It's fun to imagine a world in which Blogger was open sourced, with the core developers working for Google. Would WordPress have "won" in that alternate universe?
In a long tail world, it only really matters if you're in the tail or the "body". If you're in the body, there's no big difference if you're 1 in 5 or 1 in 50 - you're huge.
“The technology of the last 10 years should have all been open to experimentation by developers without locking users in. There are a lot of developers who believe in this. It's central to the mission of WhatsApp, btw, so if you doubted that it could be lucrative, you should think again.”
WhatsApp has changed and extended their XMPP basis such that it is not even remotely interoperable. They are actively battling third-party implementations. Their server is not federated. How exactly are "open", "experimentation" and "without locking users in" central to WhatsApp's mission?
I think they could have done Google+ and the whole social aspect better but they are still driving a couple of important buses. I think they should work on an open source WhatsApp clone with strong crypto.
- The browser it the platform of the future...they have a good browser
- Mobile is in everyone's pocket...they have a mobile OS
- Shocking newsflash...people still use mail...they have a good email service
- They provide "cloud office"
- Search is still search
And they have a bazillion other good projects.
If you want to say they slept on something I wouldn't even pick social. I'd say their biggest mistake in recent tmes was that they let Amazon get such a lead in cloud hosting/infrastructure and they aren't the #1 there.
The problem with Google and also open source apps is that they don't promote their products very well. It's more understandable with open source projects, though, since they don't have the funding, but Google has no excuse.
Take Hangouts for example. Android is now on over 1 billion devices, and will be on 3 billion in ~2 years. Most of those people should have Hangouts by default. But I'm willing to bet most of those people will not use Hangouts. Most of them won't even know what the heck Hangouts is. And since Google isn't promoting it heavily, that means that even if someone wants to use it, he knows it's going to be hard to get his friends to use it if they haven't even heard much about it or what it does.
Larry Page was right about needing to be "all-in" with a mobile company like Motorola. It used to be much worse while Eric Schimdt was leading it, with products like Google Checkout or even Google Docs being in a sort of coma-like state for years before you'd see any improvements. But even today, Google still seems to make a lot of stuff just for the sake of it, and don't seem all-in.
It feels like they want to just do the minimum amount of work for a product. With Hangouts they probably think "we've made it available to everyone with an Android phone - we don't need to do more than that now, do we? I should just become popular by itself!"
The difference between Hangouts and Whatsapp is that the company behind Whatapp treated it like a product - a product they needed to be as successful as possible to survive. Google treats Hangouts as a feature - a feature of which they don't necessarily think they need that bad to survive. That's why something like Whatsapp becomes popular, and something like Hangouts not so much.
That being said, I've love for them to integrate TextSecure/future Whisper (1) into Android, at the very least as an underlying layer, the way CyanogenMod did it recently (2). As soon as Whisper is out, I'm going to recommend everyone I know to use it, and same for e-mail as soon as a nice DarkMail-based client appears that's easy to use. But if Google offered me all of that, I wouldn't have to do it.
The problem is that Google is not just a developer, it's the platform owner, i.e. the company who has to sell the platform to manufacturers and carriers.
Carriers don't want features like Hangouts because they eat into their margins for crappy but expensive features like video-calls. If carriers don't want something, manufacturers (who have to sell to carriers) don't want it either, so Google (who have to sell to manufacturers) has to downplay it as well. Same goes for IM: carriers would prefer that you used their metered SMS services rather than ubiquitous GTalk or something equivalent.
Third-party developers like WhatsApp don't have to maintain a relationship with carriers, so they can push anything they want as hard as they want.
Google missed the boat because they only hired academics, not hackers.
They didn't need to embrace standards or build APIs, they just had to hire people who knew how to build products that real people outside the valley wanted. Google got lucky with its first product (search), acquired a company to make it a successful business (Adwords), and kept buying companies to try and onboard innovation.
Keep telling your self that. Hackers rarely build things that scale to the size Google needs. A failure for Google has 10 Million signups the first day.
