I think there's a pretty big difference here. Social networks have never been a core competency for Google. They invented modern datacenter infrastructure and are still way ahead of everyone else with it.

Urs might have kicked off Google+, but the execution was all Vic, and that's where any blame should be placed.

I think you meant to say, "he put Vic in charge of execution so that he's safe when things inevitably go south".

Google tried to compete against Facebook with a "me too" product very late in the game. And now they're doing the same against Amazon. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. What's next? Google Doors operating system? Google ZuneTunes music streaming?

They also took the entire search market with a me-too web search engine, and a huge chunk of web-mail with a me-too solution. And they do have music streaming and they do have several operating system.

Those weren't a "me-too". By all accounts, google search was insanely better than its alternatives (Lycos/AltaVista/Yahoo). Nobody paralled the speed and storage of email in the browser that Gmail did at the time of its launch. Is that "me too"? But you're right, the key here isn't me-too. Android was arguably a me-too iOS. Chrome was arguably me-too Firefox/Safari. So why /did/ the me-too Google+ flop so impressively against Facebook? What did they learn from that failure and the Android/Chrome successes to be able to successfully outperform Amazon in (arguably) it's most important service with a me-too product?

Not going to claim this is the authoritative reason for the G+ flop but as far as I can tell from the user perspective, it came down to a few related issues with the basic way social networks work.

Probably the easiest way to illustrate is to take the other examples you gave (search, mail, and browser) and compare to G+. If you're a user and you are used to Yahoo or Altavista but you hear about this new Google search, you can easily check out Google search and start comparing how it works relative to your usual experiences. If you like Google search better, you just start using Google search as your primary engine. Done.

If you had been [email protected] for years and hear about Gmail, you open a Gmail account, start sending and receiving email as [email protected] and if you prefer the new service, you set up forwarding on your [email protected] account and tell friends and family to use the Gmail address. Done.

If you had been using Safari and hear about Chrome, you download Chrome and use it for a few days. If you prefer your old Firefox setup you leave Chrome installed or ditch it but if you like Chrome, you just start using Chrome. Done.

But social networking isn't the same as email or a browser or a search engine. It's about communication like email but unlike email, you can't just pick whatever social networking service you prefer and use it. For social networking (at least in the typical Friendster/Myspace/Facebook way we usually think of it), you need everyone to be on the same service in order to communicate with them. Switching services is a lot more work than switching a browser or a search engine and there's no relatively easy "patch" like forwarding for email. For a massive amount of people and orgs, Facebook was the first big social network that they invested their time in. It was the first one that really got widespread adoption among people who may not really do much else on the web. It was the one that your mom and your boss and your neighborhood association and your local bartender all joined.

And when G+ came along, plenty of people (myself included) checked it out because we like checking out new services and Google has put out several that are at least competitive if not definitive (gmail, search, chrome, maps, etc). I won't speak for everyone but I found it much nicer to use than Facebook. There was no Farmville spam. Sorting the contacts that were displayed on your feed or who saw your posts was much more granular and visual than Facebook. The mobile app was much faster and more attractive. It was already tied to your email, voice/video chat, calendar, and photo/video hosting if you had a Gmail account. At the time, Facebook didn't have a lot of these features.

But regardless of whether you liked it or hated it compared to Facebook, it turned out to be irrelevant. Because unlike switching from Yahoo to Gmail or Firefox to Chrome, switching from Facebook to G+ wasn't something that only depended on your interest and relative acceptance of change or effort. Because unless all of your Facebook contacts did the same, it didn't matter which you liked more. The real limit of these kinds of services is that they're not interoperable. And if one (in this case, Facebook) gets a "critical mass" of users who might be resistant to change or switching services, it's nearly impossible to succeed as a competitor.

The only real way it could succeed is by offering something other than Facebook (which is what they're going for now I guess) but they will never be able to succeed as a better Facebook even if they build one.

If Google can provide a competitive service at a lower cost, they will gain traction since they are looking for corporate customers, customers that can run the numbers and see real savings from moving to GCE.

It was a much different situation with G+ vs FB -- Google was trying to compete for (often irrational) customers and had to convince customers to make the switch to a new social network when they already have a perfect usable social network that costs them nothing that Mom and Dad and the kids are already using so everyone is already there. There's a lot of friction in changing social networks since in order for it to he usable, not only do you need to switch but all of your friends and relatives have to switch too. In comparison, porting code to new API is much easier than getting Aunt Bessie to post her cat pictures on G+ instead of FB.

You can compete against a paid product with lower prices, but you can't compete against a free product with more free, you have to show real value, and G+ just doesn't offer that much value over FB for most users.

I'd compare it to Windows Phone instead: third player coming in very late with a good product. We know how well that worked out.

One thing people hate to do the most is learn something new. You have a bunch of engineers who already know ins and outs of AWS. Your stuff _works_. Would you consider moving it elsewhere? I didn't think so. Now consider that there are literally thousands of ISVs offering their stuff there, for whom porting to GCP means hiring more people, increasing complexity of the product (so that it could run everywhere), etc. Why would they pick GCP instead of e.g. Azure, which has _insane_ level of sales access to enterprise accounts?

If I'm spending a million dollars a year and GCE can cut my costs by 30%, I'd consider switching because the cost savings of dedicating a could FTE's for a few months can pay for itself in under a year.

I'm a big fan of AWS, but I purposely avoid using too many AWS services that would lead to me being locked in and able to move if I wanted to. Porting deployment scripts to another API isn't too hard, but having to build and support my own replacement to SQS or DynamoDB (and then port my services to the replacement system) adds a lot more to my costs

Once enough people like you consider moving over, Amazon will just rejigger the pricing to not make it happen. It's not like Google has some kind of insurmountable capex or opex advantage. They just don't worry about the margins as much. Yet.

That's what I'm counting on -- Amazon and Google (and maybe Azure) will keep each other in check - if either one gets too much more expensive than the other, then customers will shift and the more expensive service will have to drop prices. It's a free market that works.

Everyone keeps underestimating Azure, and yet they'll be the only ones making money when price wars erupt and margins evaporate. They're the only ones who have unique offerings (Office, Exchange, MS SQL, Sharepoint, Dynamics, AD/Enterprise management, etc) that enterprise customers already use outside the cloud, and they're the only ones with a massive sales channel into small to medium businesses. Much like it took a decade and billions of dollars for Amazon to build the distribution network, building the stack Microsoft has also takes decades and billions, and there's also an entrenched competitor now: Microsoft, so no one is even going to try.

I thought that the responsible of G¿ was Vic Gundotra.

Do you have a link to that memo from Pichai?

Urs Hozle wrote the memo about being left behind in social.

Thanks