Google Enters The Social Enterprise With Public Debut Of Google+ For Businesses | Hacker News Reader

Google Enters The Social Enterprise With Public Debut Of Google+ For Businesses

techcrunch.com

65 pointssparshgupta22 comments

So, supposedly VCs like to ask entrepreneurs "what would you do if Google enters your space?" Have you ever wondered what you would actually do in that case?

Some entrepreneurs talk about those "vomit moments" when something happens that makes you want to vomit.

Well... I won't be losing any sleep over it, but Google just "entered our space" (in a manner of speaking). We've been working on "Enterprise 2.0" stuff, heavily involving social-networking (ala, G+ or Facebook) but for enterprise use.

So, what do you do when Google does that? Well, I always imagined my answer to a VC, to that hypothetical question, would be something like:

"We'd stay the course, continue to innovate and become even more hyperfocused. Google has never shown a tremendous affinity for enterprise plays, and it's not their strength. They're a formidable competitor because of their size and resources, but this isn't what they do. It is what we do."

So, how does Fogbeam Labs react to this? We stay the course and keep developing our products and solutions, and become even more hyper-focused, of course. If this means anything to me, it means we have to be even better at interacting with our customers, understanding their problems, and working with them as a partner, not just a vendor.

We expect we'll still have a lot of advantages over "G+ for the Enterprise" in a number of areas, for some time to come. Not the least of which is because of our focus on deep integration into business activities and workflows and integration with other apps.. as opposed to simply being a very superficial communication channel that is basically just a complement to / replacement for, email.

Aside: None of this was unexpected. Google does have some enterprise presence, and them doing G+ for the Enterprise is hardly a surprise. We've only been wondering "when," not "if." Them actually doing it doesn't really change anything from our perspective.

It's funny, because the product we're working on is targeted at an existing Google product that is used a lot in the enterprise.

"What would I do if Google enters your space" is largely backwards, we're going after the space Google is already in.

Kind of depends on how well Google executes. If they really get it and execute well, then you have a real challenge. If they don't then you've had your market validated which is a positive.

I read the announcement and thought, "Wow, that puts David Sack's (Yammer CEO) comments on the valley in perspective." Sounds like David had a heads up this was coming and ducked out of the way into the waiting arms of Microsoft.

Microsoft has shown that you can throw huge amounts of money at something and not make a very good business out of it (Search is my current favorite example), Google has similar issues when it comes to being 'lean' (too easy to build a product that costs $1m/day in OpEx to run from day one.)

So you need to solve the problem better, be more responsive, and be more cost effective.

Other thread here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4448395

All I want is a "-1" button.

If theoretically there is a -1 button, where exactly are you going to use it :)

Anywhere that it's appropriate.

To expand: the paradigm of only offering +1 and not -1 is, to me, akin to the whole "everybody's a winner" problem; if I go to a product page, and all it has is a +1 button, and the 'score' is 0, then there's absolutely no context to justify the score.

Is it that the product is brand-new (and/or just added the +1 button), or conversely, is it that the product is horrible and though the +1 button has been there a year, nobody has clicked it?

Whereas if I were to visit and I could see that the score was -1000, then that would give me a very good indication that the product (or some aspect of it) sucks.

Then of course there'd likely be situations where there'd be a mix, and so it'd be good to see a representation that took all votes into account, e.g. [+1000/-500]; with that, I could see that the sample size is moderately sufficient (1500), and that most people approve -- but that it's not without detractors.

Mostly, though, I'm tired of "everybody's a winner".

I agree. I like youtubes system, where you can see total votes for both in a nice bar, opposed to simply a cumulative score.

But lets be real here, no brand is going to let FB/google/socialwhoever put a -1 button on their marketing page. And all the really matters at the end of the day is what the money decides, not you, as it's your eyeballs being sold. BigCo would never pay for the opportunity to have anyone to slap a -1 on their beloved flawless products.

Unless you look at things like app reviews. Where users are much more likely to complain than to leave positive reviews. I think the same applies for other +1/-1 options. People that don't like things run around jumping and yelling how much they hate it. Most of the ones that have positive things to say don't unless you put it right in front of their face.

- A dissatisfied customer will tell 9-15 people about it. And approximately 13% of your dissatisfied customers will tell more than 20 people about their problem. Source: the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, Washington, DC.

- Happy customers who have their problems resolved will tell 4-6 people about their positive experience. Source: the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, Washington, DC.

http://www.customerservicemanager.com/customer-service-facts...

It would be interesting to see an updated version of the study on which these statistics are based, which takes in to account social media.

So are you annoyed that HN only allows +1 until you have been a member of the community for a while ? this is something good about not allowing people to stifle different opinions.

If google had shipped Buzz for Domains, it would have crushed Yammer.

Buzz was used a lot internally at Google, and was pretty handy.

You still can't make a profile with the name of your business. And I could be wrong but I checked this morning and I didn't see any way to add a "Google for business" account to my existing G+ account, so I would need to create and manage two profiles with the same name: my old one for "personal" stuff and a new one for the new G+ for Business features.

You've been able to make business pages for a while now, example:

https://plus.google.com/106626622878120060227/posts

I think this new 'Google+ for business' is only available to paying Google apps members, it seems.

However, Google apps members can already use Google hangouts, can setup circles for internal sharing, and so its mostly the convenience of the defaults etc. that are new value. I wonder how much Google plan to charge for that.

My page can't follow people until they follow me first. I can't build a useful news feed for my page to follow. I can't view normal people's posts as my page, which means I can't leave comments either, which means I can't get my page any visibility, which means people probably will never add my page to their circles.

as a person who doesn't want to be associated with random companies, i hope this stays that way.

Your business is not a person, and shouldn't be behaving that way. If you want people to follow your page, perhaps you should put out some high quality content that makes it worthwile to follow your page.

How will people see my content if they're not following my page?

I hear there's this thing called "Hacker News" where interesting stuff sometimes gets posted. =)

It's content on the web. It gets shared and linked to like everything else.

According to Google's official blog, their recent Wildfire acquisition just closed a couple of weeks ago, and I'm interested to see which ways they'll leverage Wildfire's tools to make Google+ the first stop on the route to managing a brand's interactions on all the various social media platforms.

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