
Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company - mikegreenspan
http://recode.net/2014/04/24/exclusive-google-head-vic-gundotra-leaving-company/
======
saidajigumi
> Former CEO Eric Schmidt admitted in an interview at the D conference in 2011
> that he missed the boat on the rise of identity on the Internet.

> “I clearly knew that I had to do something, and I failed to do it,” he said.
> “A CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up.”

I think Eric screwed up in a deeper way that this quote admits. Google+ came
up at a time of broader dissatisfaction with other social networks,
particularly Facebook. From both UI weaknesses and social perception, I
initially saw G+ gaining a lot of interest among disparate folks I'd loosely
label "influencers". And _all_ of that interest was shot dead due to attempts
to own identity by enforcing the use of real names[1].

There are very real reasons why "average" people need alternate identities
online. In some cases, it's mandatory professional separation; your work
persona shouldn't be conflated with your author persona, shouldn't be
conflated with your close-friends persona, etc. Circles were interesting, but
solved a different problem.

In this regard, I think Schmidt's big failing was analogous to the fable of
the golden goose: he killed any chance Google+ had by trying to seize the
golden eggs of online identity. This delayed G+'s adoption enough that
Facebook in particular was able to react, improving both its then-primary web
UI, make some privacy improvements, and significantly shore up its public
perception.[2]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars)
[2] Not counting the rabid social-network and/or Facebook haters, whom cannot
be satisfied.

~~~
zippergz
My experience is that the Real Names policy was hated by a small but vocal and
influential group of users. I never heard about it from any of my friends who
aren't reading sites like HN. Those people still don't use Google+, but it's
because none of their friends were there, they found Circles confusing, and
they didn't see any real benefit to taking the effort to learn about it.
Social networks have a lot of inertia for users who aren't early adopters. If
they already are connected to all of your friends on Facebook, a new social
network would have to be truly amazing (or Facebook would have to really screw
up, in ways that "regular people" care about) to get them to move over. I
think Real Names was a drop in the bucket compared to other issues.

~~~
kibwen

      > I never heard about it from any of my friends who aren't 
      > reading sites like HN.
    

Anecdote: a decidedly non-technical friend of mine with the last name of
"Star" had his Google+ profile disabled after having his name falsely
classified as a pseudonym. The only Google+ service that he actually cared
about using was Hangouts (a sentiment universal among my friends, it seems...
despite its faults, Hangouts really is best-in-class as far as I can tell).
The end result was that he missed out on spending time with his friends
because of an unanswerable algorithm attempting to enforce a dubious policy.
From a user's point of view, this is incredibly frustrating.

To this day, his Google+ profile picture is the same photographic proof that
he had to send in to convince them of his name's legitimacy. His rationale is
that if his profile gets disabled again, he can just point to his profile
picture.

~~~
scrame
<b>Hangouts really is best-in-class as far as I can tell</b>

My S4 updated from gtalk to hangouts, and I loathe it. It now crashes quite
regularly, sometimes multiple times in a single chat session, and included a
stupid button that starts a video chat on my phone, a feature I have never
wanted and never will want, but manages to get fat-thumbed, or randomly turn
itself on when I am trying to communicate with someone.

~~~
kibwen
I should have clarified: best-in-class for what my friends and I need, which
is essentially simultaneous multi-user voice chat that doesn't require
installing an external program (if they have Chrome, it doesn't require
installing anything at all), works on all platforms, doesn't mandate a
laborious microphone calibration on first use, and has pretty decent echo
cancellation. We were just looking to replace Vent/Teamspeak/Mumble, rather
than e.g. looking for a replacement for Skype. It's been invaluable as a
permanent place for our geographically-distributed friend group to idly loiter
and connect to whenever anyone has a free moment.

~~~
davidgerard
"doesn't require installing an external program"

I had to install a .deb to use it in Firefox on Linux.

------
inthewoods
Vic did a pretty great job getting Google+ in decent shape, but am I the only
one that finds the overall strategy among these properties confusing? I know
that whenever I talk with a normal, non-tech civilian they are always confused
by the service.

They have Youtube (where you can upload videos), Google+ Photos (where you can
upload videos and stream as well), Google Drive (where you can also upload
pictures and videos in addition to creating standalone Google Docs).

It would seem to make more sense to me that there should be a Drive where I
store Photos, Videos and Documents, or there should be standalone
Photos/Videos and then a separate service for Documents.

To me, these services should exist separately, but Google+ should bring them
all together - meaning I can decide, from my photos/videos/documents what to
post to Google+. If I want to post a video to the general public, I should
post it to Youtube.

Obviously people may have different use cases (consumer vs. business) - but as
someone using Google services as both a consumer and business, I find the
tools confusing - and it seems to be even more confusing for my Mom.

