Google did an excellent job of targeting influencers and creating a wonderful experience for a few million people in the first several weeks of the "closed" beta. While most of the advantages were indeed small, there was one very big carrot: the possibility of improving your SEO via G+. [Of course a lot of people don't care about this, but they influencers they were talking about disproportionately do.] Facebook got caught somewhat flat-footed; Zuck threw everybody into lockdown mode for a few months, and when they surfaced, the general reaction "this is the best you can do?"

So while I agree that the technical issues weren't a major reason (Hangouts might have been janky but Facebook didn't have anything remotely comparable), I really do think it was the social stuff that killed them.

- the nymwars turned off a lot of their most enthusiastic early supporters, and turned the overall energy negative at a crucial time

- the failure to create a developer ecosystem (due to the lack of a write API) left them unable to leverage their deep pockets for a longer-term war of attrition against Facebook

Nymwars. Relevance. Hinky UI (and still). Lack of search. Poor formatting options (and still almost wholly neglected.) Forced integration. Too many SEO types.

Much of it screams "this sovles Google's problems, not yours."

I had a boss who's Google Plus page was owned by one of his other employees - they were on so many of the same emails that Google guessed who was who wrong. The two of them, working together, couldn't figure out how to hand the profile to its real owner. Similar experiences with identity issues and unusable bugs abounded.

It's one thing to have a hard-to-use website, or one that crashes sporadically. It's another to have errors so severe that they make the site permanently unusable for some people.

I think it basically was the social reasons. The name is really clunky and corporate. It was never that cool or exciting to people. The lack of original inspiration and the obvious ham-handed attempt to move people from Facebook just made it fall flat.

> none of the little annoyances or problems with G+ would have likely mattered

Yes, it would have mattered. It has happened before.

You know Orkut had every reason for not failing. I mean everybody was on Orkut seeing the Internet penetration at that time (at least in my part of the world) and Orkutting was the thing - for us there was no Twitter, no Instagram, no MySpace, traces of Friendster, but just Orkut. But it failed. It was pre-Facebook (by a a few weeks iirc) and had gained momentum long before Facebook did.

What else surprises me? The fact that what every one - I mean every Tom, Dick, Harry - knew was seemingly unknown to the G+/G leaders. Many of their decisions brought universal reactions of a metaphoric "really?" and they would do that all over again as there was a total communication gap with them and the rest of the world.

> Good product; unfortunate timing

Imho it's actually like: good idea (but nothing innovative; in fact many times repeated) badly executed (and more bad repeatedly over the time) is failing as expected.

Wave, Buzz, Orkut, G+

> For all that success, the Internet giant just couldn't seem to figure out social

I think this lines really sums it.

Maybe they banked upon the number they had in all their G-ecosystem and they believed they could just herd the flock.

This more than anything. And it was not just the external observers either. As pointed out in the article, Vic ran roughshod over the entire company to push his agenda. As is well known, a very large fraction of the rank-and-file employees were up in arms over the real-name policy. There were petitions against it signed by thousands of employees. None of that was heeded by the leadership.