In what might very well be Google’s very own Kanye West moment, a Google engineer, Steve Yegge, has trashed Google+, calling it a “knee-jerk reaction” to Facebook.
Google: give this guy a promotion, pronto!
After months of saying that Google+ was a bad idea, here’s finally someone echoing my sentiments. That the voice is from within Google itself makes it delightfully refreshing. How often do you see a big company’s employees trash its own products in public?
Whatever your opinions on this “leak”, the fact is that Steve’s comments hit home. They’re unsettling because they are true.
Ever since it was first launched, Google+ had an oddly artificial, sanitized feel to it – kind of like KFC serving salads. When Mark Zuckerberg said that “social is in our DNA”, he wasn’t kidding around: Facebook was built as a social company from the ground up; Google was only trying to enter the race for purely profit purposes. The latter approach seldom succeeds.
Not that Google+ is a bad product. After Facebook, it is easily the best social network around. But the air of artificiality that permeates the entire platform is hard to ignore. No wonder after the “1269%” gains of the mast month, traffic to Google+ is down by 60%. Few people I know outside the tech community maintain a presence there; even fewer of my ‘mainstream’, tech-oblivious friends ever even bothered to check it out, despite the prominent link across all Google sites.
Bound to Fail
Google+ was bound to fail from the very moment of its inception. Google is a search company. It’s something that it does really, really well. Search is in its DNA; it’s a part of the company’s genetics.
But perhaps more importantly, Google+ could and would never ever really be cool.
Remember that Facebook was initially open to only college kids. It wasn’t until pretty much every college student in America was on Facebook that the site was opened to the general public.
And what’s cooler than college kids (definitely not high-school kids)?
There’s a reason why advertisers like to chase the young college crowd: the youth influences the tastes of the greater population at large. What the young and the hip consume trickles down and rises up at least one generation. 40 somethings mourning their youth want to relive their college days; 13 somethings look up to their college going siblings with awe and envy. When your consumer base is composed entirely of college kids, you know you’ve made a product that will be considered cool by the rest of the populace.
Plus, there was always the underground aspect to it: genius 19 year old Harvard kids pisses off a bunch of people, drops out of college and builds a massive site. It’s a story of chutzpah, of genius – the kind of story that gets passed down through word of mouth and over constant retelling turn into a myth (it also helps if David Fincher directs the movie about your company).
The Google+ story doesn’t have that. “Did you hear about the new site launched by a tech behemoth trying to dip its feet in the spring of social media revenues?” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. Google+ may have attracted the geek crowd, but for the mainstream, it was always going to remain too uncool, too obscure.
Further, Google+ was trying to compete with a company that had a generally solid product to begin with. Remember what I said – search is in Google’s DNA, not the consumer web. Whenever it has succeeded with a consumer product - Gmail comes to mind – it’s because of the relatively poor quality of the competition (when your main competitors are Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, you know you could cobble together anything over two weekends and have a better product).
The same can’t be said for Facebook. For all my criticism of the site, I will agree that barring the short phase during which Zuckerberg became besotted with Twitter, Facebook has managed to hug – if not stay one step ahead – of the curve.
Steve Yegge is only iterating the obvious: something that should have been pointed out to Google bosses a long time ago. Hopefully, Page will take some cues and focus the company’s attention on strengthening its core products, rather than dicking around in a field it doesn’t understand.
P.S.: The original Google+ post contains a fascinatingly educational criticism of Amazon. That alone makes Steve Yegge my new bestest favoritest guy on the interwebs.
Image Courtesy: Alex E. Proimos
