

Larry Page's first blunder - fiaz
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9215666/Larry_Page_s_first_blunder

======
mixmax
It seems that I'm one of the only people here who thinks the author of the
article is on to something substantial. Here's why.

First of all, wanting to get into social is accepting to play second fiddle to
Facebook - google is not a leader but a follower in this game. They're known
for innovating and this seems to be at odds with that.

Second, as the author points out, Google is not very good when it comes to
people and how they work play and interact. This is what social is all about,
and it's very hard to put into an algorithm which is the Google way of doing
things.

Third, I agree that making all bonuses dependant on the success of their
social endeavours is a huge mistake. What happens to the really good
algorithmic search people at Google? Do they bust their ass of doing what they
do best, or do they try to implement some kind of social search that they know
nothing about because that's what their bonus depends on. What will happen to
my search results because of this? Yes, it will get worse, and yes it will
undermine Googles core product. What Larry has done is basically told everyone
that they should start working on something Google is historically not very
good at and not worry about their core business. Huge mistake.

Fourth, this shows a poor understanding of the dynamics of incentives, which
is something that a CEO of a company as large as Google should be very good
at. Paying everyone a bonus based on how one division performs is at best
disillusioning to the people who don't work in that division and have
absolutely no control over their bonus. It doesn't matter how hard a division
works if it doesn't have anything to do with social. What will this do to
their morale? At best they'll just hum along, knowing there's not much they
can do, at worst they'll start cannibalising their product to try and make it
social.

~~~
AndyJPartridge
I agree the author is onto something substantial.

Google is a bunch of great add-ons without a message board.

Facebook is a great message board with mediocre add-ons.

Google needs a message board.

~~~
maxwell
Buzz.

~~~
sp332
Also: Google Groups, Google Docs, Knol, Wave, searchwiki, blogspot, youtube
comments, Lively <http://www.lively.com/goodbye.html> , Google Reader notes,
Google Shared Spaces <http://sharedspaces.googlelabs.com/> , aardvark
<http://vark.com/> , Google Moderator <http://www.google.com/moderator/> , and
probably some I missed. All places where people can publicly share and talk
together online, none of them a Facebook contender.

~~~
phlux
One difference thiugh is every one of those tools are accessed via a unique
url. Facebook.com is the only way to access the other.

It would be interesting if, like facebook, you coukd do nothing on google
without signing in. further upon sign in, if you were given a more cohesive
iGoogle profile through which to access these services.

Clearly what google lavks is not the message board, but a cohesive ux to tie
these all together - but only if thats how these services were of value, like
facebook. But they do have intrinsic value as standalone services, thus the
user base they do have.

Its a risky situation to try to glue all the already valuable services google
has together with some ambiguous social duct tape. Im sure that would fail.

Creating yet another site where we can create an account wont work. Letting us
share through some service like disco is a single channel through which to
share info. That competes with twitter.

Additionally they cant provide a business profile as linkedin owns that space.

It seems as though they need to find a way fir people to create an adhock
social network for various activities and provide the tools that support this
group.

 __typed from phone, forgive typos

------
AlexC04
I completely disagree with the article. The 25% bonus is not a blunder at all.
It's a big shake-up that's certain, but based on what I've been reading about
Google recently, I think it's actually quite a visionary move.

If you've been reading Hacker News for the last few months you'l' probably
have read two major complaints about the company.

    
    
        1) their search results are getting spammier
        2) if you're an employee on the inside, there's more politicking than engineering going on.
    

The +1 bonus addresses both.

In terms of spammy results, if millions of people are applying upvotes to good
results every day, true human-eyeball search QA will be working at massive
scale.

And _YES_ the spammers botnets have probably already started +1'ing their
spammy links, but hey, answering that is part of the bonus. (I can think of a
few algorithms already that might actually further identify spam by finding
'unnaturally correlated voting blocks)

+1 directly improves Google's core business, which is finding good results in
web search. Having 25% of your bonus tied to the success of Google's core
business is appropriate.

The second major issue I've read about (nearing the point of deluge) is the
problem with 'internal politicking'. It happens at all mega-corporations I'm
sure, but how in the hell do you address it? Individual departments work
against certain other departments, they willfully work a little slower or
protest a little too much and some projects that didn't deserve to die do.

