Yea but the root problem lies in Larry's management. Larry gave Vic pure dictatorial powers for Google+ without holding him accountable for real results. They gave him way too much budget, control, engineers, etc. And they waited way way way too long before kicking him out when things weren't working.
The engineering headcount was ridiculous for Google+. It was also ridiculous to have OKRs for every team at Google to integrate with Google+. Facebook (or really any company) didn't start with Mark Zuckerberg hiring a 1000 engineers and start cranking. If a VC cut him a check for $500 million after his MVP Facebook would probably be a failure. Instead he built the MVP with a few engineers and increased headcount as he increased the user base and shifted vision. Google had this mistaken notion that they could just throw more engineers at the problem and skip the whole product discovery process.
I find it ironic that the author is trying to detail core reasons why Google+ failed when they themselves admit they don't use any social media.
While I didn't work on the Google plus team (I was on a different team), the biggest reason in my mind why Google+ failed was motivation. Not a single Google executive on the team had a strong reason for why they should build Google+ besides "we can make a better version of Facebook". There was no real use case.
Facebook, at the time, however had engineers and product managers who were intensely driven and hungry; they were in a fight for their existence against some of the biggest companies in the world. If they failed their company would fail, and they were hugely passionate about what they were doing. For Googlers, it was largely a theoretical intellectual experiment. Tons of Googlers on Emerald Sea didn't even use any of the social media tools and they didn't get "social". To them it was some thing you plug on top of an existing product to increase ad revenue.
If you don't have the drive and you don't understand your users, you aren't going to build something people want.
Very cliché, but reminds me a lot of Simon Sinek's famous TED talk about "Start with the why", Facebook was driven by its mission, Google was driven by market share.
OTOH same can't be said about Snap vs Facebook, Facebook simply copying many of Snapchat's features is working out pretty well for them.
That's my thought as well. Google+ seemed like just another "me too" platform. Though Google attempted to steer it into another direction later but it was simply too late by then.
What I found hard to believe was that with all the brightest, smartest, most creative people at Google, yet they couldn't figure out a better use case for the platform during all those years? That should have been easy compared to other much harder problems that Google were able to solve successfully.
Similarly, if we think about it Yelp really has no rights to be in the small business index/listing/reviews space. Google own two biggest weapons in "Search Engine" and "Maps" and they completely dominate these two markets, so why was Yelp allowed to get to where it is today I'll never understand?
I don't know why they still have not done this but if they really want to, Google could easily leverage these two tools plus Google Cloud Platform to turn Google main search page into a Global Store where end users could simply enter a product name into the search box and Google will immediately locate it on Google Maps at various stores near where they are with real time stock availability. Users then can quickly go and pick up the item they want in person at the location they prefer. They don't even have to wait for shipping.
Google could develop an easy and intuitive front-end app for small businesses to list their products and update their stock (or use some kinds of tracking technology like beacon), then tie more advanced machine learning and big data analytics features to their Google Cloud Platform for bigger companies that have the needs for such data.
This helps reducing much friction and shorten the purchase funnel for end users who are searching to buy a specific product. At the moment, users must navigate through a sea of websites of which are mostly irrelevant, even after finding a potential website users again must find their way around the store to see whether it even carries or has the product in stock. Can't find the right product or zero stock availability? Well too bad, start again from scratch!
By reducing these steps, Google can effectively help users save much of their time and quickly locate the product they want right on Google Maps. People do not really care about vendors or companies, they only care about the products as that’s really what they’re looking for. Small businesses will also benefit greatly from features like this one since they won’t have to spend more time and money to locate buyers, now buyers just come to them directly.
Google Search + Maps have just become a global retail store overnight.
Indeed. Unlike many developed countries which have those big box retail stores available in almost every neighborhood, local commerce activities in developing countries are dominated by smaller businesses, and their stores are often distributed randomly across a city.
In the U.S, you kind of know ahead what brands of retail stores you will be able to find a product, as opposed to some other countries where it's a lot more difficult to locate them due to the lack of specialized retail stores.
Cognizant should be banned from the h-1 program for these type of employee abuses. If they were threatened with something like that, they would actually listen since thats how they make money. There should be some principle like "if we believe you are a scummy employer, you can be banned from being granted h-1 visas".
The biggest problem with slack being used for thoughtful drawn out discussions is that it's UX around recall (i.e. finding a thoughtful discussion you had before) is not good.
You want to document these discussions. In my experience, Confluence, Google Docs, and email are much easier to find things. Specifically because they have a UI which has a unit per discussion (an email thread, confluence doc, google doc) while Slack is a stream of multiple discussions happening at the same time. As such is it very hard to search and also to separate discussions. Discussions can spread across threads while they tend to stay in the same email thread or Google document.
To give an example, let's say I want to have a discussion on a technical design I created. I would probably either create a Google doc and ask for comments or send out an email. If I ever wanted to refer back to the discussion I just needed to find the unit of discussion. It's relatively easy to find an email or google doc.
In slack there really isn't an equivalent. it's possible you could create a dedicated channel per discussion (although no one does) but even trying to find that channel when you have thousands of channels is much harder. Part of the problem is that search isn't very good in slack, but the larger problem is they don't have any equivalent of a "unit" of discussion.
Oh yea and there's also the whole problem that slack only works well internally but there are lots of thoughtful discussions you need with your team and outside organizations.
The problem is that the local governments are not doing their jobs so private industry is stepping in to address the gap (with obviously a biased interest towards their customers, shareholders, and employees).
Literally every Bay area government has regulations (zoning, community review, etc.) that prevent housing to be put in place. On the transit side, we have multiple transit organizations (Muni, BART, Caltrain, etc.) that do not coordinate and operate as one entity; contrast this with NYC where the transit orgs have a common leadership.
