Absolutely this.
It is, however, not the marketing strategy that failed them. G+ was hyped for some time before release and it became a hit since day one.
With the level of attention any Google product gained at that time, there was no need to focus on a niche. The issue were their horrendous decisions in UI and product design as well as feature integration. In short, it was a product for the tech savy user, yet aimed at the mainstream. It wasn't satisfying anyone.
I still can't understand why they would not cap the most valuable resource they had, GMail, GDocs, GCalendar, GReader, etc. Zero integration.
I do agree that there was a missed opportunity to integrate their other awesome products you mentioned. But to me even with those integrated Google+ would have needed a raison d’etre that was substantially different than facebook.
At the same time, the minimalism pervaded the rest of the platform. Instead of giving its users reason to spend time on G+, the site seemed to expect for people to entertain themselves. As such, there was little that drove more activity, connected people, and gave reason to spend time to understand all the features.
One thing I misremembered. There was a serious issue with marketing. They didn't open up to the public for several months. By that time a lot of the hype died down.
If Google had pivoted 180 degrees and offered up a full featured social network with pseudonyms and, like, one other twist so that it wasn't just Myspace, then there's a reason to care about Google+. LinkedIn is facebook for professional identity... There have to be other identities not shown on Facebook that google could have gone after.
So when I got to joining what did it present? Welcome - connect to some famous people. Now add your friends. Not one mention of interests, and I'm not sure they even mentioned circles. So everyone joining was being presented a picture of Facebook.
I didn't last long.
But there was simply not much to do, contrary to what you'd expect with all the other Google services available.
I was still very high on Facebook kool aid at that time. It may have had a bad rep to some people, but this sentiment was years away from reaching people like me.
Note that I am about as much of a Facebook insider as possible without actually having worked there. I personally know most of their top execs, Zuck interviewed me in 2007, turned down a PM offer to join Bebo but stayed close with a number of them for years. I would have loved to be filthy rich with those options, but if I had joined I would feel guilty for the destruction I contributed to.
In fact including wave buzz and orkut, Google had to date at least 4 abandoned forays into the social market.
I'd go so far as to posit Google:social::Microsoft:mobile
As Google Reader history shows, Google does not care about the passionate users.
I basically stopped following most blogs when it shut down, and reverted to individual bookmarks.
Big companies go after niches all the time. Many microbrews are owned by massive multi-national breweries. Huge drug companies chase niches every day. Giant food companies release ethic niche foods every month.
Whomever told you that there isn’t big money in niches or that they’re not worth going after is someone you should stop taking advice from.
AB Inbev, et al isn't targeting a niche by buying microbrews, they're building a portfolio that gives them access to growing and profitable craft brew market that's 1/4th of the total US beer market.
Retail dollar sales of craft increased 8%, up to $26.0 billion,
and now account for more than 23% of the $111.4 billion U.S. beer market.
Google isn’t really in the business of filling small niches. That’s why they kill so many products that have small but passionate user bases. It’s just not worth their time and money so they shut the products down. This is why I can’t see them trying to start with a small social media niche and slowly expand to a bigger market. It’s a great idea; but seems to go against everything they do.
Paired with the missing backward compatibility with email those two are the most important aspects of why Wave failed IMHO.
At least they could incorporate the tech they developed and used for Wave in other products, notably Docs and G+.
Great advice for a YC startup, but not how big companies that already have large user bases operate. Big companies have a metric they want to drive, then look for big opportunities, simply because dominating a “niche” is too small an opportunity to make a dent in a big-company metric like DAU, time spent, etc. If you do want to start with a niche, it can be super hard to justify continued investment from management, given that there are so many other bets that can drive larger near-term changes to metrics.
But there was no feature parity, not even close.
When G+ launched it was more like a tech demo, interest died down when people discovered that there really was not much to do.
They added more features over time, but at that point the hype was already dead.
If I just want to chat with friends I might just a well use a messenger with a group chat.
If it had copied Facebook shamelessly, it would've given an alternative for all those people fed up with Facebook for the last decade or so, and thus increased usage too.
If they had done something different, like say restricted you to X number of friends, for any small X, or focused on groups, or done something anonymous like Secret - now that at least would have been different. It may have still failed but at least it would have been trying to scratch a different itch on the social spectrum.
Doesn't Google Wave live on as Google Docs?
Good Docs had this to a degree before Wave, but it was unpolished. Two people could definitely edit a sheet together, but editing a document was more cumbersome (whole blocks of text would update at once). After Wave, they took the concepts and you could then see everyone editing the document as they typed or simply moved around the document.
Not so much defeat , but more avoiding future liability. They sure could afford to run it , but under the current circumstances, a data leak like the one they claim they didn't have would be very damaging to their image and their moneymakers.
...right. Hence, them finally “admitting defeat” which you objected to for some reason in your previous comment.
To me it seems like google is forcing more and more on selling services rather than user information.
#1, they're shutting it down to avoid a massive backlash after being hacked, because otherwise they might steal the crown of "most disreputable Big Tech co" from Facebook, which could begin to affect their stock price much like it has Facebook's.
#2, they are making inroads in every other part of their business sacrificing user privacy for nebulous features/benefits. See the recent debacle over Chrome auto-sign in. They basically tried to change the definition of Chrome from "it's a browser" to "it's Google" without anybody noticing.
Not particularly consistent with a company ostensibly moving away from a business model relying on targeted advertising.
The median Googler works there for something like 1.1 years, and gets recruited straight out of college. Combine this with the fact that Larry Page almost immediately abdicated after being handed back the reins from Eric Schmidt around this time, and a lot of other influential old timers like Marissa Mayer are long gone, it's no small wonder, I guess, that the sensibilities and follow-through of early Google are dead.
This is a ridiculous claim and should be discarded without sources. Do you have any?
It would have been better if they had competitors to keep them honest.
I really admire Apple here a lot more than Google. They seem to have a stronger sense of who they are and who they are not.
My take is, they were justified in going for it, but it’s simply not in their DNA. Social information is different from the non-human information where Google dominates (eg search, maps, etc).
I do share your admiration for Apple vs Google. But I wonder how long they will be able to keep it up without a Jobsian product visionary to define their identity. Tim Cook is doing a good job so far but there is only so long they can coast on iPhone dominance and strong operations. Apple’s identity revolves around defining the future, and I’m not sure they still have that ability.
Kind of describes Google Wave in a sense - private collaboration and passionate users. But it couldn't expand out of that niche set of users/use-cases.
Google+ was dead in the water from day one. You don’t beat Facebook at social by building a slightly different product with some cool ideas like Circles. Going for feature parity was a mistake. Instead they should have tried to identify a niche where Facebook was failing (say, intimate private sharing, or the antithesis of the narcissist fest) and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users, then slowly expanded from there. Kind of like how Facebook started out as a platform for elite universities, then high schools, then workplaces, then the world.
This approach would have been hard to sell internally at Google given the pressure to release a “Facebook killer.” But people always forget that the way to build a platform is to start by nailing a niche use case and then expanding. Even the Apple App Store only came to dominate because it was based on a hit product, the original iPhone.
Anyway, kudos to Google for finally admitting defeat. Hopefully management learned something and they hire some people who understand humans so that their brilliant engineering capacity doesn’t get wasted again.