The Product managers are what count in building a new product. Hackers are rarely good product managers.
Academics are only a problem when they don't get user feed back before hand. A good researcher can build product that fits the needs of the users, and when paired with good UI people you get a winning product. Google isn't good at getting user feed back they work like Mathematicians, not like Anthropologists and Psychologists.
Math and Anthropology are still academics. But not in the same field.
YouTube and Android only count as "trying" to onboard innovation? Seems like the strategy has been working not so terribly to me. This sounds rather like praise via faint damnation...
Im not sure google have any clue what people want.
The general impression I get is that they facilitate hundreds and hundreds of projects, let them develop, and if it looks good, let them loose into the wild and see what sticks. Most people only get to see the successful ones. I think the vast majority of these projects never see the wild.
In contrast, I get the impression that other big tech companies lean towards thinking something up, then trying to push on to users.
Perhaps I've just fallen for PR, but thats the impression I get.
Academics of all people should understand the value of having a wide open Internet tied together by search. I don't think that's where they went wrong. I think they let Facebook do their thinking for them, and Facebook has a fairly limited vision that's not at all friendly to the knowledge-building power of the web.
The premise that they missed the boat is wrong. They built a leaky boat because their core competence is in a different field. Google didn't "Miss the boat" they just never studied Nautical Science.
Google is very good at things that are mathematical, predictable, quantifiable, and numeric.
Google fails at things like Natural Language, Art, Social, Music, Video (youtube doesn't count that's just hosting and they bought it already successful, and it still doesn't hardly make any money)
Facebook would "miss the boat on search". Apple will "miss the boat" on social.
The difference is those guys won't go after a boat if they don't have the competency for it.
I was there at the time. It is not just that Google is good at certain things. It is also that the developers who built orkut were very very bright new developers (many just out of college) who lacked experience. The brazilians took over orkut and the developers were unable to make tough decisions; like starting fresh. They also made the friendster mistake; their first implementation couldn't scale and by the time the fixed it, it was too late. Furthermore, at the time, google had a policy of assigning managers to cover a very large number of developers and although the orkut manager was very sharp, he didn't have more than a few hours a week to provide leadership. The final issue, was that orkut had a huge usage rate and no other service (gmail, picasa, etc) would accept an integration with orkut because it meant having to handle the huge additional load. Google needed Larry to step in and tell people they had to make it work. This is a classic example of a failure of one of Google's core development philosophies: "Developers don't need management or experience; they can find the right solution using intelligence alone; you should never tell developers what to do." (full disclosure -- they kicked me out of the group so my opinion is biased; please take that into account).
I picked those examples because both are looking at those as features not as core to their business. Google is trying to make Social a core of their business.
Facebook is building a search engine. They are very proud of their "natural language" graph search. If they expand that to web sites they will likely fail.
Apple is starting to look at social with things like Facetime. But they are looking at it as a feature not a core business.
I'd be interested to see them try, because I have no idea what they could offer that I don't already get from the plethora of search engines available. I think Bing already has some social search thing that pushes up searches done by friends or something, but I don't hear much about that at all.
Facebook doesn't just have the social graph of who your friends are and what they search for.
They also have an increasingly insightful record of your personality. Probably moreso than Google, since Facebook gets more of your "casual" life than Google.
Google is in a good position to record and analyze the intents you express, but Facebook likely has a better record of who you are outside of those expressed intents.
Turning that into a useful product is difficult, but I'd be very surprised if they never work in that direction.
So google failed to catch the social bus, who gives a fuck. Google is an engineering company at it's core, and as long as they continue to do ridiculously cool and useful R&D with their search advertising revenues in the hopes of developing new killer products. They are a far more impressive and valuable company than their derpy cousins at facebook who mostly just capitalize on people's vanity and boredom.
Well and google capitalizes on the fact that most normal people are too lazy to install adblockers and bored enough to watch youtube videos.
I admire their engineering capabilities but for me they are no longer cool and the 'one google' doctrine is something I actively try to resist (multiple accounts, log out, avoid services, use alternatives).
