"It was an understandable, safe, and wrong decision at the time."

That's such a good way to describe a bad decision. The accumulation of decisions with those characteristics will sink any company.

In addition to being safe, understandable, and wrong, it was completely out of touch. Did nobody stop to think why people would ever elect to use MetalHead444 over their real name in the first place?

The only explanation I can fathom was that it was a decision motivated by engineers and marketers rather than by anyone genuinely concerned about user experience.

The engineers -- the ones down in the trenches -- practically revolted over it.

The decision was purely from On High, i.e. managerial. It came down from the highest levels.

And that right there strikes me as a symptom of a deep problem.

I think the best use of executives is to support people in the trenches, because they're closest to the actual work. That support can include thoughtful questioning, advising, and mentoring. But when it becomes controlling, it often gets ugly.

I just happened to chat today with a guy who built a large and successful construction company up from nothing. He said that his philosophy was always to hire good people and support them. Eventually it was running well enough that he got bored with it and sold it to the employees. He's now starting an incubator for manufacturing businesses because for him the fun part is helping people get things going. I think he'll be successful, because handing down decisions on high is entirely uninteresting to him.

sounds interesting! who is this guy? or he prefers to be anonymous?

I'd feel weird naming him without asking. But if you want to read more about this sort of approach, there's a book called Servant Leadership, plus a lot of literature around it. It's also the basic approach in Lean Manufacturing.

Thanks for the lead.

Who strangely enough for people who presumably know a lot about the internet and online didn't seem to understand why people might have completely different online personas and identities.

I have friends from the pre Internet online communities (telecom gold and Prestel) who would probably not even know my real name as we went by handles I even have a dedication using that name in a booker (think uk version of the Pulitzer prize) shortlisted authors book about that time "cybergypsies" by Indra Sinha.

Glad to hear it. I apologize to Google's engineers for my uninformed implication.

I wish more had protested more strongly or simply walked.

I know it's easy to project actions on others, but really, that was a BAD decision.

Unfortunately, not everyone had that sort of mobility. Mortgage holders, people on visas who needed to find another sponsor (and couldn't just go anywhere) and the rest have a harder time moving on.

That has to suck: knowing something is rotten but having to stick with it due to external constraints.

If they had full freedom to move around in the company, it would have become obvious as people would have bailed from the project.

Can you write an article on Vic Gundotra's resignation and the problems at Google that needs to be fixed?

And that's why I now perceive Google to be rotten from the head.

Personally I feel, best of the companies can take rotten decision sometimes,specially when they are reactionary. IMHO That doesn't mean we can generalize it.

100% of Facebook's value is real names.

That is it. There are hundreds of other services for instant/asynchronous messaging, photo sharing, etc. but only Facebook knows everyone in my life by the same names I do.

I can discover and communicate with anyone I might have heard about in my real life on Facebook because (and only because) they use their real name on Facebook.

Discoverability by real name is the point of Facebook. There are certainly other social networks (i.e. Tumblr, instagram, HN) that people use as online personas separate from their real identities, but Google pretty clearly wanted a piece of Facebook's pie. Pseudonymous Google+ would have been an entirely different community. Maybe a more successful one, but not in the same space as Facebook at all, and not what Google was trying to do.

Interestingly, people use Tumblr as a much more intimate venue, in part because you just can't hold that many people's pseudonyms in your head - at my school, only fairly close friends got to know each other's Tumblr URLs.

> Discoverability by real name is the point of Facebook.

Yup, and it's also it's greatest weakness. Hence the abandonment of Facebook by millennials to communication mediums that are inherently private—SnapChat, Kik, and anything else that doesn't put their behavior on the Internet, Google-able in one hop by authority figures.

Facebook is great for middle-aged people with stable (boring) lives who want a digital scrapbook to share with similar people. Hence all of the photos of people's kids.

I think that's thinking about it the wrong way. Google's aim is to organise the world's information in a structured way and then capitalise on it. It seems to be that with Google + they had decided to use identity as a primary key to hang stuff off. They were determined that architecturally, they wanted it this way.... at almost any cost.

Safe? It threw the Internet into uproar, which continues today as they force YouTube users to either use their real names or create a Google+ brand page for their YouTube username. That doesn't sound like a safe decision to me.

Realistically:

(a) It threw a small but vocal corner of the internet into an uproar. Now many, many of those people were smart and had really thought about the issue and the problems it would cause, but the sad truth is that a vast majority of people really didn't care.

(b) Pretty much anything throws a small but vocal corner of the internet into an uproar.

Much of the majority follows the lead of that vocal minority. This is part of how Google gained supremacy in search.

I'm curious about how you're establishing that the people objecting to this are the same people who were early adopters of Google search.

I was an early adopter of Google search back in the late 90s but I'm not that bothered about what they're doing with plus (I'd rather they were handling it differently but I'll take it or leave it).

I do see that some of the people who are objecting are potentially significant voices - I tried to reflect this in my post by saying they were people who had thought this through - but sadly having a good point doesn't mean that you'll always win the argument, particularly where massive commercial concerns are involved.