The slow demise of Google Plus has been painful to watch as the service is slowly wound back ahead of its inevitable quiet burial.
Mashable’s Seth Fiegerman has a deep look at what went wrong for Google’s nascent social media platform.
Adding to the company’s distress, early Google+ adopter and advocate Thomas Hawk posted on Facebook his requiem for the service citing how the organisation seemed to lose interest in the product and the departure of Vic Gundotra sealed its fate.
Google’s Corporate ADD
Hawk is particularly scathing about Google’s prospects of being trusted again by developers and the marketplace. “By quitting early, Google lost what little goodwill they might have to seed something in the future,” he says. “Who will ever take Google serious with social again?”
Once again we see the effects of Google’s corporate Attention Deficit Disorder and the message to developers and evangelists is clear – be very careful in devoting too many resources to any new product from the company.
Google Plus’ decline though signals something far more serious for the company however – it may well have missed some of the most serious shifts in its marketplace.
The SoLoMo opportunity
Four years ago when the service was launched with great fanfare SoLoMo was one of the key buzzwords and it was understandable for Google to want a slice of it. Unfortunately the company found that even an business as big as Google can’t force change by management diktat.
SoLoMo – Social, Local and Mobile – were seen as the big market growth areas and Google’s footprint in all of those spaces was poor. Although Google Places was leading the local search market at the time.
Google+ was intended to solve at least the social problem with the added advantage of overlaying personal information onto the already comprehensive ‘knowledge graph’ it’s gathered on users.
Four years later it’s clear Google Plus is a failure and much of that is due to the project being driven from the top down. From its launch the project was about meeting management imperatives and it’s notable in the company’s announcements about the service how little mention users get.
Google’s price of failure
The problem now for Google is they have wasted four years on the failed product at a time when Facebook have become the dominant social media platform and have successfully adapted the service to the mobile world.
Even in Local search, Facebook are making strong inroads into local business advertising, an area Google had the advantage by tying together maps and local search but lost because of inaction and bureaucracy.
A costly distraction
The Google+ distraction means the company has missed the entire SoLoMo opportunity and squandered the one area where they had a massive head start.
Google now face a future where their key advantage is stranded on the desktop without serious integration into social media. At the same time their ambitions to run a payments service seems stalled as well.
Whether Google+ turns out to be as strategic a mistake for the search engine giant as Windows Vista was for Microsoft remains to be seen but the similarity between the two companies stuck with declining desktop based business models in a world of mobile consumers is striking.