Phasing Out Google+
People have told us that accessing all of their Google stuff with one account makes life a whole lot easier. But we’ve also heard that it doesn’t make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use.
So in the coming months, a Google Account will be all you’ll need to share content, communicate with contacts, create a YouTube channel and more, all across Google. […] As always, your underlying Google Account won’t be searchable or followable, unlike public Google+ profiles.
Update (2015-08-14): Seth Fiegerman (via Todd Ditchendorf):
“Vic was just this constant bug in Larry’s ear: ‘Facebook is going to kill us. Facebook is going to kill us,’” says a former Google executive. “I am pretty sure Vic managed to frighten Larry into action. And voila: Google+ was born.”
[…]
The slow demise of Google+ sheds light on how a large technology company tries and often fails to innovate when it feels threatened. The Google+ project did lead to inventive new services and created a more cohesive user identity that continues to benefit Google, but the social network itself never truly beat back existing rivals. Facebook is now larger than ever, with 1.4 billion users and a market capitalization more than half of Google’s. It continues to poach Google employees. Facebook and Twitter are also slowly chipping away at Google’s dominance in display ad revenue.
1 Comment RSS · Twitter
Google+ was the biggest mistake Google ever made. Maybe they needed to be more focused, but boxing everyone into Google+ was a death sentence right from the beginning. That no one in a position to do anything about it saw it is unnerving.
I know from a friend who worked at Google before and as they started stepping down Google+ that during weekly presentations of new stuff, an internal chat would flood with memes about Google+ being ridiculous whenever new stuff was shown for it. So it's not even that it was unknown inside the company - just that it was the worst kind of bet-the-company edict that ended up putting people off of Google.