Not a random guy. Just a guy that once said apple was dead, and called the iPad a complete failure when it was released. Not a random guy, just a guy that has no idea what he's talking about.
Wrong wrong wrong. OP, comments, parent, children, all wrong.
Tim Wu, Master Switch, monopoly over distribution channels - that is the answer. Either google ceases to exist or it becomes Ma Bell.
There's no third way, and all of the things that google does that seem confusing make perfect sense if you view them through the prism of trying to become The Phone Company.
I think he/she is saying to stop idealizing an entity which primary purpose is to increase shareholders equity. I sure agree with him/her if it's what he/she meant.
Some things make sense, but surely not all; and surely not all as means to serve that goal. For example, storing all the world's videos makes sense while taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online does not.
Vic Gundotra ruined Google+, which could have and should have relegated Facebook to 2nd place, but then Real Names happened and the rest is history.
Google hires generalists: jacks of all trades, masters of none. Their web services and Android applications suffer greatly because of this ongoing idiocy. Don't believe me? Cool, go try building a house using only a Leatherman tool and get back to me. They need some sort of proven design czar to make dangerous choices and they need the specialized talent to execute on them.
Finally, when they went public, they were gradually coerced into being a profit-driven company over being a technology-driven company. Only Jeff Bezos seems to have figured out how to give Wall Street the middle finger so he can do as he pleases.
That said, their moonshots remain cool, and I'd get acquihired by them in a second given the kind of money they shell out.
Yes, Google hires specialists for their moonshots. And in doing so they make it extra difficult for existing employees to escape the tedious work they're doing by transferring to them. As an example, when I worked there, I was told (by someone on Glass) that the only real way on to the Android team was to be hired into it from outside.
Using these black swans to disprove my point seems akin to "proving" that playing the stock market is easy because Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch got really rich doing so.
So are you actually unaware of the blind allocation process at Google for most incoming employees or are you just trolling me?
I had no trouble transferring from Checkout to Fiber, and Fiber is a pretty cool project. I also know people on my team that transferred to Glass.
Anything is possible, you just have to do it. Nobody is going to come up to you and say, "hey, I read your mind and I think you want to transfer to Android. Follow me." Just do it!
What is unbelievable about this conversation is that the question about how content creators will get paid for the content is never raised. In fact this is biggest mistake. There are questions about how app developers get their exits but not how people who create content get paid. This is the heart of the problem with the internet today, not how someone can build the next bottleneck aggregator that rides on the wave of users creativity but pays them nothing in return. Social or not.
You are assuming they must be paid. But that's a questionable assumption. Content producer can have other means of living. Content creation could be a hobby, something you do because you have to, but not necessarily because you have to fill the fridge.
Just one example: China has most likely produced more poems than any other countries. Probably the same with paintings. And even more obvious with calligraphy. But, except for some few public writers, poetry or painting was never considered a professional activity. It was a skill, a way to spend time with friends, or alone, a way to cultivate oneself, a way to become fully human.
I think it was similar in ancient Greece and some parts of Europe in the Renaissance. Is it a coincidence that these periods are the most flourishing of human history?
Some might say that people of those times had leisure because they had slaves, or were aristocrats. That cannot be the difference: With all the machines we have now we could have as much leisure time. And I would trust much more a blogger writing for the sake of it than writing for money.
In fact micro payments might be the solution but Google have chosen to monetize with ads, this meant nothing flows for the content creators and everything for the sponsors and the toll collectors at Google. In other words the next television. This is what is out of balance now.
> Makes me wonder how Larry Page was convinced
> that Facebook was a threat.
Larry wasn't the only one. I don't think it was hard to see how Facebook posed (and still poses) a threat to Google:
Their site generates (a) more content behind a walled garden, and can produce (b) better demographic targeting for ad sales, which together pose a pretty serious threat to Google's core business (of selling targeted ads against public content). Couple this with exponential MAU growth and a very "sticky" property and you better get worried.
The comment you linked to is a bit ranty; IMO it confuses the execution flaws with G+ the product/business unit (of which there are many) with the overall decision to make a huge, concerted effort to compete head on in social.
