Larry Page: one-year anniversary of taking over Google's CEO

> Before G+, people made fun of Google for not doing social

Google did 'social' before Google+, it was called Buzz (leaving Orkut, my dear Google Reader and Google Wave alone).

And people "made fun", if we want to call it that way, because of Google Buzz's lack of buzz.

> despite all the hate from the Valley folk and HNers

I don't think that's true.

They don't have a good product (yet?). No one uses Google+ besides nerds and people who work at Google.

It makes it all the more irritating that they are forcing a non-compelling product down the throats of everyone. The only happiness generated from this is in their own egos.

He's trying to run the company more like Apple, which is what Steve Job's recommended that Larry do. It comes down to doing a few things well and focusing. Probably a lesson that we all need to learn.

> There must be some sort of group behaviour explanation to this.

Inasmuch as Google acts and observers all sharing the same planet react, sure.

Let's run down the list!

- Perceived decline in search quality. They've remedied this to a decent extent, but when your SERPs are full of spammy, scrape-y dogshit for the better part of 18 months, that's going to ding your brand a bit.

- Shoe-horning Google+ into SERPs. Clutters a UI that was once sacred, often with content of lesser value than crawlable content from other platforms.

- Sharing user information across Google products that users considered to be separate. Complicated. Good for Google – helps their business. Not unreasonable for users to be suspicious.

- For special bonus points: Every time Schmidt's mouth has opened for the last three years, the creepiest shit pours out.

Google's willingness – delight? – to be misunderstood for long periods of time is laudable, but costly in terms of potentially irreplaceable goodwill.

They killed my fantastic google reader experience, and forced the "social" aspect of it into G+. This might seem shallow on my side, but I am still livid about this. They completely ruined the reader experience for me. They tried to mesh too much social into one product. Too many generalities, not enough specialization. Even with their "circles". Now I don't even use reader, when it used to be my crack fix.

Also, I added the Hacker News circle on G+, and all of the sudden I have 1704395784390582430 contacts in gchat. mother eff.

Also, I had a perfectly one off custom color scheme in gmail, and I couldn't transfer it over to the new style. now I'm just bickering. I'm really only legitimately pissed about reader.....

It could be a lot of people just think they are moving in the wrong direction, or perhaps no direction at all, in the last year. In my case the Google services I use are Docs, which has seen almost no improvement in ages, GMail which in my opinion took a step backwards, and Android which has only improved because I spent a few hours loading an ICS ROM onto my unsupported phone. They're not giving me much to be positive about right now. I'm not interested in Google+ and the more it's been shoved in my face the less interested I get.

In a few words, they are not thinking as much as before as to what Their core clients want. I.e. better search, among other things.

Shoving Google+ in everyone's mouth was not a smart move. Not everyone likes social media, and sharing stuff. Google used to serve the people who were primarily interested in "reading" the web, not necessarily participating into its content.

And the fact that Larry Page considers the move as "successful" and obviously does not acknowledge that they have any kind of issue is concerning. They are NOT listening to feedback. Just like they forced on everyone that horrible gmail redesign. Where was the feedback taken in account?

I have a Xoom and love it. Why is that sad to you? I deal with iPads at my job and hate the experience. I'd prefer my Xoom to any iPad without hesitation.

I have a xoom and love it. Have you used one? You might be surprised. The hardware is less sexy than competing tablets (heavier mostly), but the software is wonderful, and I'm extremely happy with the overall experience.

I think Google+ is the only one that qualifies as a knee-jerk reaction, as Google realised very suddenly that social is a valuable currency on the internet, and they didn't have any.

Aside from that, there are no kneejerks in your list. Android was bought two years before the iPhone came out. Chrome was not a response to any kind of threat to Google. They created Google Offers after GroupOn refused to be bought. Google Docs was clearly an innovation, not a reaction. I could go on...

Android was purchased by Google two years prior to the release of iOS [1][2]

Tablets are the natural progression of mobile platforms, and existed prior to the iPad.

The massive contention about Android fragmentation and update/upgrade paths has steadily grown to the point that controlling an additional choke point in that process could significantly improve the ecosystem. By purchasing Motorola and operating it separately they can produce phones with shorter wait times between Android version releases and updates, and set precedents for other manufacturers to follow.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and a myriad of other platforms have proven that social is a huge market. Google+ was late to the party, but they would be stupid to ignore it altogether.

Google Offers is a natural tie-in with a mobile payments platform (Google Wallet), which they were essentially first to market with in the US despite having not yet gained significant traction.

I'm not very familiar with the Google Places, Hotpot, or Yelp services, but it seems like a natural tie-in with their existing Maps service. And sure, MapQuest was around first, but it still is, and I don't know anybody that prefers it to Google Maps.

Chrome may seem "me too" at the moment, but when it first released it was a pretty big deal. They proved that browsers could be minimal and functional, and as they said themselves it only made sense for them to contribute to the web at all points, from server to client.

Google Docs took Office products into a completely new space, one which Microsoft is now having a knee-jerk reaction to with their Office 365 platform.

On top of that, there's plenty of originality to be had still. Their self-driving cars project is really taking off, just a few short years ago nobody would ever have dreamed it would be possible to have a street-level view of nearly every road in the US (and tons of other countries now), their single account/sync structure is undoubtedly the inspiration for iOS's recent iCloud service, and they're in the process of revolutionizing internet connectivity itself right now with end-to-end fiber connections at reasonable consumer pricing in Kansas City.

Maybe there is a bit of envy in there, but who hasn't looked at something and said to themselves "I could do better"? I'd say that, for the most part, they have.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_(Apple)

I'll grant you Plus, Offers, Places, and Tablets are due to competitive pressure. But even so, in most of those, they have not gone the route of just cloning the competitor.

Chrome was strictly about advancing the web platform, for users and application makers. Google figures that anything which makes the web better automatically benefits them. And it's been a brilliant success.

I agree in a lot of big categories - although I think they contribute even when they're nominal competitors more than leaders - but Chrome and Docs were both godsends. Chrome was a huge breakthrough in browser performance and I'll never buy a personal copy of Office again thanks to Docs. If you're going to call those "reactions", then any of their landmark products - search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube (an acquisition but a key one) - could be called reactionary.

You could come up with a similar list for just about any big corporation. A few of these really don't prove your point though, because you're comparing them to services that are also copies of something else.

iPad = Nokia N800 Facebook = Myspace, Friendster IE/Firefox = Mosaic MS Office = Lotus

I suspect that if we really put time into this, we could come up with examples of things the others might be considered copies of. Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Could you please offer an argument instead of an opinion? Why should Google fulfill any of your demands, aside from you wanting it?

Could you please outline how google.com is turning into a web portal like yahoo.com?