

Why Google+ will become Google's only product - narad
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222547/Why_Google_will_become_Google_s_only_product

======
ootachi
"And between these two giants, it will be no contest. Google will almost
certainly have vastly superior search -- it's Google, after all -- superior
messaging, superior office documents, superior spam filtering, superior video
chat -- superior everything."

I think the author is drastically overstating the inevitability of Google's
product superiority. Google already spectacularly failed once at messaging
with Google Wave, and Gmail doesn't actually have the market share that most
people think it has (even just considering webmail). Office documents don't
seem to be a make-or-break feature for social, and Google Docs has had very
limited success competing with Microsoft Office (in fact, my favorite Google
office productivity product, EtherPad, was killed in favor of Wave). Spam
filtering is legitimate, but it's not that hard of a problem really in a
technical sense; Facebook could keep up. Video chat is a weak point for
Facebook, granted.

Besides, integrating your competitor's product as a feature of your own
doesn't always spell success. Microsoft integrated Bing with its operating
system through the IE search box, and look how little that has mattered. Both
Apple and Microsoft have tried to "feature-ize" Dropbox, and Dropbox seems to
have emerged unscathed. Instapaper is doing fine even in the face of the
Safari Reading List. The list goes on. (Sometimes the strategy does work, such
as IE against Netscape, but it's hardly clear-cut.)

~~~
fpgeek
I think Dropbox is a great example to illustrate the weaknesses of the
product-to-feature template. Yes, a product can be crushed by a feature, but
only if that feature is "good enough".

Dropbox, in particular, is remarkably resilient, because the competing
features still aren't "good enough". Apple and Microsoft are actually
relatively weak competitors because neither of them "plays well with others"
(and having access to your files "anywhere" is a big part of Dropbox's value
proposition). Amazon is a more significant threat (competing with your
infrastructure provider is never easy), but even they haven't done enough to
make Cloud Drive simple and ubiquitous.

Looking at Google+ that way, I think many products won't be threatened by
Google+'s features. For example, Google+ doesn't support anonymity the way
Tumblr does, so it isn't likely to be a "good enough" replacement.

Facebook might be special case, though. Other than the existing user base
(which isn't an impossible hurdle), I don't really see any dimension along
which Google+ isn't likely to be a "good enough" alternative. On the other
hand, I've never been a fan of Facebook, so I'm probably a bad person to
assess that.

~~~
movingahead
People are invested in Facebook with their updates, photos etc. Unlike what
the OP contends, people are not going to switch over their usage to a
competitor based on features. Bing is as good as Google for most queries, but
how many people have switched to Bing? Google is not attacking, it is
defending. FB messages is already way more efficient for quick communication
than email. It may not replace email, but can occupy significant market-share.

No matter how many places Google pushes G+, people are not going to switch
unless they can achieve the same functionality by copy-pasting a link.

~~~
LordBodak
People were invested in Myspace with updates, photos, page customizations,
etc. Now they're all on Facebook. There's no reason to believe they won't move
again if the right feature set comes along.

~~~
afterburner
I'd actually expect that Facebook's far deeper penetration would mean that
there is a far lower percentage that are willing to jump on the "next big
thing".

------
keypusher
I actually hope this does come to pass, but I don't see it happening any time
soon given the current state of affairs. Only a handful of my friends use G+,
and they are the web/coder guys. All the social butterflies, the girls, the
parties, and the pictures post on Facebook. It seems to me that many of my
peers' internet surfing these days consists almost entirely of hanging out on
Facebook. They have never heard of reddit, they don't follow blogs, they have
no compelling interest in international news or trends, and if they have heard
of G+ they consider it irrelevant. I think there is a key demographic of
extroverts around which social gatherings coalesce that G+ needs to start
making a dent in if they ever want to dethrone Facebook as the social space.

The other thing that concerns me is Google's prior lack of commitment to these
types of projects. Facebook did not succeed only because it was better than
myspace, I believe it was also due to just how bad myspace became that people
started actively looking for an alternative. Remember the terrible auto-start
songs, horribly mangled html templates, creepy spam and rampant security
flaws? It might be the case that in a few years Facebook will start to implode
in much the same way. Too many crappy Zynga games, an increasinly cluttered
interface, questionable privacy compromises, a constant battering of status
minutia updates and/or some catastrophic privacy event might drive people to
begin migration to a new service. That might take years though. My question
is, will G+ still be there, ready to accept them with a stable of polished
features and seamless integration to the entire Google application lineup? Or
will Google have abandoned G+ years ago, the same way it did with Wave and
countless other "experiments"...