~~~
aasarava
You're definitely not the only one. Trying to understand the interaction
between the various Google properties makes me feel like an idiot -- and yet
I'm a Web developer with a CS degree who has been using the Web just about
every day since 1994.

For example, have you ever tried to schedule a Google Hangout chat? As far as
I can tell, there's no way to do it from Google Hangouts. You need to first
sign in to Google+, then go to Google Events and create a new event, and then
you have to specify that it's a video event.

Is it a use case they just don't care about? Is there no one at the company
who's looking at this setup and thinking, "wow, this is confusing and we can
probably simplify that"? Or is my brain just getting too brittle to make sense
of it?

~~~
guelo
I feel that Google made better, more usable interfaces before they were taken
over by designers. Modern designers are obsessed with removing features
because that's the Apple religion. The new Maps is ruined because of this.
Larry should fire all their designers and let engineers take over the
interfaces again.

~~~
pwang
I find the new Maps to be so unusably slow, laggy, finnicky, and overall not
an improvement over what Google Maps had been for the 4 years before.

And I can't figure out how to show traffic WHILE displaying directions or a
location that I searched for. Seems like such a simple, commonly used thing...
"Where is this place? What's the traffic outlook for the routes there?" _Sigh_

~~~
astrieanna
On the mobile version, zooming out (a couple of time, to some magic level)
will suddenly make traffic appear (on the route and everywhere else), even
while following the directions. I have not tried this on the desktop version.

------
niix
It appears that many employees did not like working with him. This was posted
on Secret "One of the worst execs I've ever worked with. Completely skirted
the design process and got designers to do one off projects for him that would
derail plans for weeks on end and kill team trust". Interesting, since there
is much praise from Page.

~~~
nostrademons
He's a polarizing figure. I know people who used to work in Social (and
elsewhere in the company) that _hated_ working for them, and now they don't
work in Social. I also know people in Social who really admire him as a
visionary leader who's not afraid to take a lot of personal flack to get the
job done.

I think this is common to many people with strong opinions and the confidence
to act on them. Marissa was very similar: some people absolutely hated her,
while others really respected her.

------
blisterpeanuts
I like G+ for the photo back-up from my Android phone. In fact, that seems to
be _the_ killer feature. I wonder what will happen to G+ if Facebook adds a
similar feature.

The stream is interesting if you add enough people and organizations, but I
find I can go for days or weeks without checking it. I know some people spend
all day on G+, but it's unclear to me why.

Between FB, G+, Twitter, LinkedIn, and a host of other comment boards and
social network wannabes, it seems to me this market is absolutely flooded, and
sooner or later, social network fatigue has got to set in and cause people to
seek something that's more nimble.

Maybe there's an opportunity here for some kind of meta-network that ties
together several of these sites. I would like that. A single stream, one
login, see all your texts, photos, and updates at a glance. Then you can drill
deeper into the particular social network if you care to take the time.

~~~
wtbob
> I like G+ for the photo back-up from my Android phone.

See, I don't use any of Google's 'let us manage your plaintext data' services
except for mail (because email travels in the clear anyway, I'm not too
bothered by that).

If they would enable me to store my phone, tablet & app settings, Chrome
passwords and backed-up data on their servers, encrypted on the client with a
key known only to clients I control, then it'd be a killer feature for me.

Indeed, if they would bake crypto into their products such that all data were
encrypted to the public keys of the intended recipients, then I think that
they'd be going a long way towards making the world a better place.

But as it is, there's no way that they are laying a finger on my WiFi
password, my web site passwords, my photos or any other data I create and do
not intend to send to the world.

