Why Google+ Could Be the Beginning of the End of Google
For anyone that knows me, it’s no secret that I’ve never been a believer in Google+; I just don’t see any value added in Google+ over the likes of Facebook or Twitter. Call me crazy, but I believe Pintrest has a better chance at succeeding than Google+. But let’s not dive into my gripes about Google+ right now, I want to focus on a story I found this week.
Meet James Whittaker, a former Google engineer and employee who now works for Microsoft and was the head the engineering team for the social network Google+. Whittaker recently vented his frustrations with Google as well as why it eventually lead to his departure from the company in a blog post he wrote. The interesting thing about Whittaker’s take is that it was posted not on his personal blog, but on an official blog of Microsoft, Google’s arch nemesis.
In his blog post, Whittaker gives his take on how Google+ changed the famous innovative and entrepreneurial spirit of Google. Whittaker writes how the life “before Google+” was everything Google was cracked up to be, but the life “after Google+” was one of greed, bottom lines, and narrow-mindedness.
This Google-bashing blog comes in days after the wake of the New York Times article about a former Goldman Sachs upper-management employee who also left his company due to corporate greed.
Rather than try and portray Whittaker’s thoughts and comments myself, I will post some quotes from his original blog post:
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The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.
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Under Eric Schmidt ads were always in the background. Google was run like an innovation factory, empowering employees to be entrepreneurial through founder’s awards, peer bonuses and 20% time. Our advertising revenue gave us the headroom to think, innovate and create. Forums like App Engine, Google Labs and open source served as staging grounds for our inventions. The fact that all this was paid for by a cash machine stuffed full of advertising loot was lost on most of us. Maybe the engineers who actually worked on ads felt it, but the rest of us were convinced that Google was a technology company first and foremost; a company that hired smart people and placed a big bet on their ability to innovate.
From this innovation machine came strategically important products like Gmail and Chrome, products that were the result of entrepreneurship at the lowest levels of the company. Of course, such runaway innovative spirit creates some duds, and Google has had their share of those, but Google has always known how to fail fast and learn from it.
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But that was then, as the saying goes, and this is now.
It turns out that there was one place where the Google innovation machine faltered and that one place mattered a lot: competing with Facebook. Informal efforts produced a couple of antisocial dogs in Wave and Buzz. Orkut never caught on outside Brazil.
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Larry Page himself assumed command to right this wrong. Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name invoking the feeling that Google alone wasn’t enough. Search had to be social. Android had to be social. You Tube, once joyous in their independence, had to be … well, you get the point. Even worse was that innovation had to be social. Ideas that failed to put Google+ at the center of the universe were a distraction.
Suddenly, 20% meant half-assed. Google Labs was shut down. App Engine fees were raised. APIs that had been free for years were deprecated or provided for a fee. As the trappings of entrepreneurship were dismantled, derisive talk of the “old Google” and its feeble attempts at competing with Facebook surfaced to justify a “new Google” that promised “more wood behind fewer arrows.”
The days of old Google hiring smart people and empowering them to invent the future was gone. The new Google knew beyond doubt what the future should look like. Employees had gotten it wrong and corporate intervention would set it right again.
Officially, Google declared that “sharing is broken on the web” and nothing but the full force of our collective minds around Google+ could fix it. You have to admire a company willing to sacrifice sacred cows and rally its talent behind a threat to its business. Had Google been right, the effort would have been heroic and clearly many of us wanted to be part of that outcome. I bought into it. I worked on Google+ as a development director and shipped a bunch of code. But the world never changed; sharing never changed. It’s arguable that we made Facebook better, but all I had to show for it was higher review scores.
As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.
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The old Google was a great place to work. The new one?
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(You can read Whittaker’s entire blog post HERE)
There are probably several different business take-aways from this story, but the two that jump out to me are 1) stick with your core competency; just because a man with a shrimp vessel could catch crab doesn’t necessarily mean that he should, and 2) never lose sight of why you’re in the business you’re in; if your focus is on the bottom line and not the customer, you’re setting yourself up to fail.
What are your thoughts? Is Google in the wrong for trying to enter and dominate the social media space? What will you take away from this story? Post your thoughts in the comments.
-Lance Brown
In this example an employee leaves Google for MS: what to go someplace less evil? Everyone knows how fast tech can upend the entrenched, Google has pressure from those pesky shareholders. Beware – I recall someone who was skeptical of Google Adwords a few years back. And as for Pinterest – read here on analogy to Napster https://on.wsj.com/FOafMk
With the recent changes to Facebook with Timeline Google+ might have a chance to stick a wedge into this door. But it has to be done smartly and by people that know what social is. Zuck has shifted to timeline to satisfy a small group and not with the intrest of his primary user but the segment that is making him rich. Again the focus on the bottom line and dragging every last dollar into ones pocket can not be the focus. We the customer are getting sick of being used as cash cows instead of the sacred cow we are. Make the right choices and Google+ could capture part of the market. But I doubt it will happen no one in big corps are interested in the customer anymore.
I think you definitely hit the nail on the head with facebook and it’s new timeline layout. I also don’t believe they’re doing it with the users’ best interests in mind.