------
overgard
Apparently all this "integration" appeals to some people, but I can't say I'm
one of them. The last thing I want is google+ integrated with my gmail
(largely why I haven't signed up with google+). I'd rather just have my mail
be my mail, not some sort of weird blob-like uber product trying desperately
to force me to classify the people I kind of know into "circles". I get the
value for the company, but as a consumer the idea of all this integration just
creeps me out.

~~~
notatoad
a circle is _exactly_ the same feature as a contacts group, something email
clients have had since their inception. you've never organized your contacts
into groups or lists so you could quickly send an email to a pre-defined list
of people? that's exactly what a circle is. i can't imagine any rational
reason to be creeped out by that.

and even if you don't group your contacts, that's perfectly fine. there is
nothing forcing you to do that. after-g+ gmail works exactly the same way it
did before g+, only now it has the ability to send mail to any circles you've
set up in google+.

~~~
muyuu
Similar, but not exactly the same. Contact groups are more of a memory aid.
You just need to be able to find the person, and most of the time this is the
only consideration. Circles involve privacy and thus they also involve social
considerations.

For instance, I'd have all my f __* buddies in the same group but not in the
same circle. People who I don't want to discuss my stuff together I wouldn't
have in the same circle, and this happens a lot.

That said, it's been a while I don't even use contact groups, I have just 2
lists: people I actively communicate with (time doesn't allow for a ton of
these) and people I seldom communicate with, or whose contact I may or may not
need. I've also learnt to delete people who I don't need or want in my
contacts, and found it to be a great life-hack.

------
cek
I put money down with a buddy (when Google+ launched) that within a year
Google would drop the Google+ brand. This article basically agrees with me,
but has it backwards.

Google+ will just become Google. Owning an Internet scale social-graph is just
too important for Google; thus they will do whatever it takes to own one. This
will include forcing users who just want search (or email) to have the
functionality of Google+; but to avoid brand dilution Google will drop the
"+".

(They will continue to use the + in the UI for +1, but that's different).

~~~
r00fus
Though I agree with your reasoning, I don't think the "+" is going away, and I
do think your buddy will end up winning.

Like Circles, the + is becoming it's own strong brand, and though it may be
that "Google+ == Google", the plus brand will stick around.

Likely, Google will still retain the non-plus Google search, but put most of
it's efforts into improving and integrating the "account required" Google+.

------
danko
This is a well-written and persuasive, and I think Elgan does a terrific job
at structuring his argument around the 'product-to-feature' angle.

What I don't agree with necessarily is the framing that Google's success is
fait accompli. One skill that Google has _NOT_ established is their ability to
integrate separate services such that the whole is _at least_ as much as the
sum of its parts. One might argue the only case where they've had success in
this is AdSense. Tell me if I'm forgetting something.

While Google's scale and technological advance is a major plus, if you don't
design these integrated products cleverly enough, you end up with a bloated,
confusing, nebulous morass that people can't grasp as easily as they would
independent services. I'm sure Page is aware of this, but the devil is in the
execution, and again, the precedent so far is not encouraging. It'll be
intriguing to see how well they do this in 2012.

------
varelse
I can't see a future where the majority of people (knowingly) opt in to having
their personally identifiable web histories stored and analyzed by anonymous
nerds. Sure, that's happening already if one has a facebook account, and the
battle's already over and lost there, but a lot of friends, more than I have
on facebook, avoid social networks for that very reason.

That said, it seems like google's focus is now desperate imitation of anything
remotely successful on the social web with subsequent bundling of the winners
into one uber-product within google+. And it would be a real shame if this is
as good as it gets. Is it?

------
thenewgreen
This reminds me of this article: <http://hubski.com/pub?id=2069>

I think it's an interesting argument. Google+ might be Google's biggest
success, and also sew the seeds of their downfall. Now that G+ is spreading
into Gmail, there is no going back.

------
phamilton
When I heard "center all their products around one product" I first thought of
Gmail.

I'm not sure if I'm alone on this, but Gmail is by far the most critical part
of my Google experience.

