There’s not a lot in this post left unsaid. Adam Pash over at Lifehacker has written an excellent rant on Google, from the perspective of an avid user and lover of Google’s products.
I am inclined to agree with most of it.
Choice quotes:
Google’s not the only giant web company who wants to grab every piece of the internet you use. Every sufficiently large web company wants to become How You Use the Internet. Facebook does it. Microsoft does it. Yahoo does it. They build and buy and compete with one another to become your portal, and to deliver “sticky” content.
For those of us who want to use really great products, this is a fantastic bummer.
Because Google is so big, they don’t need to make great products anymore. They just need to make a sufficiently viable product. Their user base and platform is so large that by simply launching something, they’ve got a competitive advantage that a new startup that actually cares about making something great could only dream of. That’s why all of Google’s most recent product successes have been acquisitions. It’s biggest failures products have been knockoffs.
And this:
To be fair, Google makes one thing clear in their guiding principles: It wants information. The more information Google has, the better it is at search, so in a sense, they’ve remained true to their goals. When Google pimps Google+ throughout their products, including search results, they may be more interested in the information a new Google+ user will provide than they are in making more money by keeping you on their domain.
The problem is that Google doesn’t care about making a great social network. No one at Google woke up from a fever dream in a cold sweat, grabbed a pen and paper, and sketched out a brilliant and inspired new idea for a web app called Google+. They looked at Facebook and Twitter and the threat these sites pose and thought, “Shit, we need to make a competitive social network.”
Unfortunately that’s not how a great product is made. That doesn’t mean Google+ isn’t useable, or even adequate. It is, sort of, and I’m sure they’ll continue to make it more palatable to people who want an alternative to Facebook or Twitter (of whom there are many). But Google+ is a calculated business decision, not an idea.
