

Why Google can’t build Instagram - edanm
http://scobleizer.com/2010/11/12/why-google-cant-build-instagram/

======
edanm
I'm not sure I agree with everything Scoble wrote, but it's definitely
interesting. One thing I think he doesn't really talk about: whether Google
_wants_ to build things like Instagram.

The Google Wave example is a telling one - Wave wasn't the success Google
wanted, so they scratched it. Nevermind that there _were_ great uses for
Google Wave, and there were probably hundreds of thousands of users on it, at
least, who really liked it. In Google's eyes, Wave didn't succeed in becoming
the huge hit they wanted, so it was a failure.

A small startup would have considered it a huge deal and pivoted on Wave's
good uses until they turned it into a much larger project, IMO.

~~~
axod
> "...and there were probably hundreds of thousands of users on it"

I'd be _really_ surprised if usage was that high. I'd believe there being
maybe a few thousand using it regularly.

~~~
phjohnst
I know 3 completely separate (and non-tech focused) groups of people (each
30+) that were/are running on Wave and are each pretty upset that its going
away. I know that each of them came to swear by Wave for almost all intra-team
communication.

It wouldnt be a stretch for active users to run into the high tens of
thousands. Unfortunately, thats tiny compared to the usage of Google's high-
profile projects, so it gets killed.

~~~
wlesieutre
If you want a conversation between more than two people, Wave kicks
everything's ass. And unless you're the kind of group that's comfortable with
setting yourself up a phpBB, I can't even think of anything that comes close.

Wave's problem wasn't that it's not useful, it's that nobody knew about it (of
people I know, it had 0 adoption outside of computer geeks), and it couldn't
integrate with desktop applications. A lot of us are stubbornly hanging on to
Mail.app and Entourage because they integrate with our workflow better than
web based solutions.

If google had come out with a a desktop Wave client that worked with OSX's
address book, photo libraries, etc, it would have had a lot more draw. That
sort of integration is less expected on Windows, but I'm sure they could have
come up with some compelling features that the website didn't offer.

~~~
phjohnst
I completely agree. I know from my experience that if I could have just put in
my normal Google Apps email and pushed everything through Wave, I would never
look back. The fact that it was a self-contained, closed system killed a lot
of its usefulness.

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tav
Great article, but I'd like to contest a few points.

 _4\. Google forces its developers to use its infrastructure, which wasn’t
developed for small social projects_

One of the advantages of working for Google is _that_ you get access to this
infrastructure. At times I wish Google would start offering a raw BigTable
service alongside/instead of the richer, but, limited App Engine services.

 _6\. Google’s engineers can’t use any Facebook integration or dependencies
like Instagram does._

I don't know if such a policy exists, but it certainly doesn't seem to apply
to projects like YouTube which integrate fine with YouTube.

 _7\. Google can’t iterate in semi-public._

If anything, Google have proven that a _large_ company can iterate publicly. I
can't think of a single other company that has had as many perpetual betas as
Google...

P.S. Corrected link to Instagram: <http://instagr.am/>

~~~
simonw
4 is particularly interesting to me. When I worked at Yahoo! back in 2005 I
was constantly jealous of Google's infrastructure stuff - Yahoo! stuff was all
replicated MySQL, PHP, memcached and Java while Google appeared to be creating
infrastructure that totally changed the way you approached large scale
development.

In the past five years, it feels like the world outside Google has mostly
caught up - in part through open source equivalents of Google's secret sauce.
Hadoop, EC2, S3, the various NoSQL engines, RabbitMQ, Thrift, Scribe... access
to the Google stack may not be as big an advantage.

I spoke to a Google engineer recently who complained that the Google stack was
actually something of a pain to build agains, with a very steep learning curve
and a great deal of innertia to work around.

~~~
tav
Totally agreed that the world outside Google has _mostly caught up_. An
equivalent for BigTable and associated libraries is still missing though.
Hypertable, HBase, KDI and even Cassandra are extremely poor substitutes. I
often end up resorting to App Engine for many projects but wish that there was
a true open source substitute.