~~~
magicalist
Chrome sync (including passwords) can all be encrypted on the client. Just go
to settings -> Advanced sync settings -> "Encrypt all synced data with your
own sync passphrase".

Also, if you're this worried, you really owe it to yourself to put in a little
effort on your email. Email is often _not_ transmitted in the clear,
especially if you're using gmail already, and if you would just switch to a
desktop client and IMAP or POP3 access, you can PGP to your heart's content.

~~~
wtbob
I'm aware of the Chrome sync passphrase. If I used Chrome on Android (I
don't—I use Firefox), would Chrome back my passphrase up to Google's systems?
I dunno.

Is the crypto behind Chrome's sync anywhere near as good as that behind
Firefox's? Not last time I looked.

I'm also aware that email often travels via SSL—but it's always cleartext to
the sending and receiving hosts. I don't see that I'm suffering an especial
risk with Gmail, since someone will always have plaintext versions of all mail
I receive; I would be were I backing up data to them which I would never back
up to anyone.

~~~
magicalist
> _I 'm aware of the Chrome sync passphrase. If I used Chrome on Android (I
> don't—I use Firefox), would Chrome back my passphrase up to Google's
> systems? I dunno._

At least the docs claim that it's only saved on your device. You can believe
it or not. There may be a way to verify that it's not being backed up with
your normal Android data, but I'm not sure.

> _Is the crypto behind Chrome 's sync anywhere near as good as that behind
> Firefox's? Not last time I looked._

It's never been not good. Maybe you're thinking of back when they didn't have
the option to encrypt all your sync data locally, just your passwords? It uses
Nigori[1] and the source is all available[2].

This is a little old, but it compares browser syncing security:
[http://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2012/04/08/comparing-the-
securi...](http://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2012/04/08/comparing-the-security-and-
privacy-of-browser-syncing/)

> _I 'm also aware that email often travels via SSL—but it's always cleartext
> to the sending and receiving hosts_

Fair enough, but if you're using PGP, those hosts are only the actual sender
and recipient (and anyone the recipient shares an email with, of course).

[1] [http://www.links.org/files/nigori-
overview.pdf](http://www.links.org/files/nigori-overview.pdf)

[2]
[https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/sync/util/n...](https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/sync/util/nigori.cc)

------
e15ctr0n
The comments on the Secret app[1] speculate that he might be joining Mozilla,
Github or the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. What if he rejoins
Microsoft instead?

[1]
[https://www.secret.ly/p/wxdnkdhjnsocjxwnizhdpacufc](https://www.secret.ly/p/wxdnkdhjnsocjxwnizhdpacufc)

~~~
powera
I think that's just people suggesting companies that have had a recent people
of hiring people that say stupid things, not serious speculation. [Brendan
Eich, Tom Preston-Warner, Tom Perkins] Because vicg@ also says a lot of stupid
things (and does a lot of stupid things).

~~~
pessimizer
You got downvoted for getting the joke:)

------
r0h1n
Google+ and Gundotra's lasting, and perhaps perverse, legacy to Google is the
"social glue" that forcibly connects together most Google services.

That Google+ never quite managed to take on Facebook is obvious. A much bigger
and intangible cost, IMHO, is the falling trust in much bigger Google products
like search, YouTube etc. as Google+ was shoved down user's throats.

