Who passed sentence on GooglePlus and why?


The exact text Google used when announcing shutting Google+ down for consumers.
"There are significant challenges in creating and maintaining a successful Google+ product that meets consumers’ expectations."
WTF does that mean?

First off why is "creating" in there at all? That makes no sense, it was already created; let's ditch that.
"There are significant challenges in maintaining a successful Google+ product that meets consumers’ expectations."
Assuming "significant challenges" does not in reality mean "we aren't as clever as we thought" then the challenges are a "successful Google+ product" that "meets consumers’ expectations". Agreed?

Successful?

People who didn't use Google+ saw it as a failure. people who used it loved it.

Millions of Google account holders loved Google+ but billions of Google account holders did not use the product.

Google's failure is not understanding why a small set of users loved the product. The product didn't fail, Google's culture did. Sunsetting yet another social product is not going to fix that.

Consumer expectations?

A consumer is defined as "a person who purchases goods and services for personal use".

I think what Google meant in the context of their announcement is better expressed as "User Expectations" not consumer expectations. After all the G Suit (paid for) version is not being shut down.

Users commonly express their satisfaction or dissatisfaction by leaving reviews.

Here are the reviews for social network applications from Google's App store, including (listed alphabetically): Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat and Twitter

Which review is from a user-base with poorly met expectations? 

The active user base for Google+ was small by Facebook standards but still millions of users.

Whoever made the call to sunset the non-paid version had alternative options which would have given those active users a choice. Instead, whoever made the call decided that millions of people did not matter.

While I except that Google faced significant challenges; claiming those challenges as the reason(s) to cull Google+ makes little sense.

I don't like being fobbed off. Neither should you.

Comments

  1. "... I don't like being fobbed off ..."

    That's Google Corp. for you.
    We're all to stupid to understand the reasoning of Ivory Tower,
    and not smart enough to figure the brown stuff they are feeding us isn't oxtail soup.
    (This level of superiority from the company founded by two blokes too stupid to realise PageRank would be gamed so easily!)

    Anyone with half a brain knows Googles shoveling the excuses.
    The shame is, there's a fair % that believe it :(

    ReplyDelete

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