Half-assed efforts like OpenSocial and Buzz were not going to get anywhere close to Facebook-style data and ads. (And I don't mean to disparage those teams; the half-assed part regards the company's priorities.) In hindsight maybe the walled garden of Facebook isn't such an existential threat to Google's business, but in 2010 it was still very hard to tell. Larry would have been negligent not to act.
Does Facebook really produce better demographic targetting? Facebook has more explicit knowledge about me, in that I've filled in stuff like my age and gender on my Facebook profile; but Google knows enough about my web habits that it ought to be able to work out that information and more besides (Facebook obviously also knows stuff implicitly about me from tracking Like buttons and so on, but it's not in any better position than Google in terms of implicit knowledge). Google viewing Facebook as a threat strikes me as Google having a lack of faith in its distinctive advantage (big data rather than conventional explicit demographics).
Google's main source of revenue comes from ads that are driven by user want. I search for "car insurance" and Google gives me an ad for GEICO. But that doesn't really tell me anything about GEICO other than that they have enough money to pay for my click. They could be excellent or they could be crap, but they do likely sell car insurance and I'm looking for car insurance.
On Facebook, I may ask my friends "what car insurance do you have and how do you like it?" I get better information; I get testimonials from people whose judgement I trust (or at least I trust that their judgement isn't paid for, unlike Google's ad). This cuts into the heart and soul of Google's revenue - matching advertisers with user needs. Facebook hasn't done this to my knowledge, but let's say they classify those queries and responses. So, I post the question and my friend Julie replies, "I have GEICO and I love them". Six months later, our mutual friend Jeff sees an ad in the sidebar with a GEICO logo and that quote from Julie. Better yet, Jeff posts a picture of his new car and an advertisement comment appears using Julie's quote.
This isn't about car insurance. Your friends will not be as good about filling search requests as Google for many needs. However, your friends might be better for the ones that pay. I have no idea if this graph is accurate, but it can be interesting to go through: http://www.wordstream.com/articles/most-expensive-keywords. Attorney and Lawyer are the #4 and $6 most expensive keywords. I think I'd rather go with a friend's recommendation than a Google ad for something important like that. We've already covered insurance at #1.
That's what makes Facebook a threat. Rather than searching, people ask the hive-mind on Facebook for a recommendation for a restaurant, insurance company, lawyer, etc. Friends and friends-of-friends comment and like different answers and while people are certainly fallible, at the very least is comes off as more trustworthy. If you were looking for wireless service in a new city, would a Google ad be the first place you looked or maybe how your friends in that city fared. Recommendations would certainly be skewed by the fact that they have too little data to have a good opinion combined with popular perceptions of the carriers, but would ad space that went to the highest bidder be more trustworthy?
Now, when I search for the Battle of Gettysburg, I don't get ads. Same for when I search for Washington DC. Same for many other search requests - the type of requests that don't really have money in them; the type of requests I use Google for and would never really use Facebook for. The threat is that Google would become the place you go for the searches that don't pay while Facebook gets the requests for information that do pay.
Worse, what if Facebook leveraged itself for videos as it did for photos? As the comment you reference mentions, Facebook's photo platform was worse, but its social aspect made it better for the way users wanted to use photos. Facebook's messaging platform makes it good to chat to a group of people who you know, but not super well - and everyone can see the whole conversation even if they were added later. Businesses are already setting up pages and giving Facebook nicely formatted data about the business.
The worst part of it is that Facebook is good at what they do. They're not some company that can't handle the technological challenges. While one can call their business fluff, their engineering staff isn't. So, the company isn't going to go away via technical problems.
I'm not saying that any of this will come to pass, but Facebook is certainly a threat to Google's revenue. Google makes its money off of ads that can be replaced by friend recommendations. Again, I'm not saying the replacement will happen, but I can see the threat.
We often criticize companies for being blind-sided by an innovator coming up behind (ie. Microsoft with the web), but in this case I think we have the opposite problem of Google dropping everything to try to become Facebook.