To wit, I don't use Google+, but thanks to its bundling I've also stopped
logging in to any Google service on my laptop except on a strict need-to basis
(for e.g. log in, update Google Drive doc, log out...or turn GPS on, use
Google Maps, turn GPS off).

~~~
ersii
I find myself in the same situation, the more Google+ leaks out into their
other products in an obtrusive way (ie. with "big fanfare") - the less I use
those Google services.

I have however not seen many people near me, be so annoyed at this as I am.
The most complains I hear about is the YouTube pop-up (that never seem to go
away); Calling you out on choosing to use your real name instead of your
YouTube-nickname.

------
kkotak
A couple of months back I gave my feedback to Vic about how G+ is in a limbo
zone between Facebook and Twitter, and that the needs of none of the use cases
are met on G+. In his sincere attempt in trying to do his share of keeping the
conversation vibrant on G+, Vic would (bad call, in my opinion) post pictures
of his kids for thousands of his followers to see and comment on. I think this
is where the non-clarity of the platform emerges. First of all, why would you
post personal pictures of your family for thousands of strangers to see and
comment on? And what do you do with the responses you get? Are you going to
read/respond to all? What's the point of someone saying 'awww' or asking you a
personal question, to which a response is not really warranted - as the askers
are complete strangers. A lot of people follow others on G+ to get
professional insights (as in this case) and Vic's usage of the platform as an
example confuses the value proposition. My 2c.

------
lewisflude
Why would someone leave a company immediately if it was under good terms? Or
is it just the case that this wasn't public until today?

~~~
raverbashing
Because any more time the person remains there is giving information to a
potential competitor (and there's no point staying if you don't want to be
there anymore)

I think Marissa Meyer gave Google a half hour notice.

~~~
nostrademons
Marissa resigned by e-mail and just didn't come into work that day.

------
ThePhysicist
370 million monthly active users. I wonder how many of those interact with
Google+ by mere accident. Personally, the only time I post stuff on G+ is when
I'm using another Google service (e.g. Youtube) and they post it to my G+
stream, often without my knowledge or consent.

~~~
pessimizer
"We’ve heard that there were tensions between Gundotra and others inside the
company, especially surrounding the 'forced' integrations of Google+ into
products like YouTube and Gmail. Apparently, once each of those integrations
was made, they were initially being claimed as 'active user' wins until Page
stepped in and made a distinction."

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/google-is-walking-
dead/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/google-is-walking-dead/)

------
rjf1990
I don't understand why people have to try and read so much into someone
leaving a company. High-ranking execs and employees change jobs all the time
for numerous reasons.

~~~
DannyBee
They really don't. What you just wrote is like saying "This is nothing out of
the unusual. Cows turn themselves inside out all the time"

([http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/149573/inside-out-
cows](http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/149573/inside-out-cows))

~~~
rjf1990
They really do. Anybody who's been at a big company sees it all the time. Most
don't make news stories because they aren't at a sexy company like Google,
leading up a division that's well-known among consumers.

You wouldn't hear about something like the head of fraud detection at American
Express leaving his job. I've seen it before (not at Amex, but other large
companies).

~~~
pessimizer
That's only because you don't read creditnews.com.

When a major exec leaves in my industry, everyone is talking about it on
Monday, and lawsuits often ensue if they end up at a competitor.

~~~
magicalist
non-competes are void in California.

~~~
x0x0
only up to a certain seniority level

~~~
tptacek
[citation needed]

There are things execs do that line employees don't that can presumably make a
CA noncompete binding, like, for instance, accepting significant consideration
specifically in return for a noncompete. But I don't believe seniority is
itself a factor that can make a noncompete binding.

------
mathattack
_“I’m also forever in debt to the Google+ team. This is a group of people who
built social at Google against the skepticism of so many.”_

Seems like the skeptics were right, no? And this is coming from a big fan of
Google. Great company, but this didn't work out. Interesting that they give
Vic credit for Circles. I thought it was someone else's idea, no? Great idea,
they just didn't follow up on it.

------
bane
IMHO Google+'s principle problem is that it's multiple efforts all under the
same name umbrella. This is confusing to users and seems to have been
confusing to Google.

It's a longer-than-twitter public broadcast messaging system/social
network/photo sharing/single sign-on/half a dozen other things.