The complaints about Google's ability to innovate are evidence of this stuff.
The internal middle managers' squabbles.

Well what better way to ensure that you cut through the corporate squabbles
than by looking at all the projects you've got going on, picking the one that
you think has the best chance of helping the bottom line and saying to
everyone in the company "you can either help or get the fuck out of the way.
25% of your bonus is tied to this project"

If morale is going to be take a hit if this project fails, then the answer is
don't fail.

~~~
sunchild
"In terms of spammy results, if millions of people are applying upvotes to
good results every day, true human-eyeball search QA will be working at
massive scale."

And if a disproportionate number of those humans who bother to vote are
spammers?

~~~
AlexC04
As I touched on - that can be taken care of in part by algorithms. Consider
that each vote requires a google account & IP address. Assume also that google
will be able to identify at least a handful of "Definite Humans" and monitor
their behavior.

Definite humans do certain things, like browse the web in certain predictable
patterns, their +1 votes might cluster around certain interests, and generally
"human looking stuff". Without enough data to look at I can't tell you exactly
what that means but I'm assuming that patterns would emerge once compared with
computers.

Assume that spammers manage to automate a certain number of google accounts to
vote +1 on their web properties. At the click of a button (in low orbital ion
cannon style) thousands of robot-accounts log in to +1 against an individual
link.

Now the spammers may find a way to stagger the automation of the logins, but
unless they're particularly sophisticated how do they manage to create the
rest of the simulation of a web-browsing individual?

Do they automate "fake humans" to run google searches from time to time? Click
about on links? What about the analysis of the 'clustering' of accounts? A
given group of 1000 accounts always voting on the same things together? What
about the odd similarity that all the +1's seem to be routed through the same
handful of IP addresses? What if +1'ing is closely related to other people
+1'ing near your own geolocation?

I'm not saying it's going to be perfect, indeed they're buying themselves
another "arms race" - it really would be interesting to investigate what
proportion of Facebook's like button is being "astro-turfed"

There's definitely going to be mechanical turk jobs to search my link, click
+1 and such, but that exists for facebook as well.

I firmly believe that as clever as spammers are, there're not going to be able
to accurately simulate the behavior of real humans for long. There are too
many factors that can trip them up.

Again, this is probably one of the things that 25% of the bonus is tied to
addressing. Clever, interested engineers now have a serious incentive to
spending their 20% time addressing your concern.

Right?

~~~
AlexC04
Consider also Reddit's method of spam-user-flagging. They use something that's
been nicknamed "Ghost Banning" they can continue to upvote links, comment on
threads everything from their point of view looks like they exist. They never
get a message that says "hey by the way, you're not being counted"

They're just not counted.

Ghost banning can give you a a large number of false-positives without the
same level of risk of upsetting others.

In fact, with google's version of ghost banning, they could further tie your
votes to the accounts of your friends.

Google algorithmically thinks your a spammer, you're ghost-banned - except to
you and except to people who have elected to count you as a friend.

It will be very hard to feel slighted if you never know that your votes don't
really carry an impact.

Obviously there's work in getting this right, but it's got a good chance of
being a very solid quality filter.

~~~
diegob
This is also known as a "hellban"
<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hellban>

I think it's a deliciously evil solution to spammers and trolls, as you've
described.

------
ScottBurson
Huh, interesting that people here don't seem to be getting this article.

Every organization has a culture, and every culture has blind spots: things
that it doesn't value and is not good at. Because it doesn't value them, it
doesn't bring in people who are good at them. Because it doesn't have people
who know about them to remind everybody else about them, it continues not to
value them.

The only way out of this is for senior management to realize that their
beliefs about how to build a company -- the very foundation of their success
to this point -- are now what is limiting them.

In this case, Google has gone massively overboard on hiring engineers, and has
neglected designers, UX experts, human factors experts, people who understand
the "soft side" of computing. What they need to do is to bring a bunch of such
people in _and give them power_. But their whole hiring process is built
around finding the very best engineers; they have no process for hiring "soft
side" experts. Worse, they have nobody who even knows how to evaluate such
people.

