Fire Vic Gundotra | Hacker News Reader

Fire Vic Gundotra

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19 pointshartator13 comments

As bad as Google+ may be, it is still a thousand times better than Facebook and all that Facebook represents. Purely as a social networking site, Google+ in my experiences is much better... it's just that Facebook won in numbers because of network effects + first mover benefit. And I guess I'm one of the few who's been okay with G+ integration? If you don't like it just ignore it, don't go on it.

This little 'fire Vic' piece is silly and immature.

You can just not use Google+. I like hangouts for what it's worth. I like that you can plugin stuff into it (basically an iframe).

The YouTube change is really sad though. YouTube is stellar in some many ways, but the Google+ integration is definitely a black mark. I'm sorry there are so many trolls on YouTube comments, but I don't want my public activity on YouTube to be visible with my real name. I've since stopped participating in comments, sharing, and uploading, even though I want to participate more. I want to upload game videos I've recorded, but I don't want to do it using my real name and API integration with Google+ pages and Google+ names like on twitch is broken. I still consume content on YouTube, but besides watching I hardly do anything anymore. I don't want a comment I made on a YouTube video to be searchable 20 years from now by someone who uses my real name (an easily searchable name).

I still have a google acccount, but I'm 99.9% of the time logged out of it. I just do not want my search and other activity recorded by google and presentable in some current or future surprising way. I don't want my search results influenced by who google thinks I am.

I maintain the account for a couple of private purposes, but I'll eventually move those away and then close the account.

Google feels like a snooping landlady who's always looking in my windows. All I want to do is pay rent, shut the door, and use the property (service) the way I want. I don't want interaction with the landlord.

#1 reason why I think they should not fire Vic Gundotra: all of this is most likely not Gundotra's fault, but Larry Page's fault. Gundotra was VP of engineering before and then he was VP of...social, or whatever that department is called now. I don't think he wanted the job, but most likely given to him to clean up the Android leadership structure a bit (I think Andy Rubin was answering to him rather than directly to Larry Page back then), and to put one of their more experienced leaders in charge of this major and critical (from their perspective) project for Google. Maybe he wanted it in the same that he wanted to "prove his worth" with a new major project, but I doubt he seeked out a social project.

#2 reason why they should not fire Vic Gundotra: I really like him, ever since he gave that Google I/O keynote in 2010 [1]. I thought he gave a Steve Jobs level of keynote, and it's still the most exciting Google I/O I saw in recent years. When Eric Schmidt announced his retirement from CEO position, I was hoping Gundotra would get the job, actually.

Kill Google+ if they must, but I think firing Gundotra would be a big mistake.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY3U2GXhz44

From the post, arguing against G+ integration in YouTube, he writes,

"Want to post anonymously your crazy trolling stuff or you want to assume your weird troll behavior in front of your family, friends and co-workers"

Umm, pretty sure that's the point. Neither YouTube nor anybody anywhere really wants "crazy trolling stuff". YouTube comments had been perhaps one of the worst places for discussion on the web, second perhaps only to 4chan.

Not everyone who doesn't want their real name associated with comments is a troll. Forcing real names isn't the solution. I don't want my boss or members of my family to know I spend 40 hours a week playing games like DayZ and commenting and liking videos where bandits are making awful jokes about breaking people's legs and leaving them stranded in the middle of a forest in gruesome video games. There's nothing wrong with liking horror or survival games but not everyone needs to know that's my thing.

I think g+ is having a significant strategy tax on the rest of google's products (similar to windows for microsoft). However, the benefits of g+ for google are potentially huge. Organizing all products across one account system helps them get to know you better, which in the end should result in better products.

> better products

Better for Google's stakeholders, you mean?

I think G+ is kind of Google's Internet Explorer moment. The have dominated search for over a decade, but the realised that social media had become massively important and that they just weren't relevant there. They couldn't acquire anyone large enough and their previous attempts at entering that area basically all failed. So in the end they had a choice of either giving up and risk being overrun over the long term or they could do what MS did with IE: Leverage your dominant position in one field and force your new product down your existing customer's collective throats.

The difference is that it worked for MS (for a time at least), but so far it didn't really work for Google and instead their existing customer base is getting more and more annoyed. However, at this point G+ is so deeply integrated that a graceful exit from this strategy would be next to impossible. Google is basically all in with this.

All this integration is even more frustrating if you own an Android device. Sending a Google Hangout invite to my mobile device when I'm sitting in front of my laptop ready to go? Whyyyyyy?

I understand this can be disabled, but this was a terrible design decision in favor of G+ brand of cross-platform integration.

It was my understanding that Google + was created to tie Google products together. The main purpose of this was to stop Google getting in trouble for recommending its own services in search results.

I quite like Google +, it does need work but I don't see it going away any time soon.

I don't know if fireing Vic Gundotra is helping, but I definitly agree with all the other points. How Google is trying to forcing us into G+ is just too much and annoying... And I think they harm themself with ranking pages better if they integrate G+...

Chats in Hangouts are searchable.

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