There's some great ideas in there. Having a subscription style feed of people
I want to follow, and their long-form posts (including deep linking) is much
more interesting to me that twitter. There's been some absolute gems posted on
g+ that simply can't be represented on Twitter. But it falls down because all
these important thoughtful posts are buried in my regular social feed.

Everybody seems to like the circles ideas for organizing our connections,
that's a great idea I'm surprised still hasn't been really replicated by FB.
But then I can't assert different public names/faces to different circles. So
my work circle sees me the same way my demoscene friends. But I'd rather use a
formal identity for my work friends and a goofy presentation of myself in the
demoscene (with an old crazy picture of me from a party). But I really can't.
Unifying my identities, along with my logins, wasn't a good idea. And thus I
don't really use g+ for social network stuff because neither I nor most of my
contacts don't really want to pay the switching cost from FB/linkedin/whatever
else. So literally the major initial message for what g+ is when it was
launched, I almost entirely don't use or get anything out of. I say this as
somebody who really doesn't enjoy FB all that much, but recognize its
importance in connecting me to people I know and want to keep in touch with.

and it goes on and on. Lots of good ideas, mucked up by bad execution and a
muddled vision that doesn't map well to most people's needs. It seems like the
pieces of the product that are the best bits, are the ones that are not as
deeply buried into the morass. Hangouts is pretty good for example and usually
works like I want it to (I usually only message people). But now I hear voice,
which I use all the time, is about to get bungled up with hangouts. I bet I'll
hate whatever the integration looks like. There are _tons_ of people I use
voice with that I have absolutely no desire to tie up with my google+
identity.

The integration is too tight. Rather than being a bunch of well branded
products, all under a unified umbrella, it's like a bunch of products were
stuck in a blender, ground up and then half-baked into a some kind
of...whatever it is.

I think if you can't point at a product and describe in a brief sentence, it's
too big of a concept and that will start infiltrating your development of the
product. What is google+?

Why not "google+ personal news" and "google+ social network" and "google+
chat" and whatever else? Each of those is focused and simple and disjoint
enough not to cause confusion.

~~~
inthewoods
Circles seems like a good idea - but I find I don't use them.

~~~
cookiecaper
I agree, circles mandate additional cognitive load. They should've been
implemented such that each user had 2-3 circles max, like "Work", "Friends",
and "Family", and it was almost always invisible (meaning you'd almost always
share with all). Prompting the user each time they want to post something and
making them choose from their 8-10 circles greatly increases the friction of
posting.

~~~
bradbeattie
That, and the decision is one-sided. Say I want to post something publicly
about some new technology. Do I post it publicly and have it go into my
family's feeds where it will be considered akin to spam? What if one of my
friends actually _is_ interested in new tech but I don't know it?

I get that it would be an added layer of indirection, but to allow each user
to have multiple subject personas for posting and let others subscribe to said
personas might have been more useful. As it stands, I err on the side of
caution and post privately to the people I can best guess might be interested.

~~~
ZoFreX
I think it would work better one-way if you could separate "visible to" and
"posted to". I would like to post to "public" and "techy people", which would
mean it appears in the feeds of people I don't have in my circles who have me
in theirs, and people I have in my tech circle. It would like it to still be
visible to people in my other circles if they went looking for it, but it
wouldn't appear in their feeds.

------
k_kelly
Google+ has it's users, but to me it always seemed like the ultimate example
of building something no one actually wanted.

------
Tloewald
Reminds me of the post on "Mac Pravda" after Steve Jobs shitcanned the Newton
division. The Google+ version would go something like this:

"Maximum Leader Page declares total victory of Google+. Workers to report to
railyard at dawn for reassignment."

------
frade33
Google+ is to Facebook, what Bing is to Google Search.

It wasn't really going to work, much like the Bing. There were simply too late
to the party as were Microsoft or Yahoo to 'modern' search engine.

I only hold Vic responsible for messing too much with the web design of
Google+. Jesus, no one changes underwear so often as they would UI.

