Hindsight is 20-20, of course. But in this case, foresight was 20-20: G+ has failed in almost exactly the way that I (and everybody I was talking to at the time) expected it to. For me, the saddest thing about G+'s failure has been its plodding inevitability.
It would be really interesting to see a more in-depth analysis of how this happened. It didn't happen because the folks at Google are stupid: from top to bottom, they are wicked smart. So how did such a mass delusion take hold? I'd be genuinely interested in hearing from people who expected G+ to succeed, and why they had this expectation, and how its failure has changed their perceptions.
I've seen similar patterns elsewhere: company X brings on powerful, smart, and egotistical person Y, who browbeats others into believing their pet project Z has to be top priority; those who disagree with Y leave Y's team (or perhaps leave X altogether); groupthink takes hold, and this perception of priority becomes reality; groupthink mutates into sunk cost fallacy to convince everyone to keep going.
This process is often reinforced with incentive structures:
- raised salaries for everyone working on Z;
- higher performance bonuses offered to top performers on Z;
- greater social cachet for those working on Z (more mentions in Q&A sessions, presentations, etc.; more marketing punch; more opportunities for advancement; air of secrecy; etc.)
Once the incentive structures take hold, even smarter employees have rational reasons to perpetuate Z.
Understood, but its not that google went social that was a problem, it was that they had no vision about how to do it in the first place. They perfectly executed their vision to create a social network, but people already had that.
It has little to do with egos and everything to do with bad planning and a panicked knee-jerk response to the crisis at hand.
I don't think there was as mass delusion at all. Most of the googlers I knew were really skeptical of the thing, even ones that had to integrate their products with it. I think only the people working directly on it, and of course the management chain, were really convinced. It was the most top-down thing that I'd seen at google to that point.
It's going to be top down, so the most fundamental answer comes from the person running the company. The programmers are wicked smart at programming, but they do what the managers say, the managers are great managers but do what the division lead says, etc. There were apparently failures at multiple levels.
It would be really interesting to see a more in-depth analysis of how this happened. It didn't happen because the folks at Google are stupid: from top to bottom, they are wicked smart. So how did such a mass delusion take hold? I'd be genuinely interested in hearing from people who expected G+ to succeed, and why they had this expectation, and how its failure has changed their perceptions.