What is happening in the Bay is that we are having an infrastructure crisis because a Nimby philosophy is preventing investment in critical areas like housing, transport, etc.
I agree that private industry won't solve this problem correctly because of its self interest, but frankly the problem is that the policy makers have no interest in solving the issue. Their loyalty is to their wealthy vocal residents who have no interest in creating housing or transit. They definitely do not care if underserved and disadvantaged people are suffering.
So while I agree that private industry will not tailor their solution to the disadvantaged (due to self interest), I don't think policy makers will either (due to self interest). Proposition 13 is a perfect example of how the voting population does not care about infrastructure for the poor. Prop 13 was marketed as a relief provision for the elderly, but the bulk of the measure is essentially a tax break for largely white wealthy landowners.
Property owners have no interest in creating housing; scarcity keeps their property values high. However, I don't get why it is that renters seem ineffective as a block in advocating for more construction. There are lots of renters, many with more roommates than they'd like, and they're all vaguely aware that their landlords could decide to evict everyone and sell, so they should be motivated to try to build the stock of alternatives.
Can you imagine how much more valuable property in Queens would be if it was zoned so you could build at Manhattan densities? You can create value just by increasing density, by making building more housing legal where it isn’t. In the very long run this may not be an obvious win for all property owners, as a group. But they’re not a group, and if you can be one of the first people to build a lot of housing in a supply constrained market you’ll make a lot of money.
If building more housing in the Bay Area was legal there’d be more housing. If they built enough housing prices would even fall eventually.
I think the Dropbox announcement is a sign that the enterprise has superceded consumer as the 1st priority for Dropbox executives.
This makes sense, as essentially they wanted a 10 billion+ valuation and the consumer market wasn't big enough to get to that valuation. The problem is their enterprise products don't look look much better than their competitors while their consumer product (sync a folder) was best in class...
If dropbox hadn't raised so much money they could have stuck to their core vision. Instead they will have to compete into the crowded world of mediocre SAAS products that duct tape different solutions together badly.
All because they wanted that sweet VC money so they could have a $100K chrome bear in their office and dropbox branded water in their fridges...
I think your first point about enterprise vs consumer is very true. I don't even think it's a recent change.
What I disagree with is your opinion about VC money. If they didn't take VC money Dropbox in its current state wouldn't exist. The costs to support free accounts is staggering - there is a very real dollar cost associated with running a giant farm of storage servers. But free accounts are also crucial to Dropbox's business. It's very natural to run out of space and then decide to upgrade to a paid account. So you can see there's a bootstrapping problem. How do you support these free users while they add enough stuff to convert? This seems like a pretty good usecase for VC to me.
I'd also push back a bit on sticking to 'their core vision.' I don't know how much more there is to do there: Dropbox is already best in class in sync and backup. I'm not saying there are no improvements, but they are decidedly more incremental than in the business collaboration space.
It was quite aggravating when my shared Dropbox folder on a dual-boot Windows/Linux System lost support. It was the main reason I switched from GDrive to Dropbox (besides trying to gradually de-Google). Now I have 2 Dropbox folders on one machine.
I haven't worked at Google in a while. Is this the same Claire Stapleton that was responsible for doing the quirky Company weekly update / TGIF email? If so, it's a bit sad because when I worked at Google (2009 - 2012) she was one of the voices of the company (kind of like Victoria for Reddit AMAs).
There are 80 billion dollars worth of shares that exist. However only 8 billion of those shares were released for the public markets. The remaining 72 billion dollars worth of shares are held outside of the public markets (insiders, vcs, the company itself, etc.)
Till such time those 72b shares do not become public, are these technically still referred to as options? Also, for ex-uber employees who still own shares, how does one restrict them to not sell those in the public market assuming they are part of the 72b or will they only be part of the 8b?
This is incorrect. There are lots of cases where profitable companies want to IPO. Specifically the public markets are where you go when you need to raise money at significant levels. Nowadays this happens less often as their are bigger and bigger private investors (so you can raise billions in private markets). However there is still a point at which you may need to go public for fundraising.
You are making a mistaken assumption that only unprofitable companies need to fundraise, there are lots of profitable companies that want to raise capital to fund future growth (and their current cash flows aren’t enough).
Also I am very surprised that you named Github as a well run private company. As far I know, they were definitely not profitable (their spend was crazy) which is part of the reason the board took the acquisition offer from Microsoft. I really don’t think they are a good example of a well run private company.
You are correct that only companies that want capital IPO but that is by definition as an IPO is a capital raise. I believe that direct listing is an exception to this.
You are correct. There are many cases where fundraising for successful companies is needed. From liquidity, to gathering funds to fuel new ventures. Acquiring competitors, etc.
My assumption was that troubled ones also need it. So we should not be surprised that see so many controversial IPO listings recently.
> Nowadays this happens less often as there are bigger and bigger private investors (so you can raise billions in private markets)
Arguably, the reason IPOs happen less now than 20 years ago is because of the increase in regulatory requirements (particularly in the US), and the increase in available funding is a result of that.
The engineering headcount was ridiculous for Google+. It was also ridiculous to have OKRs for every team at Google to integrate with Google+. Facebook (or really any company) didn't start with Mark Zuckerberg hiring a 1000 engineers and start cranking. If a VC cut him a check for $500 million after his MVP Facebook would probably be a failure. Instead he built the MVP with a few engineers and increased headcount as he increased the user base and shifted vision. Google had this mistaken notion that they could just throw more engineers at the problem and skip the whole product discovery process.