Your reasoning about the potential threat of Facebook is of course totally cogent, and indeed Facebook could be a threat to Google's business. The only problem is that they haven't proven there's a way to monetize that word-of-mouth that Facebook technologizes so well (because of course it's always existed). In fact there's a strong argument to be made that it is impossible to monetize this phenomenon without destroying it. Facebook is throwing everything they have at this problem, but they have still not crossed the chasm. The state of play today is that AdWords are expensive because of the ROI they can drive, and Facebook tend to be cheap, yet still overpriced due to a wave of hype that has crested but still hasn't washed away back to sanity yet. And when the smoke clears will Facebook's model be more valuable than Google's? I think that's anything but a foregone conclusion.
Given the uncertainty of the winning model, I'd rather see Google stay true to their DNA rather than chase after the Facebook hype with the G+ strategy. Some good has come out of it in terms of improving their authentication across properties, but by and large it appears as an impotent move to recreate a second-class implementation of Facebook that no one gives a shit about. Meanwhile, Google actually has tons of properties that Facebook can't touch. So why are they chasing after an upstart? I consider it a sign of weakness and ultimately detrimental to try to shift your company culture like this. If you're on top with a certain strategy, do your best to ride that wave instead of running scared and trying to compete with someone else on their terms. It's a sign of weakness, and only should be pursued when the company is in real trouble, not based on attempted clairvoyance.
You make a good point that perhaps facebook can't monetize word of mouth on the valuable keywords without also destroying the word of mouth. It's easy to see how that could happen. People would stop asking if it just resulted in their friends getting quoted in ads.
But does it have to be monetized to hurt Google? What if Facebook just promoted the idea that you should ask your friends for advice on these things? Maybe something like yelp, but limited to reviews and comments from your circle. Or even just highlighting the conversations when they naturally occur.
Probably wouldn't get to a level that it was a threat to Google, but it might shave some edges off here and there, at little to no cost to facebook.
But that would be even less reason to change strategy. Look, there are an infinite number of things that could kill Google in the future. The only real certainty of life is death. But they can't be speculatively jumping on every potential future threat just because Goldman Sachs said you should buy; it makes them look foolish. Successful companies should stay true to themselves and give their own DNA a chance to win with full commitment, if they lose they lose but at least they won't have suffered a fear-based implosion.
The thing about Facebook advertising, and the reason it struggles with monetization, is Facebook knows nothing of what people want. Moreover, there's a ton of stuff people will never post about wanting to Facebook (privacy is a big issue there - from friends and family).
The best Facebook can do is classify people into narrower demographic bands, but then spam the range of advertising for that band at them. It is not good at it - I'm under-30, ergo clearly I should be sent ads for alcohol and travel. Regardless of time of day or what I'm doing at the moment.
Facebook can also never not show you ads - they don't know intent, at the moment, so they have to try and catch the rare sellable moments throughout the day of a person, whereas Google knows when you search that you're searching for that exact thing right now. Which means they can filter a lot of ads which would otherwise make people suspicious of the advertising because they don't have to show you anything when they have nothing interesting to show you.
Moreover, the type of advertising you suggest Facebook leverage is a giant catastrof* of possible legal issues with using people's likeness without permission. To what level of social graph depth are they going to do that? And who bears responsibility if 4 months after saying "I love GEICO" someone follows up with "Screw GEICO, they're a terrible company to make a claim with". Facebook doesn't get paid for not showing the GEICO ad anyway.
I think you are underestimating how good NLP is getting. Getting easier to accurately pull like, hate, going-to-buy signals from social media texts. (I used to work on this problem.)
Do people really ask their friends for recommendations for things like insurance? For lawyers, and other local services, I can see perhaps. Product comparison and review sites, or even Amazon seem to me like bigger threats to Google than Facebook. I can also see them trying to do something about that (reviews appearing for some search results), although I don't think they're doing a particularly good job of it.
Then again, how do I find those auto insurance comparison sites? Google, of course.
> Do people really ask their friends for recommendations for things like insurance?
