dec 1, 2019 - Google Cemetery: Google+

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Why did Google+ fail?
Perceiving Facebook and its growing share of the advertisement market as a valid threat, Google decided to build a copy of the social network and get users away from it.

Considering Google’s broad reach, deep pockets, and almost endless access to data, it’s hard to imagine how a project of the magnitude of Google+ could fail as badly as it did.

It had all the human capital needed, with engineers being taken from other projects and moving to Google+. The available capital also seemed more than enough – a whopping $585 million was allocated for the project during its 8-year tenure.

The search giant also had the potential to tap into its huge user base. Almost anyone with access to technology used some type of Google product by 2011, which meant that practically anyone using the internet would hear about the new social network. You could even argue that the company tried to capitalize on the opportunity to attract their current users to Google+ way too aggressively.

Google+ had a nice interface and some very cool features, even if some might have found them a bit too complicated. However, at its core, it didn’t offer much more than Facebook did. People weren’t in a hurry to leave an established network to join something new but kind-of-the-same. On top of that, considering Google’s previous failed social media attempts, a lot of people were skeptical of the project.

The first mover's advantage could be an insurmountable challenge if you are not offering some kind of unique value proposition. The main point of differentiation of Google+ was its circles, yet the circles felt more like a gimmick rather than a must-have social media feature.

Add to that the way Google tried to force people to join, and you have a recipe for disaster. Google was lucky their other affected products, such as Gmail, Maps, and YouTube, were top-notch and didn’t have any real competition, or all that hassle might have caused people to leave those platforms as well.

There have been many theories of what exactly went wrong. Articles and forum discussions by Google employees seem to point to a serious issue with how the Google+ project was being managed from top to bottom. They mention the effect on the development and overall strategy concerning the project that the social media team being separated from the rest of Google could have had.

Additionally, Google approached the whole thing hastily, wanting to increase the user base fast while not paying proper attention to the actual engagement on the platform, which was low and was a strong indicator of a lack of product-market fit. Research revealed that users spent 3-5 seconds on Google+ on average per day, compared to the hours spent on Facebook.

The search giant wanted too much, too fast with Google+, and didn’t let the network develop naturally through its growth phases. According to the Startup Genome project, premature scaling is the main reason for startup failure, and G+ definitely scaled prematurely. Google pushed to their users an unvalidated and insufficiently differentiated product and consequently produced the biggest failure in the company’s history.

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