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.

1- https://whispersystems.org/blog/a-whisper/

2- http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/whisperpush-secure-messaging...

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.

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.

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).

first, look at this chart: http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/services/ranking-factors-201...

second, notice how all of the highest ranking seo factors are social.

third, google makes more money on search ads because it monetizes intent. you know what else monetizes well? recommendations.

fourth, owning both the recommendation data AND the ad data enables even better (aka more expensive) ad targeting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Norvig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Abelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Bloch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Tveit_Alvestrand

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.

Hack on that.

No actual argument, just making fun of some guy's name.

Very nice.

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.

It isn't clear to me why no startup has built a product on the Wave code or concept.

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.

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.

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).

http://www.businessinsider.com/i-interviewed-to-be-googles-h...

http://piaw.blogspot.ca/2010/05/organizational-thinking.html

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.

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.

Then again, how do I find those auto insurance comparison sites? Google, of course.