Google+ as we know it appears to be finished. Vic Gundotra, the executive in charge, is leaving the company, and TechCrunch says big changes are afoot. The three-year-old social network is being redefined — demoted? — from a product to a platform, and Google GOOG -1.71% will stop trying to infuse it into all its other products and services.
This is great news. It’s great for consumers, who shouldn’t have to sign up for a service they never asked for just to be able to use the ones they actually care about. It’s great for those of us who depend on Google search for traffic or new business, and for whom maintaining a G+ profile that satisfied Google’s ever more demanding specifications was an unwanted burden.
And, ultimately, once the sting of embarrassment fades, it will be great for Google. The failure of Google+ wasn’t just a matter of botched execution; it was a result of misguided strategic thinking. Plus has been mostly a cul-de-sac for Google, and it will be better off for having emerged from it. Here’s why.
1. Google’s attempts to push Plus on users were a standing invitation for antitrust lawsuits. Forcing consumers to accept a product they don’t want in order to get access to one they do want is called tying, and under some circumstances it’s illegal. It’s debatable whether Google’s heavy-handed integrations of Plus crossed that line; the Federal Trade Commission looked into the matter but didn’t take action. Still, Google finds itself in front of antitrust regulators often enough as it is without waving a big red cape in front of their noses.
2. There was no need to force Plus on users in the first place. The argument for it was Plus would make users of every Google product and service immensely more valuable to advertisers by allowing the company to track and profile them across the entire suite, and to follow them to every page with a “+1″ button on it. But why do you need a whole new social network for that? Rather than forge Google+ as the One Ring To Rule Them All, why not just do it with Gmail, which has more than 500 million users it acquired organically, not through coercion? (Indeed, Recode reports the sign-in component of Plus may become its own separate product.)
There was also the argument that Google search would suffer if it didn’t have access to users’ social graphs as a data set. But even Facebook has yet to figure out how to turn social data into a worthwhile search product.
3. Building a bunch of independent products is a better approach than building one uber-product with a ton of different features. That’s what Facebook has concluded lately, anyway. After years of trying to do everything under the same umbrella, Mark Zuckerberg is now focused on “unbundling” Facebook’s offerings into a number of “ single-purpose, first-class experiences,” like Messenger, Paper, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Not only does the unbundled approach lower the threshold for potential new users to sign up, it just results in better products on their own terms. That’s what former Google+ team member Danny Crichton took away from the experience of working there:
One of the key lessons I learned from the experience that I have drilled into every founder I have worked with is that focus is absolutely everything. As soon as you have two goals, even one that is minor, you start heading toward the center of the convex set of solutions, and your product deeply suffers.
via Forbes