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asknemo
I am relatively new here, not based in US, and a bit confused: why is
Instagram considered somewhat a huge success in the tone of the article, that
Google HAS to learn from it? There has been free iPhone Apps with similar
growth before. There's no clear monetization method. There's nothing that
competitors can't copy in a week. So what am I missing? Is there something I
fail to see here, in the context of what makes it a successful startup?

~~~
ojbyrne
Scoble routinely equates buzz in the SF PR scene with commercial success.

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guelo
meh, Instagram seems pretty useless to me. Google builds more cool stuff in an
average month than Instagram ever has.

~~~
ErrantX
This is the key I think. For every instagram there are hundreds of half baked
products that never make it past the initial stages (hell, I have tried to
build a few..)

At Google such things often do get past the initial stages, and then flop.
Even more probably gets shoved under the carpet.

Google are quite openly trying out the different projects, looking for a hit.
Classic example; Gmail. Slightly different because that was a "hit" internally
first, but the basic idea applies. A project that ended up working well,
resources got thrown at it and, some hiccups later, a really huge success.

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adambyrtek
> Tonight I was talking with an exec at Google and I brought up the success of
> Instagr.am (they’ve gotten more than 500,000 downloads in just a few weeks)
> and asked him “why can’t Google do that?”

First of all the number of downloads, especially during the period of initial
hype, is not a very useful metric. But even assuming that Instagram is an
amazingly successful product, it's still a little fish comparing to Google.
This company is more interested in developing Android, a platform on which
toys like that can be built, which by the way has more than 200,000
activations per day.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
You beat me to the punch on this. I am very impressed with Instagram's
success, but to say 'why can't Google build a product with half a million
users?' is so completely wrong-headed that I don't even know where to begin.

------
axod
huh?

Google _have_ built instagram. It's standard on any Android phone. [photo] ->
[share] -> picasa/twitter/facebook/gmail/etc

Unless I'm missing something, instagram is a 'feature' that should be on any
smartphone. Not surprising it's not on the iPhone though.

(First I'd heard of instagram as well. This is an interesting way to get PR).

~~~
zalew
instagram applies vintage filters, so digital modern photos look like the ones
from a cheap used old camera

~~~
nikcub
that is a problem for instagram - it isn't defensible atm. I imagine the
Android team will look at it and think 'really, so people want to do that -
ok, lets add filters in the next release' and done.

~~~
zalew
I know, I wouldn't use instagram or these filters anyways, but people seem to
like this hipster stuff. Bigger problem for them is, they have to think what
to offer their users before these vintage-effect photos stop being trendy.

~~~
DannoHung
Ehh, they don't have to worry about that until the cameras on phones stop
being so shit. The reason people like the vintage effects is that lots of
phones end up taking blurry, slightly out of focus, under and over exposed
photos. Slap some vintage filters on that and it looks somewhat charming.

Now, on the other hand, take some serious optics and truths same and unless
you explicitly start blowing things out on the photo you've got something
weird and artificial looking.

------
jcoop
Scoble doesn't point out why he see's instagram as the pinnacle of innovation,
apart from the fact they've received a high number of downloads.

Instagram's success stems from the viral nature of wanting to try out these
filter's that you've seen others using. Dont get me wrong, Instagram is a nice
little service. But not the right example when compared to Google's recent
failures in Wave and Buzz.

Besides, Google houses plenty of innovative products that match the success of
Instagram.

Google's problem with its lack off 'innovation' within its recent failures
stems from its products not being user led. Wave and Buzz solved no immediate
problem for your average user. And I'm not so certain Instagram does.

