Google Minuses Plus
When Google co-founder, Larry Page resumed his position as CEO, ten years after relinquishing the same to Eric Schmidt for “adult supervision”, the company was a hodgepodge of myriad services with no cohesive bind between them. Google, Android, YouTube, Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides (it wasn’t Google Drive back then), Gmail, all existed in their own independent universes.
In order to organise the chaos, the company needed a connecting thread binding all these services together with a common design language and experience — a social layer, if you will. Google had already burnt its hands with social, unable to come up with something that clicked with users in quite a while. Orkut had been successful in certain parts of the world, but had long been outgunned by Facebook. Google, not used to playing second fiddle, saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone — connect all of Google’s services and get a foot in the door in the business of social networking. Under Larry Page, Google, in 2011, launched its own Facebook rival — Google Plus. It took Facebook head-on. Where Facebook was routinely criticised for not being sensitive to their users’ privacy, Google made a big splash announcing far more granular privacy controls than any other service at the time. They also included a photo service far superior to anything in the market. Over time, this was spun off into its own product — Google Photos.
Learning from the success of the invite based system which made Gmail so popular, they replicated the same with Google Plus. Early adopters came in droves. However, the excitement was to be short-lived. With about 500 million users at the time, Facebook was by far, the most popular social network in the world. Without the interoperability of email services, users had to either pick one platform — Facebook or Google Plus — or post to both. This proved to be too big a task, and people preferred to stay with the platform where all their friends already were.
Things went downhill from there. Slowly, Google Plus has become a ghost town with little to no activity seen on the platform. Things ultimately got so bad that when the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that there had been a security breach with data of over 500,000 users compromised, the company simply decided to shut down the service. An internal investigation revealed that even though the security flaw had been in existence for a long time, nobody had taken advantage of it.
This is not to say that Google Plus was a complete failure. It launched with two main objectives — unify all of Google’s products and take on Facebook. While it failed at the latter, it has managed to unify all of Google with a single login. Not just that, Google also took their secure login to other websites and apps, making logging into any service that much easier. Users logging in to third-party services via Google, has also boosted their ad business, which contributes over 80% of their revenues.
In minusing Google Plus, Google has publicly thrown in the towel in their attempt to take on Facebook head-on. However, to call it a complete failure would be missing the point.
