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Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

The Real Name idiocy certainly convinced a number of people like myself, and those who listen to me for advice, to avoid it like the plague if you had an important established Google account for things like GMail. That they'd tie them all together and zap all of them if you failed their Real Names test made it just too dangerous.

Also made it clear they were not doing this for us.

Ah, as a very experienced text searcher (got into it in the early '90s in the document imaging arena) disabling a leading "+" for search terms was grossly obnoxious.

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Now I have to wrap "every" "search term" "in quotes", it's completely absurd. Even then it assumes you made typos.

To me, that's the biggest sin of G+, it made the search experience worse.

"my" G+ account is register to agu monkey (not a real name at all), it made the whole thing pretty sad.

> Also made it clear they were not doing this for us. Most important point in G+ state IMO

Whatever Facebook was, it was something out of a guy's desire (lowly or great). Google+ felt like yet another business attempt at market share grabbing. The original circle idea was cute, but everything else was corporate strategy and forced unification.

Indeed, like it or not, Facebook came out of Zuckerberg's desire to create a neat thing, in which he succeeded.

And Google+ came from a Microsoft veteran who started back in 1991, when Microsoft succeeded in supplanting a lot of one trick pony companies. But those had limited network effects and the big ones also manifestly failed at software development, and Facebook continues to run that part of the company well (enough).

Google+ came from Google.

The attempts in this thread to retroactively attribute this failure to something other than Google are...interesting.

While that wasn't my point, it manifestly wasn't developed in the traditional Google style.

Here I'm just talking about Gundotra likely having the conceit from his time at Microsoft that he could make a Facebook replacement that wasn't 10x times better, but through tie-ins to other parts of the Google ecosystem would draw people in (vs. a lot of Microsoft's success in that period coming from other companies failing to execute, which Facebook did not).

Hmmmm. The way I read it, you and the article are deflecting the blame away from Page and at Gundotra. The buck stops at who is in charge and that is Page.

Agree and disagree. I've got a very strong sense that many of G+'s issues had something to do with Gundotra. And that it was decidedly non-organic. Rather than an internal useful engineering hack created out of desire and practicality, it was a fear-driven reaction to Facebook.

But: the policies clearly ultimately came from the very highest level at Google. Biggest consequence is an exceptional blow to my trust in the company.

Or rather, series of blows.

I would have used a G+ without the 'real name' policy right from the start. By the time they relaxed the policy, it was too late.

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