Google could never create Instagram simply because creating a frivolous app
based around styling your photos just doesn't align with their brand values. I
can imagine the Google Engineers now, "So why are we using a sepia filter
exactly?"

~~~
jonhendry
Google goes for apps you might call big and wide. Broadly useful tools that
you can make intensive use of and that capitalize on Google's strengths. GMail
is an example of this, but Mail is a well-known product area. Wave and Buzz
were attempts to create innovative new ones.

Instagram is a tiny little toy camera app hooked up to a website. It's very
narrow-interest. It's not the kind of thing you wrap your workday around or
rely upon.

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alecthomas
I agree with a lot of what he wrote, but his own list of reasons why Google
can't innovate refutes his assertion that they can "...by buying companies
like Instagram".

Once a company is acquired, all of the same constraints that apply to internal
Google projects now apply to it. They are Google for all intents and purposes.
"Strategy taxes" now apply, they'll have to port their iPhone app to Android,
port their systems to Google infrastructure, and so on.

That is, if the acquisition doesn't get gutted entirely and its employees
redistributed to other projects. See AppJet, Jaiku, JotSpot, etc. The "Google
Blackhole", or talent acquisitions.

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nollidge
This comparison is absurd. Would anyone use it if Google _did_ build
Instagram? I can see it now:

 _They built the world's fastest, most reliable, most relevant search engine
on the planet, the most usable webmail and map apps... and then a dinky photo-
sharing smartphone app with three features?_

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crux_
Projecting my own biases onto google: Maybe it's just because Instagram is the
very definition of all sizzle, no steak?

It is innovative in the "gee nice idea" sense but it not at all innovative in
the sense that our collective knowledge or capabilities have expanded as a
result of its creation.

~~~
madh
Great point. Instagram is beautiful, fun and seems to really make people
happy, but I would much rather see continue to focus on its core mission and
tackle problems that no one else can.

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klochner
Scoble responds to our HN discussion:

<http://twitter.com/#!/Scobleizer/status/3154038992412672>

~~~
devmonk
Instead of tweeting and cinching, why not just click the reply link? There are
plenty on the page.

~~~
eagleal
Because he can change your perception of the message a lot more narrating it
than by writing it down (which is something cold). Or he's just lazy to type
it.

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haribilalic
Maybe they can, maybe they can't, but do they want to? I'd bet Google's going
after fish so big that two guys can't do everything from start to finish.

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derefr
The gist is, Google (and Microsoft) are brands that are already associated
with "web-scale" software. So, if they make something new, people expect it to
be engineered to be web-scale from the beginning, not a bloated prototype that
relies on other tiny/bloated third-party services (and definitely not on
services from their competitors.) I think this is just an _image_ problem,
though—couldn't Google get around this simply by not saying that the projects
are "by Google" until they're popular? Publishers call this an "imprint."

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antichaos
Because Google isn't stupid enough to waste engineering resources on such a
small niche that will never grow into a million dollar market.

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guiseppecalzone
If you ever read the Innovator's Dilemma, this article makes a lot of sense.
For a project to make financial sense for a big company, or appeal to its
current user base, it has to get big fast, be scalable off the batt and be
compatible with their current software. So, it's iteration speed goes way
down. Think about Buzz. They couldn't launch to 1,000 users and iterate
quickly as they grew. They had to release it to everyone. Imagine the pre-
launch engineering required to make an app ready for tens of millions of
users?

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obilgic
I think success is very abstract concept and it is also about expectations of
companies/people.

Can Instagram be a success from google's perspective?

~~~
mcosta
The answer is no. This article seems to be written to help some friends
getting attention. Imagine this conversation between these folks and a google
exec:

For which mobile platforms is it available? Only for iPhone, but it's got
500,000 downloads in just a few weeks.

Is it internationalized? you know we are a worldwide company. No, but it's got
500,000 downloads in just a few weeks.

Can it scale to serve our millons of users worldwide? No, but it's got 500,000
downloads in just a few weeks.

Do you have a plan to monetize this? No, but it's got 500,000 downloads in
just a few weeks.

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chrisaycock
> He had done his own startup and knew the man-month myth. For every person
> you add to a team, he said, iteration speed goes down.

That phenomenon is Brooks's Law, and first appeared in _The Mythical Man-
Month_ :

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month>

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neworbit
The only ways you'll get an Instagram out of Google is

a) Google finds some serious way to monetize it

b) Someone gets a 20% wild hair

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jamesaguilar
A more detailed and BS-free list than the average one on this topic. I think
all of these are good explanations of the problem.