~~~
tikhonj
Could this be simply because you're taking their search for granted? Perhaps
because I Chrome, I find Google search to be my main way of getting around the
internet, both for specific sites and specific queries.

~~~
phamilton
I would say that's accurate.

Maybe it's because I type gmail.com far more often than google.com. In fact, I
don't think I ever type google.com.

I probably make a couple dozen searches a day, but only spend around 30
minutes a day in the search engine. On the other hand, 99% of the time I have
Gmail running.

------
zanny
They center their products around ads, because that is where the profit margin
is. Google is just unique in that it does a lot of externally tangential web
services that on the outside don't make direct income but really keep the
google brand going and strong. They are pretty much the only company to
realize they can have a separation between what makes money and what makes
customers.

------
wavephorm
No, the author missed it completely. Google's business is massively threatened
in many different dimensions. Google is in a desperate fight to save their
business, and the Google+ product is entirely a defensive reaction to the
threat imposed by social networks, targeted searches (Yelp) and non-web
searching (Siri) and information discovery. I do not forsee a future where
people perform searches by going to www.google.com. A conventional search
engine is going to look quaint in the coming years and that's bad if you make
97% of your revenue from something that has or will peak.

~~~
codelust
I don't agree with the author on many counts, but I wish that everyone who
makes the point about Google being threatened by "social networks, targeted
searches, non-web searching and information discovery" would elaborate a bit
further.

Let us look at factors you have pointed out:

1\. Social networks: Google has 3 positions in Alexa's Top 10 for the US
market. Only Facebook and Twitter are the only two sites that are social
networks on that list. Other than Twitter (protected accounts), Bing and
Paypal, every other site on that list is crawl-able by Google. Even for
Facebook, it is better to have public than private pages (6,330,000,000 pages
in the Google index). *

It is very much possible for Facebook to be double the size that it is at and
also for Google to grow at the same time. There are more people using more of
the internet every year. They all need to connect with others and also find
other information they are looking for. Growth for both Google and Facebook
need not be mutually exclusive.

The most tangible growth-related metric of year-on-year growth for Google is
still pretty impressive: <http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html>
Till a lot of the numbers start veering drastically off-course, I won't worry
much about it.

2\. Targeted searches: There will always be niche companies who do this over a
million domains. I do not think Google would bother too much with it purely
because of the clout they carry in the search market. If you have to get good
non-organic traffic, you need to be indexable on Google these days. There is
also the fact that Google would not want to dominate in everything related to
search as it leaves them badly exposed to anti-trust issues.

3\. Non-web searches: This is more of an input/interface matter. It has been
possible to search through speech for a while on Android and it is something
that is only bound to grow as speech recognition gets more and more better
across all platforms. What matters is the quality of results and if competing
platforms can provide better results from a non-Google platform, then Google
would be in trouble. Parsing spoken text is different from delivering results
for a query. So, Siri doing a good job of parsing what you are saying is
different from Siri being able to serve results from a different search engine
than Google.

If the majority of people who do speech-based searches get their results from
Google, it will be something for Google to rejoice and not fear. In fact, I
think Apple may have even done Google a favour with Siri. There is now going
to be a race to be the best voice-based interface on non-iOS platforms as a
result of Siri. There is also the increased awareness of this feature now due
to Siri.

4\. Information discovery: If I am not mistaken, Google already is the leader
on this front. They layer a lot of additional information into search results
(which, I am not a fan of) and there is nobody of a comparable size who is
competing with them on it.

* Alexa is a flawed metric. I am using it as a comparative/indicative measure. Google's page count is broken; but they do have a LOT of pages on Facebook that is crawl-able.

~~~
ianstormtaylor
RE #1: Even if Google grows thanks to indexing Facebook pages, isn't "Where do
people search for these pages?" the question that matters. And I'd bet that if
people are trying to find a friend or a group or whatever on Facebook, their
first attempt will be searching with Facebook.

That being said, Facebook's search could definitely use some help, and the
more they improve it, the less anyone will need Google to search for things
inside the Facebook ecosystem.

~~~
codelust
Absolutely correct there about Facebook being the primary destination to find
Facebook friends. Point I am trying to make is that Facebook being open to
being indexed by Google also contributes to Google's growth.

Searching for most names on Google throws up first results from Facebook,
which makes it one more reason why I'll search for a name on Google than the
situation where Google would not have the results on the what is probably the
most authoritative page for most people. Thus, in the latter case, creating a
situation where I am forced to use Facebook at the cost of Google.

Edit: I think there is a popular zero sum perspective to these things, which
is not necessarily true when you look at it closely.

