them is, they have to think what to offer their users before these vintage-effect photos stop being trendy.

Ehh, they don't have to worry about that until the cameras on phones stop being so shit. The reason people like the vintage effects is that lots of phones end up taking blurry, slightly out of focus, under and over exposed photos. Slap some vintage filters on that and it looks somewhat charming.

Now, on the other hand, take some serious optics and truths same and unless you explicitly start blowing things out on the photo you've got something weird and artificial looking.

The filters are part of it, because of the way they gloss over crap/boring photos with a layer of nostalgia.

But there are plenty of camera apps on the iphone that have filters (often exactly the same ones) and can post to facebook/flickr/picasa -- and they haven't generated the interest Instagram has.

There's more to it, and it really does seem to be the social-network-seeing-what-your-friends-doing part.

This.

The iPhone's Camera and Photos application lets you share photos the same as you might on Android.

The point wasn't that Google can't make the technology, of course it can. The point was that Google can't create the product.

Besides, Instagram isn't even a key part of the post. Swap in any other hot startup of the week and it's still the same point: Google has an innovation problem (according to Scoble).

I'd never heard of it, it's free (hard to monetize), seriously, I'm not sure Google are that worried.

There'll always be some hot new fad. I don't think Google would be doing any good getting into the game of creating hot new fads.

Unless I'm missing something

You are. Instagr.am is itself a social network and at least as much about looking at photos as sharing them. Where sharing is concerned, it's aimed at sharing across multiple sites at once, and quickly. The filters, as cheesy as many people find them, have a tendency to induce already snap-happy users to take and share more photos with their friends who then ask "How can I do that?"

Scoble doesn't point out why he see's instagram as the pinnacle of innovation, apart from the fact they've received a high number of downloads.

Instagram's success stems from the viral nature of wanting to try out these filter's that you've seen others using. Dont get me wrong, Instagram is a nice little service. But not the right example when compared to Google's recent failures in Wave and Buzz.

Besides, Google houses plenty of innovative products that match the success of Instagram.

Google's problem with its lack off 'innovation' within its recent failures stems from its products not being user led. Wave and Buzz solved no immediate problem for your average user. And I'm not so certain Instagram does.

Google could never create Instagram simply because creating a frivolous app based around styling your photos just doesn't align with their brand values. I can imagine the Google Engineers now, "So why are we using a sepia filter exactly?"

Google goes for apps you might call big and wide. Broadly useful tools that you can make intensive use of and that capitalize on Google's strengths. GMail is an example of this, but Mail is a well-known product area. Wave and Buzz were attempts to create innovative new ones.

Instagram is a tiny little toy camera app hooked up to a website. It's very narrow-interest. It's not the kind of thing you wrap your workday around or rely upon.

I agree with a lot of what he wrote, but his own list of reasons why Google can't innovate refutes his assertion that they can "...by buying companies like Instagram".

Once a company is acquired, all of the same constraints that apply to internal Google projects now apply to it. They are Google for all intents and purposes. "Strategy taxes" now apply, they'll have to port their iPhone app to Android, port their systems to Google infrastructure, and so on.

That is, if the acquisition doesn't get gutted entirely and its employees redistributed to other projects. See AppJet, Jaiku, JotSpot, etc. The "Google Blackhole", or talent acquisitions.

This comparison is absurd. Would anyone use it if Google did build Instagram? I can see it now:

They built the world's fastest, most reliable, most relevant search engine on the planet, the most usable webmail and map apps... and then a dinky photo-sharing smartphone app with three features?

Projecting my own biases onto google: Maybe it's just because Instagram is the very definition of all sizzle, no steak?

It is innovative in the "gee nice idea" sense but it not at all innovative in the sense that our collective knowledge or capabilities have expanded as a result of its creation.

Great point. Instagram is beautiful, fun and seems to really make people happy, but I would much rather see continue to focus on its core mission and tackle problems that no one else can.

Scoble responds to our HN discussion:

http://twitter.com/#!/Scobleizer/status/3154038992412672

Instead of tweeting and cinching, why not just click the reply link? There are plenty on the page.

Because he can change your perception of the message a lot more narrating it than by writing it down (which is something cold). Or he's just lazy to type it.

Scoble's blog post's thesis was 'Google could never build Instagram.' He seems to have changed his argument: 'guys, you don't get it, Instagram is innovative!'

Clearly Instagram is on to something, and I think they are doing some innovative work, but that has nothing to do with whether or not Google could build this.

Also, a stopped clock is still right twice a day: sure, Scoble was right about Twitter (and possibly right about Foursquare...we'll see), but he seems to call everything innovative and exciting. The products that flop are swept under the rug and forgotten, and the ones that make it are trumpeted as evidence of prescience.

Maybe they can, maybe they can't, but do they want to? I'd bet Google's going after fish so big that two guys can't do everything from start to finish.

The gist is, Google (and Microsoft) are brands that are already associated with "web-scale" software. So, if they make something new, people expect it to be engineered to be web-scale from the beginning, not a bloated prototype that relies on other tiny/bloated third-party services (and definitely not on services from their competitors.) I think this is just an image problem, though—couldn't Google get around this simply by not saying that the projects are "by Google" until they're popular? Publishers call this an "imprint."

Because Google isn't stupid enough to waste engineering resources on such a small niche that will never grow into a million dollar market.

If you ever read the Innovator's Dilemma, this article makes a lot of sense. For a project to make financial sense for a big company, or appeal to its current user base, it has to get big fast, be scalable off the batt and be compatible with their current software. So, it's iteration speed goes way down. Think about Buzz. They couldn't launch to 1,000 users and iterate quickly as they grew. They had to release it to everyone. Imagine the pre-launch engineering required to make an app ready for tens of millions of users?

I think success is very abstract concept and it is also about expectations of companies/people.

Can Instagram be a success from google's perspective?

The answer is no. This article seems to be written to help some friends getting attention. Imagine this conversation between these folks and a google exec:

For which mobile platforms is it available? Only for iPhone, but it's got 500,000 downloads in just a few weeks.

Is it internationalized? you know we are a worldwide company. No, but it's got 500,000 downloads in just a few weeks.

Can it scale to serve our millons of users worldwide? No, but it's got 500,000 downloads in just a few weeks.

Do you have a plan to monetize this? No, but it's got 500,000 downloads in just a few weeks.

> He had done his own startup and knew the man-month myth. For every person you add to a team, he said, iteration speed goes down.

That phenomenon is Brooks's Law, and first appeared in The Mythical Man-Month:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

The only ways you'll get an Instagram out of Google is

a) Google finds some serious way to monetize it

b) Someone gets a 20% wild hair

A more detailed and BS-free list than the average one on this topic. I think all of these are good explanations of the problem.

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