How in the world would you have thought that? Genuinely curious.
It was obviously DOA and waaaayyy outside G'scompetence.
It was obviously DOA and waaaayyy outside G'scompetence.
2. Everyone already had a Google account and many millennials were using Google Talk at the time. It appeared Google could undermine the network effects.
3. The UI of G+ appeared better
4. Facebook had released the newsfeed otherwise known as ‘stalker mode’ at the time and people recoiled at the idea of broadcasting their every action to every acquaintance. The circles idea was a way of providing both privacy and the ability to broadcast widely when needed.
5. Google had tons of money and devoted their world class highly paid genius employees to building a social network.
You can see parallels to each of these in AI now. Their pre existing index of all the world’s information, their existing search engine that you can easily pop an LLM in, the huge lead in cash, etc. They are in a great position but don’t underestimate their ability to waste it.
not sure about this take, given that chrome‘s rendering engine was famously based on Safari‘s - WebKit - before they forked it (Blink). V8 was indeed faster than Safari‘s JS engine at the time. However, today, Safari is objectively faster in both rendering (WK) and JS performance (JSCore).
Google somehow manages to fumble the easiest layups. I think Anthropic et al have a real chance here.
Fact not in evidence. Google's search and advertising revenue continues to grow.
I use Claude every day. I cannot get Gemini to do anything useful, at all. Every time I've tried to use it, it has just failed to do what was required.
So it is reasonable that Claude might show significantly better coding ability for most tasks, but the better general reasoning ability proves useful in coding tasks that are complicated and obscure.
Makes CoPilot look like something from a Sci-Fi movie.
Google has AI infrastructure that it has created itself as well as competitive models, demonstrating technical competence in not-legacy-at-all areas, plus a track record of technical excellence in many areas both practical and research-heavy. So yes, technical competence is definitely an advantage for Google.
In the end I'd rather if both had failed. Although one can argue that they actually did. But that's another story.
That being said, tying bonuses for the whole company on the success of Google+ was too much even for me.
I guess we sort of got it with Slack though
It became clear they where desperate about user numbers when thay forced the merge of Youtube accounts. Or something like that.