Now if Page realized all this, he could do something about it. But to realize
it he has to see the limitations in his existing beliefs about who he wants
working at Google, about what skills are important. _He has to realize he
needs people unlike himself._ And he has to make a fundamental change in his
vision of what kind of company Google is and how it can be most successful. It
is very rare to see a CEO with the level of self-reflection to be able to make
changes like that.

~~~
gruseom
_Google has gone massively overboard on hiring engineers, and has neglected
designers, UX experts, human factors experts, people who understand the "soft
side" of computing._

It's often said that Google's weakness is the human side, and I agree, but
what's not clear is whether Facebook is so culturally different. Much of what
I hear about Facebook indicates a hacker culture that is not dissimilar to
Google's engineering culture in this respect, i.e. not necessarily "softer" in
the way you describe. Do Facebook emphasize "human factors experts"?

There are people here who have worked at both companies. I'd like to hear some
comparisons on this point.

~~~
ScottBurson
This is not the insider view you're hoping for, but I think Zuckerberg is a
different kind of hacker from Page and Brin. He seems to have a much better
instinct for UX and for what users want. I'd wager, based admittedly on little
evidence, that he has much more of an artist's soul. Page and Brin seem much
more like pure engineers.

------
spinchange
My comment there seems to have been immediately flagged as spam, so I'll say
it here.

I think it must be much, much easier to write articles like this about
managing Google than it is to actually manage Google.

We're talking about tying a portion of bonuses to performance in an area that
is crucial to the success of this company! What a blunder, indeed.

~~~
vixen99
Much easier to write the article, yes (of course) but why make the point? It's
utterly irrelevant to whether the author has a valid criticism or not.

~~~
spinchange
My point is that there is little empirical basis for these criticisms. In the
absence of this, what basis do I have to trust this author's intuition? His
experience running enterprises like Google? His experience managing some of
the brightest engineers in the world? Or his experience chasing an ephemeral
position on Techmeme?

------
raju
Interesting article. I agree - Google is now singing FaceBook's mantra and
potentially losing sight of their own.

Today, Google knows who I email most often, who my contacts are, what's
happening in my life (via my Calendar), what I like to read and bookmart (via
Reader), what I like to talk about (via Google AdSense/Analytics on my blog
and via Search), even places I tend to go often or plan to go (via GMaps). The
list goes on.

That is a huge piece of the puzzle. They need to figure out a way to put all
of that together rather than push (and potentially fail) new "social"
incentives.

There are two parts to this that escape me -

1\. Whatever happened of "Google Me"? How is it that no one ever mentions that
anymore?

2\. Google has (IMO) _always_ been a company that places emphasis on being
algorithmic than having humans do the work for them (if that even makes
sense). It's part of their DNA. That's hard to change.

Finally, this is Google chasing the _current_ fad, and forgetting to focus on
what's the next thing.

[Edit - Formatting]

------
hieronymusN
Personally, few things rile me up like a manager giving me directives to
'evangelize' products to my family & friends on my personal social accounts. I
am currently in this situation. I have no problem evangelizing on social
accounts tied to the company (the company's official twitter, facebook, etc.)
or writing posts on the company blog, but I do not use my personal social
accounts for company business and don't plan on doing so in the future. Maybe
I'm just old, but I need a separation between my business and personal life on
the web.

I'm sure the techs who keep the servers running in the Google data centers
love having 25% of their bonuses tied to social products they may truly
dislike, don't use, etc.

~~~
frossie
"few things rile me up like a manager giving me directives to 'evangelize'
products to my family"

Few things make me worry more about the product too. If it was good, you
wouldn't need to order people to evangelize it. They would be doing it because
showing off something cool is fun, doubly so if you had a hand in it.

------
ajays
These are all just cheap shots.

If something goes wrong down the road, the writer can crow "I told you so" and
strut around like a rooster. If nothing goes wrong, then who remembers some
unknown writer in some forgotten rag?

The beauty of these naysayers is that, like a broken clock (or a stuck display
;) ), they're right about the outcome (and not the cause) once in a while by
sheer chance.

