They had literally everything going for them including user trust, their data, their photos, their location, their voice - all they needed to do is to wrap it in a nice way to create social profiles. They also had the best engineering talent to make it happen. Sowing the right social networking seeds would have given them loads of advertising revenue today. Even today, if Google comes up with a half decent social network it can easily beat Meta at its game. My answer - poor product teams. When I was at Amazon, PMs from Google used to move to Amazon because they got to deal with more complex product problems than at Google. But that's just my perspective. For now, RIP Orkut and Google+. That said, Meta is merely surviving by buying the right social network - Instagram. Otherwise Facebook is trash these days. 280k
Yeah what I said in a comment above Also this post tries to go a level deeper - yes they had bad UI but what led to that bad UI?
RIP Orkut 🫗 https://killedbygoogle.com/
They failed to make it cool or onboard young people who are really into social media. See TikTok/instagram target demographic So I think failure to market google+ to the right audience was the worst thing about google+
From user perspective google+ was just confusing to me and I had no incentive to use it everyone already got hooked to Facebook
Only nerds posted to Google+ .
Luck . What is actually randomness. Google throws enough shit at the wall thinking eventually it will stick, at least some of it. But their ad revenue has always been through the roof and they never contemplated something will eventually be better than their search engine. But that changed a year ago and all hell has broken lose. Google now finds itself in a situation where trying thousand different things resulting in failed projects is not the way forward all the time and they need to better scope out and be intentional with their projects. So maybe just maybe Google might have something other than search engine in next two years to rival their competitor
Focusing on wrong things starting with the interview culture, hiring best leet coders instead of someone that has a big picture and has the skills to make an useful system. Recognizing and promoting arbitrary things such as visibility instead of actual results. Google's initial success unfortunately also influenced other companies into adopting the same horrible leetcode culture and other criteria for promotions. I blame Google for everything.
“I blame Google for everything” lol did you not get in
Larry and Sergey once said it’s because they themselves aren’t very social. May be some truth to it.
They didn’t acquire Instagram
From my experience working with ex-googlers, they are way too centered on engineering perfection, to have even mild common sense of what’s shippable.
I feel like internally, Google lacks a good UI framework. They seem to be using the same UI framework for GCP and Google+ back in the day and honestly it's too heavy, slow and bloating. Amazon's UI framework also sucks, but Amazon was lucky to be first to market and that Amazon's UI style became synonymous with an e-commerce application.