In the end, the failure of missing the social bandwagon solely relies on Eric.
Because Vic was working on the mobile side (I think) when Facebook was kicking
in.

------
hartator
Last week, I've posted this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7598111](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7598111)

Last week! :D

------
yuhong
Personally, I don't think Google+ should be abandoned, but I do wish some of
the problems, such as the real name policy, can be fixed.

------
dredmorbius
Eric Schmidt said in a December 30, 2013 Engaget interview "my biggest mistake
at Google was not anticipating social".

My response at the time: No, Schmidt, your biggest mistake was failing to
realize that vast hoards of highly detailed and categorized personal data are
not only an asset, but a tremendous liability.

Or as I put it: "Schmidt: My biggest mistake is still not realizing my biggest
mistake"

[http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1u356d/schmidt_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1u356d/schmidt_my_biggest_mistake_is_still_not_realizing/)

------
cessor
Oh, good. Vic, please make sure that a) you don't miss the door and b) you
take away the comment function of youtube with you.

------
jgalt212
17 comments (as of this writing), and about 1/3rd are grayed-out due to down
votes.

Ergo, there are some pretty strong opinions about Vic.

~~~
huhtenberg
There A LOT of downvoting across all HN threads recently. In every single
topic there are comments upon comments that are in gray and barely any
actually deserving to be there.

These aggressive downvoting sprees also seem to coincide with that change in
HN stewardship from few weeks ago.

~~~
dang
Your wording suggests that maybe you didn't see sama's announcement about the
change we made to count more downvotes [1] or any of my recent comments about
it.

People can reasonably differ, of course, but I don't agree that _barely any_
negatively scored comments deserve to be there. I look at all the negatively
scored comments, and the vast majority are either not substantive, not civil,
or both.

It's true, though, that some substantive, civil comments are getting unfairly
faded out. We're asking users to give those a corrective upvote when they see
them. This is a longstanding HN practice. It usually only takes one or two
corrective votes to get a good comment back to par, so every user can make a
difference.

Overall, this experiment appears to have succeeded in addressing the epidemic
of highly toxic comments. That was our main goal, because those had
increasingly been poisoning HN. That doesn't mean, though, that every other
effect has been good. If rallying the community to do more corrective upvoting
doesn't turn out to be enough, we'll eventually take other measures.

All: please don't add comments complaining about downvotes, though. It just
adds noise.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605973](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605973)

~~~
CamperBob2
I won't complain about downvotes, but I would like to request a feature. In a
manner similar to 'showdead', I'd like to be able to disable graying.

Here's why: when you gray out a comment to the point of illegibility, as is
happening more and more, _that only makes me want to read it more._ So I end
up paying more attention to downmodded comments, not less. Somehow, I don't
think that's what you were going for.

I would rather have the option to judge comments on their content, and not
their color.

~~~
dang
That's a reasonable request. I've added it to our list.

~~~
Karunamon
Thank you for at least taking the idea under consideration.

I've more than once wanted to create a browser plugin that basically hides the
voting system from the person running it. i.e. all comments are the same
color, and top level ones are sorted randomly on the page - there are some
hot-button issues where such a feature would be valuable.

------
chresko
I think had Google taken the approach of 'what do we have that Facebook
doesn't?' vs 'what does Facebook have that we can obtain?' would've resulted
in a better product (as far as value proposition goes). There was a lot of
opportunity to create a unique experience, and that simply didn't happen.

------
arunc
When I get notification that one of my friends (who is on Facebook full time)
has joined new on Google+ after all these years, that shows that Google+ has
failed miserably to reach the mass. I don't use Hangouts these days. Its only
Facebook messenger (on Android/desktop).

------
sidcool
This post was meant to inform of Vic's departure from Google. It suddenly
became a slug fest of Google +.

------
mark_l_watson
I am really curious what he will do next.

I am just a light user of G+, FB and Twitter. That said, I enjoy G+ the most.