~~~
Confusion
I could make the exact same argument about any criticism of any random thing,
because it does not address the correctness of the criticism at all. If I made
this argument against some criticism you fully agree with, you would probably
lash out against me for not addressing the issues raised. I haven't even read
the article and yet I can safely judge your comment to be completely
irrelevant.

~~~
waqf
I think that's a fair criticism of all of GP's post except the first sentence,
"These are all just cheap shots." That single assertion is a meaningful one,
albeit one with which I totally disagree.

------
ChuckMcM
I think large changes to complex systems are fraught with risks, and Larry's
changes are quite large. But given how different Google is, as a company, than
any other company out there, its not really possible to evaluate this change
apriori as a 'win' or as a 'blunder.'.

I've been out of the 'plex for a year. But when I worked there, every year
things changed; from bonus plans, to quality of life 'perks', to who ran what.
Google is good at change, they change things all the time.

Google measures a lot. For some it seemed like extreme surveillance but it
really was mostly about measuring effectiveness. Of course it also reduced the
time to catch the contractor who helped his friends help themselves to some
laptops to about 15 minutes after they were noted as being missing :-).

They don't always interpret what they measure well. The feedback loop on that
seems poor.

From the outside it would seem that Larry is embracing one of the core Google
beliefs which are "Change things to be what you think is the better way,
measure what you change, fix what you break." Does that belief scale to the
CEO's office? Guess we'll see. If its broken it won't stay broken since I'm
sure there are a number of experiments in place to provide feedback on its
effectiveness.

The only danger to Google at that point is whether or not they can understand
and internalize the feedback effectively. That was a skill I didn't see a lot
of when I was there.

------
kunjaan
I wish Google continued to being an awesome Information Retrieval company that
they always were. I loved Google's original mission, the automation and the
algorithms.

~~~
arctangent
I don't have a source for Google's original mission, but I think it is fair to
say that their current mission is to collect as much information of all kinds
as they can, make it findable by people, and make money by selling targeted
advertising accordingly.

If Google make their products more social then their is a clear value-add for
the consumer of the data, and also a value-add for advertisers. I don't think
Page is making a mistake here at all.

------
mariusmg
Can't wait for this social fad to be over.

~~~
revorad
Don't hold your breath. People are not going to turn into loners any time
soon.

What's wrong with technology helping people become more social? I love it and
apparently, millions of others do too.

~~~
regomodo
"What's wrong with technology helping people become more social?"

Banality?

~~~
revorad
You could say that about any form of communication. What's special this time?

~~~
daniel1980fl
nothing. you both right.

------
NathanKP
I don't necessarily agree that social is a blunder, but I do agree with the
analogy of comparing social to a party. Just like having a party everywhere,
all the time is not appropriate, so having social elements everywhere can
quickly get old.

I go to Facebook when I want to see what my friends are doing, but I don't
necessarily want to see what they are doing all the time. Imagine if social
elements were deeply integrated into Google search, distracting you with stuff
from friends every time you tried to do a Google search on a programming
topic.

The challenge I think will be to see if Google can properly integrate social
aspects where people will appreciate them, and leave them out of places where
they will just be a distraction or a frustration.

------
zokiboy
Imagine one central place where all Google products would be conneced. It
would look like an improved Facebook main page: stream of information from
gmail, reader, picasa, groups, docs, news, link recomends (+1) from friends,
ORDER BY important; with search bar at top and gmail chat at the bottom. Fail
or win?

~~~
stevenj
For the average user, that seems like an overly complicated thing.

~~~
zokiboy
Facebook is complicated for the average user. At least based on questions I
get about it.

------
maverhick
In a sales organization you can tie people upto a similar performance
incentive structure, because everyone (the majority) sell. The key being, the
people you are incentivizing should have the ability to move the story
forward. I find it odd about the entire co's bonus being attached to social,
when the entire co is not allowed/designed to 'do social'.

What is the point of incentivizing gmail/maps/apps/search to do social? (some
social widgets make not a coherent social strategy).

Its a textbook wrong move. May be implementation details differ - but that
info is available in the article

------
djcapelis
I hate the writing of the article, but the point of having a 25% bonus tied to
social being a dumb move I actually find myself agreeing with based on the
information presented. (I'd love to read the full memo...)

People should share social features because they want to, not because they're
getting a bonus. Google is ignoring an intensely valuable internal feedback
mechanism by re-aligning their employees to adopt new social features without
skepticism.

The other big problem I see is tying bonus compensation to an area where you
are looking for passion and innovation is the easiest way to replace intrinsic
motivation with external motivation, the latter having been proven ineffective
in research over and over and over again. You can't incentivize passion, you
can only create the environment for it. They will likely end up with products
built for bonuses instead of products built out of passion as a result.