You'd be amazed at how many do. For anything, from insurance to computers. The provider of one's car insurance is a regular discussion topic among those of my colleagues who have a driver's license, and I've seen at least two or three people lamenting about how bad the services they got were and switching to another insurance company on a whim, based on nothing other than the success stories of a handful of people.
Product comparison and review sites, or even Amazon, tend to be perceived as very broad and impersonal, while your bros know exactly what's best for you. I mean that's why they're yo' bros.
I have little doubt that this is economically, and to some extent socially self-destructive, but so is a lot of what we see today :-).
What boat did Google miss? Seems to me they're achieving their goals. They own search, they own video (YouTube), they have a very successful mobile OS, they have a successful desktop platform (Chrome OS and the Chrome browser), and they're innovating faster than anyone.
Yes but the problem is most of their revenues come from one thing - advertising. What their leadership is innovating desperately is to have something else people will give them money for. Successful companies have many things they make money on. You can be successful giving everything away for free when you are small and hope to IPO or get WhatsApped. When you are a real company you need lots of things that make money so that no single one of them failing will hurt you.
Anyone who thinks Google+ has missed the boat doesn't understand Google+.
Google+ brings together:
- SMS
- Chat
- Likes (+1), on apps, youtube, websites
- Videochat / screen-sharing / helping out
- The easiest OAuth implementation (Facebook needs an App-ID), google needs nothing
- Your location information (Android)
- GMail
- Contacts (backup of your cellphone)
- SEO (their platform is OPEN for the web, while Twitter and Facebook wants to hide their information)
- Information for businesses (Google Places)
- and probably a lot more that i didn't thought about right now.
- Pictures (backup of your android phone, default tag= personal)
- Documents (Google Drive)
Now, to create a social network, what do you need and what does Google + doesn't have? Google+ is probably one of the most used communication social network... But a lot of it is going on in the backend and you don't see it on the web.. Because people don't really use it right now (they don't use it by going to Google+ and enter their message there).
Here are some practical innovations that are usefull when i'm going out with my car.
When you lookup a bussiness in Chrome/Google on my PC, Google Now (your mobile) will suggest the navigation to this business, included with traffic delays. Just click on it (you don't have to enter an address), and it will navigate to that place. (ps. this is a less user friendly method: http://gps.about.com/od/gpsmapscharts/ht/google_garmin.htm )
Traffic delays can be calculated by people who navigate with Google Maps (or are using Google's Localisation Service).
Low Battery localisation (with WIFI) can be calculated by the combined power of collecting MAC-address by the Android platform and/or the cars that are used for Google Street View.
I can view the surroundings of where i'm going with Google Street View in my navigation app. It will ask me if this information is correct, if it's not correct. I can correct it and the business has a improved place on the Google Maps platform.. (without doing it themselves)
Google+ is not only a social network. It's an authentication system where the pk is your email, the frontend is www.google.com/+ (social network) and the backend is a collection of meta-data (big data?) that can be used to make your life easier... And on top of that big data, you have a learning skynet ;-)
Sorry, that was a typo on my part, honest. Got back to HN only when it was too late to change :(
My point stands though: Whiner lamenting the demise of RSS and OPML is not news. Every time he makes HN, he's found some new way to lament that RSS was killed/sabotaged/forgotten. It's funny (and sad) to see how he's now added OPML to the list of grievances.
No, Winer did not invent RSS. Please know your history before spouting nonsense. Winer pushed RSS into the mainstream no doubt. But he wasn't the inventor, in any sense of the word.
XML-RPC in its original incarnation DID need to be changed but from my read of that history, Microsoft turned what was an elegant proposal for making the content more contextual into the SOAP WebServices mess.
It's worth noting that when G+ launched (oddly missing from your list), it didn't have search.
Even now, while G+ has search (and yes, it's both fast and comprehensive in that everything is indexed), it's missing tools -- you cannot search by author, by date, or by content type (posts vs. contents). Search is balkanized: you can search ... "pages" from the search bar (along with posts and content which is what you likely want), but to search a Community you've first got to navigate to it, then realize that the thing that doesn't look like a search dialog is actually a search dialog.
