Google actually had a successful social network project, Orkut, they just continuously marginalised it for it to be too NIH for US headquarters.
I'd say for GMail, it is just an email client they started out excellent, thanks in part to its huge storage space and good search features. And they didn't break it enough to make it unusable.
As for YouTube, it is great for hosting video, but its social features are terrible. There are communities tied to popular channels, but it stays in a producer to consumer model, with no interaction between community members. The comment section is made in such a way that dialogue is almost impossible.
Maybe they should hire a few people who understand human beings, because right now, it looks like the company is run by robots.
"People who understand human beings" and the have the ability to synthesize those insights into compelling technology products are exceedingly in demand in 2021. Rest assured, we hire as many as we possibly can and offer them a lot of money/benefits. However, they can pretty much get jobs anywhere and many choose to start their own venture.
You seem to think it's quite easy though. Do you think you can do a better job at Gmail than the Gmail team currently? Or a better job with Youtube than the Youtube team?
Maybe it's not as simple as 'understanding human beings'
I don't think I'm a genius here since many others said similar things. Rather, the G+ action felt like corporate policy stepping on sensible thinking. Yeah, youtube, gmail and etc are hard to run, hard to alter and so they weren't going to change. But someone also felt they need to leverage all those desperate things - that just feels like what middle management does, not simply what people with not that much understanding do.
For example, you think the real name policy tanked the effort. But did it really? Twitter verified status is considered to be coveted, people are lining up to get their real named acknowledged. Is that not enough to introduce plausible doubt?
Similarly, we always complain about “network effects” of social media these days - that’s why Facebook can maintain a “monopoly”. Well when G+ was rolling out, it was by limited invitation only; clearly in hindsight an extremely rookie mistake for a social network. Perhaps nothing else matters - perhaps not allowing ppl into your social network dwarfed all other causes.
We may never know as we can’t A/B test history.
It’s really easy to look at failed features in hindsight and say “ah I knew all along”. Statistically, most things fail. And it appeals to our innate desire to seek confirmation.
But I invite you to seek alternative explanations than “corporate messed it up”. And hey, if you really do know how to make successful social products, join ycomb, raise money and go be a billionaire
I don’t know who made the decision in Google to sunset that and start to charge for quota.
That stupid decision is going to destroy a very popular and useful social network service.
Then you will have a “G+” hindsight again.
Somebody might have already submitted a ycombinator proposal to take over that market when Google Photos is dead.
It _does_ sound like a "corporate messed it up", because if they had understood the culture surrounding their products they would have probably done things differently.
Here's a blatantly obvious example of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B#Commenting_on_YouTub...
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/facebooks-news-feed-i...
Lots of people hated it can claimed in the moment that corporate ruined everything. Then it went on to become one of the most successful products of all time.
Even if you hate FB today, you have to recognize that FB was beloved between 2007 ~ 2011 by pretty much everyone.
How was anyone to know, in that moment, whether the G+ name thing would be a major flop or a world changing product?
A quote from Zuckerberg's post regarding the News Feed is: "This is information people used to dig for on a daily basis, nicely re-organized and summarized so people can learn about the people they care about."
This does not sound like they were trying to push back against users, whereas Google basically said "no, you do it our way".
Can you make youtube to not to recompress video?
Can you make Youtube search filtering by time work for at least few months? Having sorting by time fixed for at least few hundred search results will be good too.
How is Google to address this issue? Buying more startup teams and then abandon their products? What about the talents who do actually want to work for Google but have no chance to pass the high barrier of engineering culture which is the symptom of lacking “understanding of human beings“?
These are serious social engineering challenges Google is facing and deserve serious discussion.
It was launched about the same time as Facebook and after Friendster.