------
colinhowe
It strikes me that Larry Page shouldn't be making this decision about bonuses
at all. It should be up to the head of social to make the call about how he
wants to motivate his folks. One of the biggest complaints you hear in large
organisations is that they don't get to reward their people how and when they
want to. Larry Page just made this a problem for Googlers, big time.

------
digitalvisions
I'm actually surprised Google is trying to compete with Facebook. Their whole
premise is they develop products outside the realm of chasing someone else's
product or service. This is what separates them from every other company out
there.

To me, this decision is WAY too late, as the article points out. You can't win
the game when you haven't even been on the field for the majority of the
match. This is going to be a HUGE blunder and cost them dearly. Dropping a ton
of cash and effort into chasing a dead horse is going to come back and haunt
them. I give Page about 2 years tops before they pull the plug on him.

------
millerc
How is the incentive a blunder? Google employees can voluntarily devote a
large portion of their paid time to any project of their choosing. By
announcing this incentive, Larry is actually focusing the efforts of whole
company into the market he thinks they need to grab.

I say the move is genious. There might be a little fewer tomato gardens on the
campus at the end of the year, but he'll be leveraging the ideas and strength
of the whole workforce into that single market. Zuck might very well have
something to worry about now.

~~~
daniel1980fl
I agree with your first sentence and strongly disagree with second.

I think its the dumbest move on Page part. Let Google be AND REMAIN the best
what it is the best SIMPLE SEARCH.

if not, then Page may wake up in 5 years with half of Goog valuation as a
zombie-lunatic who still tries to create a Social network when his main money
making machine is broken dues to poor maintenance.

------
chmike
My impression is that the fundamental factor in play is catching eye balls.
Social networking like facebook is a success on this perspective. But facebook
can't be the end of the story, I hope not.

Stop aping existing social networking services. Make something people want,
something that provides a new dimension to human interaction.

Smart phones is a disruptive technology change which should provide
opportunities for new usage and applications which would be disruptive too.
This "market" opportunity emerged post facebook and because of Android, google
has a significant advantage over competitors it could and should leverage.

The wise points at the moon and the fool looks at the finger. Social
networking is the finger. Look where it points to and target this. Restore the
initiative of creativity and invention. Reconsider google wave for instance.

------
tomx
How much of an incentive is a 25% bonus modifier? I can imagine people (who
presumably are already paid well) ignoring the incentive entirely, and
continuing to work on more interesting projects.

Additionally, many people will be in positions entirely irrelevant to social:
This includes non-engineers, perhaps sales, and people working at lower levels
of the engineering stack (i.e. people working on large scale filesystems,
racking servers, the chef...). These people are more likely to be alienated or
more simply confused, rather than encouraged in the long run.

------
dstein
When I heard that Eric Schmidt was stepping down I couldn't help but be
reminded of the "free ice cream" video from a few months earlier
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbg8IOfdbA0>). I wonder if that video hit a
nerve. It should have, because this is the way a lot of people are perceiving
Google these days. And I think that perception is primarily the reason Google
hasn't been very successful in their social offerings.

~~~
ryanhuff
Considering that Facebook has comparable (potential) privacy issues, I don't
think people are avoiding Google because of such concerns. Its simply a matter
of superior execution from Facebook on social.

------
Metapony
I agree that tying these bonuses for everyone's participation is Larry Page's
first big blunder.

I think there's two things that google can do to be a leader in the social
space. Maybe you won't agree.

First. Buy Reddit. Buy all of Conde Nast if you have to, Larry.

Second. Given that search is an instant gratification thing (which google does
so well) what would happen if, like in a subreddit, I wanted to be aware of
goings on in a certain subject? Facebook is great for checking up on what a
bunch of my friends are doing all over the world. But if I want a good daily
overview of what's going on in a subject I'm interested in, with generally
good coments, I go over to Reddit. Google could rule in this "automated
newsgroup" space quite well. You would turn to this space to get commentary on
articles all over the web. Google could keep it free from bots and not easily
gamed. But Reddit's doing it right, and has the biggest userbase. (And yes, I
find it pretty annoying most days, but now I filter out a lot of the
subreddits I don't like.)

My point here is that Google should look at and learn from Reddit's model so
much that it'd be better if they just bought it outright.

