It seems that I'm one of the only people here who thinks the author of the article is on to something substantial. Here's why.
First of all, wanting to get into social is accepting to play second fiddle to Facebook - google is not a leader but a follower in this game. They're known for innovating and this seems to be at odds with that.
Second, as the author points out, Google is not very good when it comes to people and how they work play and interact. This is what social is all about, and it's very hard to put into an algorithm which is the Google way of doing things.
Third, I agree that making all bonuses dependant on the success of their social endeavours is a huge mistake. What happens to the really good algorithmic search people at Google? Do they bust their ass of doing what they do best, or do they try to implement some kind of social search that they know nothing about because that's what their bonus depends on. What will happen to my search results because of this? Yes, it will get worse, and yes it will undermine Googles core product. What Larry has done is basically told everyone that they should start working on something Google is historically not very good at and not worry about their core business. Huge mistake.
Fourth, this shows a poor understanding of the dynamics of incentives, which is something that a CEO of a company as large as Google should be very good at. Paying everyone a bonus based on how one division performs is at best disillusioning to the people who don't work in that division and have absolutely no control over their bonus. It doesn't matter how hard a division works if it doesn't have anything to do with social. What will this do to their morale? At best they'll just hum along, knowing there's not much they can do, at worst they'll start cannibalising their product to try and make it social.
One difference thiugh is every one of those tools are accessed via a unique url. Facebook.com is the only way to access the other.
It would be interesting if, like facebook, you coukd do nothing on google without signing in. further upon sign in, if you were given a more cohesive iGoogle profile through which to access these services.
Clearly what google lavks is not the message board, but a cohesive ux to tie these all together - but only if thats how these services were of value, like facebook. But they do have intrinsic value as standalone services, thus the user base they do have.
Its a risky situation to try to glue all the already valuable services google has together with some ambiguous social duct tape. Im sure that would fail.
Creating yet another site where we can create an account wont work. Letting us share through some service like disco is a single channel through which to share info. That competes with twitter.
Additionally they cant provide a business profile as linkedin owns that space.
It seems as though they need to find a way fir people to create an adhock social network for various activities and provide the tools that support this group.
The author has a good point which should be contemplated in the context of one's company. Incentives should be tied to your performance.
There is a small backlash against "social". Google pushing social will not help that. Facebook and twitter own social right now. Next year, who knows? The better way forward is to figure out how to give users clean and excellent tools to manage the privacy/transparency aspects of social and integrate that into a platform with a great signal:noise ratio.
That's not an engineering problem. That's a people problem: a business, legal and UX problem sitting square in that gooshy, touchy-feely, soft side of how people think, operate, and want to manage their data. The question is, can Google play in that arena? Can they hire some flake fruity designer who totally groks how non-engineers think and integrate that understanding into the engineering teams?
Social software and slick UI design is not in Google's "genes". That's OK, but they should just admit the fact based on past performance. Google's engineers are great at building computing infrastructure that scales. They should acquire a bunch of young, promising social startups. Then let those engineers and designers expand their services on Google's infrastructure. Google could organize into nimble app teams building on platform teams' work.
I actually thought the most on-point part of the article was its suggestion of a strategy for Google's social features. Like the author said, if they want to have a chance at beating Facebook in the social realm, they really need a "social network", not a random smattering of social features tacked on to already existing Google features. There needs to be a single URL you can type to easily access this social network and easily navigate to every feature from it, and it needs to have a common, clean UI like Facebook does.
And moreover, it needs to have a big, well-planned release. I didn't even know Google Profiles existed until a couple weeks ago. If Google were to release an entire social network on a single day with an Apple-esque release press conference, there's a chance it might get enough people interested to have an actual impact. Doing things like a limited beta release is a horrible idea when it comes to social features, and arguably a major part of why Wave failed so spectacularly.
Everything they've tried up to this point has been completely disjoint and confusing.
Innovation isn't necessarily inventing something new, it can just as well be taking something existing and making it better. Pagerank, adwords and gmail are examples of this. They all took something existing and made it much much better.
Pure invention is overrated. While it's nice if a technology exists in a lab somewhere or in somebody's head, I don't really care.
Microsoft put cheap GUI computing on everbody's desk and broke the vertical hardware micromonopolies, commoditizing hardware.
Microsoft gave me run whoever's programs you want computing, no permission needed computing on everbody's desk.