~~~
discordance
Xiaomi could do with a social network.

------
davidgerard
"He spent his last hour at the company thanking each Google+ user personally."

------
igorgue
Sorry if I'm asking a stupid question, but:

How come all these "internal memos" always leak? Is it fine to share an
internal email without getting in trouble at a public company?

~~~
walshemj
Politics you know the 8th layer of the OSI stack :-)

Normally some one has a line they want to run and have their friends in the
media to spin stuff to its the same in politics.

~~~
joeblau
I'm laughing so hard at this. I'm definitely stealing this and using this
later!

------
ForFreedom
Is Vic moving to another company?

------
hawase
How is it an "exclusive"? it's all there in public posts:

Vic:
[https://plus.google.com/+VicGundotra/posts/MFrDF3W4RJL](https://plus.google.com/+VicGundotra/posts/MFrDF3W4RJL)

Larry:
[https://plus.google.com/+LarryPage/posts/A2gm48nzitx](https://plus.google.com/+LarryPage/posts/A2gm48nzitx)

~~~
arebop
The "exclusive" article was posted at 10:16. Larry's post, quoted in the
article, was posted at 10:18.

------
whoismua
_" This is a group of people who built social at Google against the skepticism
of so many.”_

Well, he does have a sense of humor. They sure built it, I see many obscure
names ranking on search engines...only to see an G+ empty page (along with a
Youtube one--also empty. Looks like the Android signup process.)

------
leccine
There plans to rename the service Google- reflecting to the lack of interest
of the public using the service even after forcing youtube users to have an
account.

------
mauricio-OH
Pushed out for sure

------
gdulli
I guess there are challenges more interesting than cat pictures to be solved
elsewhere.

------
arkj
G+ failed coz of a simple reason, Hubris.

------
akennberg
Google tried social without a real name policy (aka Buzz) and it didn't work.
Google+ has better content.

~~~
zmmmmm
I don't know how you can compare them. G+ has had a massive support from being
tied into every other product, in some cases taking features people already
use and making G+ mandatory for continuing to use them. Not to mention getting
tied to search such that not having a G+ presence could significantly
adversely affect your SEO. Buzz certainly had its problems but it doesn't mean
G+ was the right way, or that real names had anything to do with the
difference.

------
nfoz
Can he take Google+ with him!?

------
DogeDogeDoge
g+ was garbage from the start and could not compete with facebook. And anyone
who used facebook know how trash it is... In terms of UI. But google made it
worse experience.

Google will try to recover now :)

------
bkurtz13
Yes, "he" built Google+ from nothing.

~~~
libria
The guy who "built" my house never lifted a hammer. I think our egos can take
the abbreviated form of "assembled/managed the team that built G+" in stride.
Context, dude.

~~~
pekk
You paid someone to build you a house. Therefore you built the house! It
wouldn't have happened without you to pay, would it?

It's not dishonest, it's just shorthand. Context, dude.

------
teawithcarl
Gundotra sucked anyway. So does Google+. That's what happens when you "copy"
technology, rather than rethinking/innovating. A new player to the space, and
they just "copy" \- that sucks. (apologize for my negativity.)

Try Google searching on Vic Gundotra "licking the cookie".

(a metaphor for making a project "his" before others can lay claim.)

"Gundotra, we’re told, would “lick the cookie” at Google by putting future
products and features into presentations about Google+, long before his teams
would be able to get to building them".

[http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-
it...](http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-its-a-game-
of-thrones-in-mountain-view-2013-9)

~~~
yuhong
Yea, I have mentioned this before too and I think this article was submitted
to HN.

------
etfb
Definition of unintended consequences: I don't instantly recognise the names
Eric Schmidt, Larry Page or whoever the other guy is -- I have to look them
up, and to be honest I keep mixing up Larry Page and Larry Wall. But I know
Vic Gundotra, because he's the wanker who pushed the real names policy and
made Google+ the laughing stock among my various communities. "I am a Google
employee who likes donuts", indeed!

