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Comment by choppaface | Hacker News Reader

G+ was indeed an internal success in that:

* It made a lot of coddled high-energy employees continue to feel valued and engaged and not jump to a competitor.

* It forced users to unify accounts making cookie joining and user data from different segments much more universally accessible to ads.

* It brought design uniformity to G on the web, which is an important to contrast the Google brand with the otherwise fragmented Android space.

* Lasting revenue and user data from Google Photos and Drive.

Google plus was Google doing what it does best: solving Google problems. It never had a chance as a product, but they didn’t need for it to win. They needed to re-consolidate data input to Ads and defend against a talent drain.

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Was it really planned for that? This sounds like just a list of initially unplanned effects it had, used as internal PR spin at best.

The user account consolidation was pretty explicit. It might have been explained as necessary for UX consistency, but for Ads it was a huge way to whitewash otherwise verboten underwear-smelling.

G+ birthed the "create account / log in with Google" widget for non-Google websites, that could go alongside the "log in with FB" widget that was getting popular. Those widgets let Google / FB join your account cookies with whatever other ads get shown on the page.

G+ lead to a dramatically changed privacy policy that dramatically increaed data sharing.

+1 Google Photos is very successful, the product spawned out of G+ auto syncing photos.

Wasn't that more from the acquisition of Picasa?

I imagine this is exactly what they put into their perf reviews at the time. Doesn’t mean it’s causal, or that those things wouldn’t have happened anyway, for a much lower cost.

This is kinda like saying, "The Vietnam War was a success. After all, it kept Indonesia from turning Communist."

Well that's kind of a brutal example, but I agree with the comparison. Indeed, G+ was successful for Google zealots and their bottom line. And in turn, to some extent, the shareholders.

Wait what impact did the Vietnam War have on Indonesia? I've never seen this documentary

Who's going to show a documentary like that?

I have seen articles claiming all sorts of "benefits" of the War, and I believe that was one of them. The coup of 1965, which massacred a million "Communists" was in there.

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