Apple put touchscreen microcomputer app technology in my hand. I don't care if they didn't invent any bit of it, they were the ones who made it available and synthesized the pieces to make a whole much greater than the parts.
Apple put cheap mostly individual digital music in my hand. Who cares that they didn't invent digital audio, compression, or mp3 players -- they were the ones let me have them.
First of all, wanting to get into social is accepting to play second fiddle to Facebook
That's like saying that Google getting into email with Gmail years ago was accepting to play second fiddle to Hotmail (or Yahoo Mail). We know how that worked out. It's too early to say who will be second fiddle to whom.
Gmail arrived in a field where having 10 or 50MB was considered normal and it disrupted that by letting people not having to care about mail storage. It rendered email weightless to most.
Hotmail & Co. were stagnant, they thought that webmail was a solved problem and Gmail blew their little world.
Facebook is moving, it isn't resting thinking "Work's done."
If Facebook really is a serious threat to Google, he needs everyone in the company to realize that and fight against it.
>"What happens to the really good algorithmic search people at Google? Do they bust their ass of doing what they do best, or do they try to implement some kind of social search that they know nothing about because that's what their bonus depends on."
If that good algorithmic search person only cares about his/her job and not the life of the company maybe he/she should leave. I'm sure he doesn't want everyone to make individual products, but they have an army of incredibly smart people that could give valuable input. Setting a company wide priority is the right thing to do.
But... but social is an adjective. As far as I can tell, Google is talking about implementing social feedback in a sense similar to Slashdot (also Digg, Reddit, HN, etc), not social networking a la Facebook. And this feedback mechanism on search results is the basis of the 25% bonus[1]. How does voting on search results relate to Facebook?
Comments
It seems that I'm one of the only people here who thinks the author of the article is on to something substantial. Here's why.
First of all, wanting to get into social is accepting to play second fiddle to Facebook - google is not a leader but a follower in this game. They're known for innovating and this seems to be at odds with that.
Second, as the author points out, Google is not very good when it comes to people and how they work play and interact. This is what social is all about, and it's very hard to put into an algorithm which is the Google way of doing things.
Third, I agree that making all bonuses dependant on the success of their social endeavours is a huge mistake. What happens to the really good algorithmic search people at Google? Do they bust their ass of doing what they do best, or do they try to implement some kind of social search that they know nothing about because that's what their bonus depends on. What will happen to my search results because of this? Yes, it will get worse, and yes it will undermine Googles core product. What Larry has done is basically told everyone that they should start working on something Google is historically not very good at and not worry about their core business. Huge mistake.
Fourth, this shows a poor understanding of the dynamics of incentives, which is something that a CEO of a company as large as Google should be very good at. Paying everyone a bonus based on how one division performs is at best disillusioning to the people who don't work in that division and have absolutely no control over their bonus. It doesn't matter how hard a division works if it doesn't have anything to do with social. What will this do to their morale? At best they'll just hum along, knowing there's not much they can do, at worst they'll start cannibalising their product to try and make it social.
I agree the author is onto something substantial.
Google is a bunch of great add-ons without a message board.
Facebook is a great message board with mediocre add-ons.
Google needs a message board.
Buy Reddit.
Buzz.
Also: Google Groups, Google Docs, Knol, Wave, searchwiki, blogspot, youtube comments, Lively http://www.lively.com/goodbye.html , Google Reader notes, Google Shared Spaces http://sharedspaces.googlelabs.com/ , aardvark http://vark.com/ , Google Moderator http://www.google.com/moderator/ , and probably some I missed. All places where people can publicly share and talk together online, none of them a Facebook contender.
One difference thiugh is every one of those tools are accessed via a unique url. Facebook.com is the only way to access the other.
It would be interesting if, like facebook, you coukd do nothing on google without signing in. further upon sign in, if you were given a more cohesive iGoogle profile through which to access these services.
Clearly what google lavks is not the message board, but a cohesive ux to tie these all together - but only if thats how these services were of value, like facebook. But they do have intrinsic value as standalone services, thus the user base they do have.
Its a risky situation to try to glue all the already valuable services google has together with some ambiguous social duct tape. Im sure that would fail.
Creating yet another site where we can create an account wont work. Letting us share through some service like disco is a single channel through which to share info. That competes with twitter.
Additionally they cant provide a business profile as linkedin owns that space.
It seems as though they need to find a way fir people to create an adhock social network for various activities and provide the tools that support this group.
typed from phone, forgive typos
The author has a good point which should be contemplated in the context of one's company. Incentives should be tied to your performance.