------
pedalpete
I think the author has seriously missed the mark in the comparison of Google
vs. Facebook mission statements. Google's mission statement is to organize the
worlds information. Facebook is organizing your personal/social information.
That is all facebook really is, a good organization of your relationships,
photos, things you like, etc. etc. This is directly inline with Google's
mission.

------
snissn
It seems like the Page move is a step in the right direction. The article
takes that premise as an assumption, and then goes on to argue that Page's
first few leadership plays won't be a panacea against Google's problems, which
I think is missing the point, that they're taking a good first step, at the
cost of saying that it won't solve all of their problems.

------
philfreo
I love this quote:

 _It focuses Google on Facebook's mission. Google's mission is to "organize
the world's information." Facebook's mission is to "give people the power to
share and make the world more open and connected." In a way, Page's edict
tells employees: "Stop working on Google's mission and start working on
Facebook's._

------
gcheong
A bit of an aside from the assertions of the article, but there is some
research to suggest tying anything that involves creative solutions to a bonus
is actually a disincentive:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/opinion/20ariely.html>

------
Cossolus
It's only a blunder if it doesn't work. And that depends not on the bonus but
whether there's a clear top-down plan for a well-defined social product.
Bottom-up development, where each team figures out whether/how to integrate
into +1... that will probably amount to nothing revolutionary. If social
"features" are just spread like jam around all of Google's offerings, the
result will be a sticky mess that nobody wants to touch.

But Google has a good fall-back position with +1, since the worst case
scenario is that it simply evolves into a global digg/reddit-style thumb's up
signal for the relevancy of a search result (which alone would be a great
result). Beyond that, success in "social" will depend on having a well-defined
product that's good enough to sell itself, so I basically agree with the
article.

------
melling
How do you know it was an "accident?" He wants the entire company to think
about integrating social into their products. He wants people to be thinking
about how to accomplish this. Android, Chrome, Ads, Docs, etc.

By the end of 2011, a lot of "social" is going to appear in places you didn't
expect.

------
SergeyHack
> Google has a blind spot about the "human element" in usability

I agree with that. I reported a problem with search localization 3 times for
the last 2 years to my friend who is working at Google. And monthes after the
last time I saw the bad localization behaviour in the search.

I also had to involve my friend for this bug and a few gmail ones because I
just could not find the feedback form.

1\. That was a one-three years ago. 2\. The bad behavior is that Google search
invited a new user (without its cookie) with a locale based on geolocation
instead of much better indicator - browser accepted languages. 3\. This
behavior is extremely annoying when you search from the Linux console in Links
(or Lynx) that has no yet native language installed.

------
Keyframe
IMO, Google COULD tackle "social", but not with the same approach that worked
with facebook. They ought to forget about facebook's approach and attack from
another angle. I have some ideas how it could be done, but it's a bit of a
conundrum to say the least.

~~~
iwwr
_I have some ideas how it could be done, but it's a bit of a conundrum to say
the least._

Would you mind sharing some of that?

~~~
Keyframe
Sure, but I don't think my general idea would suit google (as of their current
behaviour). Allow me to elaborate a bit.

Google has 'social' platform already - Gmail. However, what they have tried to
do so far is to force 'social' elements into their current offerings, and they
have tried to append external turn-key systems like orkut.

You can't force social behavior onto your users, as they have successfully
demonstrated. As I see it, only two successful platforms so far, facebook and
myspace (which died) had a different start. They started out from human
element, which is people started banding together and dragging along their
friends into it - onto a central place. Email is social too, but it isn't one
central place, but more peer to peer.

What I think Google should do is to do something they have never done before.
Humanize Google. Introduce customer support, active engagement with current
user base, expand into traditional media, and not only with google ads, but
with interactive shows based on google platform, editorialized part of google
news, etc... only then will users start to feel google is something they can
empathize with and concentrate around it vs only using their services and go
away.

tl;dr; humanize google, bring human element to it. Actual humans into their
services.

~~~
daniel1980fl
humanize google -- that will NEVER happen for pure economical reason.

you are not talking here about hiring a customer team of 50 folks answering
the phone. you talking about half a million team of humans sticked to the
phone 24/7 in order to accomplish that and succeed. I dont think AdSense
revenue would cover the payroll and still keep GOOG stock going up.

here is the blueprint as of HOW google can win social: take me as an example:
I am a web programmer, mostly php and mysql. google can determine that from my
searches I am sure. but no matter how much I google I am still getting pages
of C++ and Oracle results to my php/mysql problems.

To win social they should let webadmins of all sort of websites and all
subjects (not only programming but anything else there is) implement more
narrowed down system that would let them talk back to Google spider (sort of
key tagging or GQL some sort of Google Query Language that would let admins
describe what google boot see in more mechanical/technical language), and this
way Google search results will be more precise, near to perfection! who goes
beyond second results page?? I only found garbage after that! All I need is an
answer to my question, not 50 pages of results. Accomplish that, Google, and I
am stick to your search for next 10 years at least!