There's no negation (you can't exclude people or terms), you can't search by user, you can't search by date ranges.
All that said: search was the one thing G+ really had going for it.
I was pretty gobsmacked when it showed up missing.
For a while there, before Google's "you will be assimilated* policy really showed itself, Search was about the best thing about G+. I've since abandoned it largely for Reddit, which does have a featureful search, though it's not comprehensive (comments aren't indexed).
It interests me how people expects Google to do all the things they want. Let's be sure that Google is a business, not a missionary organization. They will guard their business interests first.
They did try to provide an open platform with Wave, which was amazing, powerful, innovative, open source and decentralized. And it failed. I wish it hadn't; I liked it a lot.
+1 totally agree. Wave was really good. I sometimes use Apache Wave, but not having the combined AppEngine support for Wave Robots makes Apache Wave less useful for my interests.
I strongly believe that was the right way to go. I never understood why Google didn't make a big push for standard structured information. They could have published standards for different industries similar to RSS. Everyone would have gotten on board similar to how every blog was pushing a RSS feed. Once the web moved towards structured data it would have been the first big step towards Semantic web.
Imagine writing apps that could do this: "Phone, please book top movie at the box office and dinner for Friday evening and adjust Nest at home accordingly".
First of all twitter's growth is slowing, so its not very apt to compare them to google. And the same thing may start happening to Facebook in a few years (as people are notoriously fickle with social media sites - which depend on mass adoption - not innovation). I think google is doing the right thing - they are sticking to what they know instead of trying to 'build around the web' and become another Microsoft (who tries to make 'their own version of everything' example - Silverlight).
the first two or three version were unbearably slow and awkward, but since the 'card' redesign, it's reactive (coming from a fps fetishist on a 2006 laptop) and usable. When G+ came, FB had all this in place, their html framework was hyper lean in all possible ways. Every time I had to use FB after G+ I was shocked to witness the difference. FB gained some weight since but it's still a smooth cut.
Odd that Winer doesn't mention Google's actual attempt to do what he suggests here, which was called OpenSocial (and had buy-in from MySpace, back in 2007 when that might have mattered): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial
I'm not sure why Google gave up on this approach, but it's not the case that no-one at Google was thinking along these lines.
When you're just so damn rich, and the money keeps pouring in, it's very hard to stay focused, to relentlessly innovate, to admit (if only to yourself) that you're just as imperfect as everyone else, and make just as many mistakes.
It was true for Microsoft, it's true for Google, and it's true for everyone else. (Well, those of us who are rich enough not to have to give a sh*t. Not me personally.)
I wonder if there were some structural attempts (at Google or elsewhere) at mitigating this effect, like voluntary creating nano-competition by spinning off a bunch of companies just to see how the perceive trends and create on their own.
It definitely happens in the valley; Cisco was notorious in the 90s and 00s for acquiring "spin-ins" (startups founded by ex-Cisco leadership/teams with an almost certain expectation of returning to the mothership), and I'm sure there are other examples.
Less drastically, Google (and I'm sure many other valley peers) will often set up special incentive structures for certain teams: bonuses tied to aggressive adoption metrics and separated from the company-wide bonus, for example. I doubt it comes close to cutting that safety net (and making people truly hungry), but I give them credit for trying.
Thanks for the info, "spin-ins", is exactly the idea I was trying to describe. And I agree with you, in-house incentives are probably far from being enough.
When you are small, a small trend which is likely to be big can yield huge growth percentage-wise. When you are big, these are in the near-to-moderate term marginal at best so what you do is you buy startups.
One of the big breakthroughs for me personally was modelling business growth on a sigmoid curve.
All good points on openness, but I don't want services built off of my searches or history. That's their core product but it's one based on the assumption of privacy, not sharing.
http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all
It's fun to imagine a world in which Blogger was open sourced, with the core developers working for Google. Would WordPress have "won" in that alternate universe?