How's it going everybody? I wanted to share an interesting article I read on tech crunch by Alexia Tsotsis is about google plus and how it is shifting from a product to a platform. This is a reminder to me that copying the current trends does not yield success. I like to imagine where we are headed and plan/create today for the next generation and explore new concepts that could potentially become something. So keep creating and dreaming and conceptualizing where humans and technology and business is going next. Thanks for taking moment out your life to read this. One Love Z.
Today,
Google’s Vic Gundotra announced that he would be leaving the company after
eight years. The first obvious question is where this leaves Google+,
Gundotra’s baby and primary project for the past several of those years.
What we’re
hearing from multiple sources is that Google+ will no longer be considered a
product, but a platform — essentially ending its competition with other social
networks like Facebook and Twitter.
A Google
representative has vehemently denied these claims. “Today’s news has no impact
on our Google+ strategy — we have an incredibly talented team that will
continue to build great user experiences across Google+, Hangouts and Photos.”
According to
two sources, Google has apparently been reshuffling the teams that used to form
the core of Google+, a group numbering between 1,000 and 1,200 employees. We
hear that there’s a new building on campus, so many of those people are getting
moved physically, as well — not necessarily due to Gundotra’s departure.
As part of
these staff changes, the Google Hangouts team will be moving to the Android
team, and it’s likely that the photos team will follow, these people said.
Basically, talent will be shifting away from the Google+ kingdom and towards
Android as a platform, we’re hearing.
We’ve heard
Google has not yet decided what to do with the teams not going to Android, and
that Google+ is not “officially” dead, more like walking dead: “When you fire
the top dog and take away all resources it is what it is.” It will take copious
amounts of work for it to un-zombie, if that’s even a possibility.
It’s not
clear, according to our sources’ intel, where the rest of the employees will
go, but the assumption is that Larry Page will follow Mark Zuckerberg’s lead at
Facebook and send the bulk of them to mobile roles.
This would
telegraph a major acceleration of mobile efforts in general, rather than G+.
The teams will apparently be building “widgets,” which take advantage of
Google+ as a platform, rather than a focus on G+ as its own integral product.
One big
change for Google+ is that there will no longer be a policy of “required”
Google+ integrations for Google products, something that has become de rigueur
for most product updates.
One impetus
of this was that the YouTube integration with Google+ did not go well,
something that the public recognized through the comments blowback, but that
was also seen inside the company as a rocky move.
That doesn’t
mean that all G+ integrations will go away, though. Gmail will continue to have
it, but there may be some scaling back that keeps the “sign-on” aspects without
the heavy-handed pasting over of G+.
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.
Taking
Gundotra’s place inside Google will be David Besbris, though we hear that parts
of Google+ are under “the person responsible for Chrome,” according to one
source. It’s not clear if this is Sundar Pichai, Google’s head of Chrome and
Android, or why this would happen. “It’s complicated,” our source said. Google
PR denies this account.
We’ve heard
that the acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook may have been a factor in the
phasing out of Gundotra’s grand experiment. There was a perception that Google
had missed the “biggest acquisition in the social space.” Though another source
tells us that Google knew what was up with WhatsApp but simply didn’t want to
pay out for it.
Google+ is
and always has been about turning every Google user into a signed-in Google
user, period. If true, these changes dovetail with that focus going forward,
with Google+ acting as a backbone rather than a front-end service. That being
said, there are a ton of really interesting things going on in Google+ like its
efforts in imaging. Having the photos team integrate the technologies backing
Google+ photos tightly into the Android camera product, for instance, could be
a net win for Android users.
In the long
run, the issues with Google+ didn’t especially stem from the design of the
product itself, but more from the way it interjected itself into your
day-to-day Google experience like some unwelcome hairy spider. Perhaps these
changes will scale back the grating party crashing?
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