~~~
Keyframe
They already have a bunch of offices and representatives in numerous
countries. Albeit, those people are mostly sales force.. if they expand those
localized teams with marketing and intertwine them with local centers of media
power they could humanize themselves with reasonable amount of money.

------
mrspeaker
A similar take on it was discussed here: "You Can’t Threaten People Into Being
Social" <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2425512>

------
rbanffy
I think there is plenty of space for Google to be more "social" without
building a Facebook. FB is a form of aggregating and extracting value from
tenuous social relationships that would be too much work otherwise. Google
needs to make the same within their space - which is search, mail for end
users and ads for content/service providers.

Going head-on Facebook is stupid. The one who succeeds will not have invented
a better Facebook - will have invented the next social thing, whatever that
is.

------
abbasmehdi
For everybody hating on the author, he is not just a nay sayer, he actually
offered a valid solution. Also there is nothing that will disenfranchise
employees faster than tying their income to something that they cannot
control. Also, Google has dominated search, web mail, smartphones, this author
is just lending advice on how to bring it all together for social. It might be
just me but I would rather have friends tell me what's wrong with me than
praise me all the time.

------
divtxt
I found the article pretty good. It states clearly the issue:

Google need to be clear to their employees what the definition of success in
social and they should define it based on their strengths rather than the
competition's product.

I believe Google is very close to getting there: they need to deliver a great
ChromeOS experience and they improve their apps.

I wait impatiently to give Google 2 photo-sharing customers who won't make it
to facebook: my parents.

------
jeffreyrusso
Why does Google need to have some centralized social product? I think that the
strongest thing about +1 is that it's totally built on top of their wildly
successful core product. Its social, but it's more passive, and relevance
remains at the core. I don't need another timeline of stuff that is relevant
to people I know, but not necessarily me.

------
Apocryphon
It really seems to me that Google is failing to understand social media the
same way Microsoft failed to understand the internet back in the '90s. So the
question always is: what will Facebook fail to understand?

~~~
marshray
"The Internet is hot. Let's wire a web browser deeply into our operating
system and office suite people won't know if they're accessing trusted local
data or untrusted internet data. What could possibly go wrong?"

"Social media is hot. Let's wire social deeply into our successful search
engine, web apps, and operating system. What could possibly go wrong?"

It reminds me of the first part of the 20th century (well I'm not really that
old :-) where every kind of business reacted to the disruptive change of the
automobile by simply bolting on drive-through windows. It fundamentally misses
the point and will seem silly in the long run.

------
stevenj
To get me to change social networks, Google will have to convince my friends
to switch; especially my close ones, as using Facebook to communicate with
many of them has replaced email.

~~~
pdaviesa
That's really the heart of the issue - no matter how good your social product
is, people are only going to make the switch from facebook if a significant
number of their "social network" switch as well. I wonder if the next big
social site needs to incentivize entire groups to switch rather than just
individuals, e.g. promotions that only go into effect after x number of your
friends sign up.

------
gallerytungsten
From the article:

"Page wants employees to advocate Google's social networking features to
family and friends."

Sounds like the Amway approach.

------
chrischen
I'd say Facebook's party ended when peoples' moms and dads joined.

------
yanw
I wish people would keep some of their opinions to themselves, classifying
something as a 'blunder' because you don't agree with it is just bad
reporting.

You wanted a startup and there you have it, with startups there is a certain
amount of risk involved which galvanises people to succeed.

~~~
ivoflipse
Actually his suggestion at the end of grouping all the different features
together on one cohesive page would be an improvement over being spread out
over all the separate products.

But whether the decision is a blunder remains to be seen... We'll see in a
couple of months if its for better or worse.

~~~
yanw
They might just do that, he doesn't know and that's my point, he's quick to
judge.