There is a small backlash against "social". Google pushing social will not help that. Facebook and twitter own social right now. Next year, who knows? The better way forward is to figure out how to give users clean and excellent tools to manage the privacy/transparency aspects of social and integrate that into a platform with a great signal:noise ratio.
That's not an engineering problem. That's a people problem: a business, legal and UX problem sitting square in that gooshy, touchy-feely, soft side of how people think, operate, and want to manage their data. The question is, can Google play in that arena? Can they hire some flake fruity designer who totally groks how non-engineers think and integrate that understanding into the engineering teams?
Social software and slick UI design is not in Google's "genes". That's OK, but they should just admit the fact based on past performance. Google's engineers are great at building computing infrastructure that scales. They should acquire a bunch of young, promising social startups. Then let those engineers and designers expand their services on Google's infrastructure. Google could organize into nimble app teams building on platform teams' work.
I actually thought the most on-point part of the article was its suggestion of a strategy for Google's social features. Like the author said, if they want to have a chance at beating Facebook in the social realm, they really need a "social network", not a random smattering of social features tacked on to already existing Google features. There needs to be a single URL you can type to easily access this social network and easily navigate to every feature from it, and it needs to have a common, clean UI like Facebook does.
And moreover, it needs to have a big, well-planned release. I didn't even know Google Profiles existed until a couple weeks ago. If Google were to release an entire social network on a single day with an Apple-esque release press conference, there's a chance it might get enough people interested to have an actual impact. Doing things like a limited beta release is a horrible idea when it comes to social features, and arguably a major part of why Wave failed so spectacularly.
Everything they've tried up to this point has been completely disjoint and confusing.
> [Google is] known for innovating and this seems to be at odds with that.
What kind of innovation has Google done?
They've done "better" successfully a couple of times, but they've rarely done new.
Innovation isn't necessarily inventing something new, it can just as well be taking something existing and making it better. Pagerank, adwords and gmail are examples of this. They all took something existing and made it much much better.
Pure invention is overrated. While it's nice if a technology exists in a lab somewhere or in somebody's head, I don't really care.
Microsoft put cheap GUI computing on everbody's desk and broke the vertical hardware micromonopolies, commoditizing hardware.
Microsoft gave me run whoever's programs you want computing, no permission needed computing on everbody's desk.
Apple put touchscreen microcomputer app technology in my hand. I don't care if they didn't invent any bit of it, they were the ones who made it available and synthesized the pieces to make a whole much greater than the parts.
Apple put cheap mostly individual digital music in my hand. Who cares that they didn't invent digital audio, compression, or mp3 players -- they were the ones let me have them.
etc etc
First of all, wanting to get into social is accepting to play second fiddle to Facebook
That's like saying that Google getting into email with Gmail years ago was accepting to play second fiddle to Hotmail (or Yahoo Mail). We know how that worked out. It's too early to say who will be second fiddle to whom.
Gmail arrived in a field where having 10 or 50MB was considered normal and it disrupted that by letting people not having to care about mail storage. It rendered email weightless to most. Hotmail & Co. were stagnant, they thought that webmail was a solved problem and Gmail blew their little world.
Facebook is moving, it isn't resting thinking "Work's done."
Except that it probably equates to around 5% of the total remuneration package.
Not a huge monetary incentive, but you can bet that social ideas will get all the backup they need from infrastructure, marketing, etc.
If Facebook really is a serious threat to Google, he needs everyone in the company to realize that and fight against it.
>"What happens to the really good algorithmic search people at Google? Do they bust their ass of doing what they do best, or do they try to implement some kind of social search that they know nothing about because that's what their bonus depends on."
If that good algorithmic search person only cares about his/her job and not the life of the company maybe he/she should leave. I'm sure he doesn't want everyone to make individual products, but they have an army of incredibly smart people that could give valuable input. Setting a company wide priority is the right thing to do.
But... but social is an adjective. As far as I can tell, Google is talking about implementing social feedback in a sense similar to Slashdot (also Digg, Reddit, HN, etc), not social networking a la Facebook. And this feedback mechanism on search results is the basis of the 25% bonus[1]. How does voting on search results relate to Facebook?
[1] -- since this could use a source, see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/08/google_bonuses_tied_... and 'Page is tying a proverbial lamb chop around the neck of its new social thingy, "Google +1" [...]'.