Google FAIL Whale in Social
James Whittaker, now of Microsoft, says he left Google after it lost its way as a slave to advertising. He liked it better when Schmidt was running things. He also lamented Google's failure in social versus Facebook. We must remind James that is was under Schmidt that Google fell far behind FB!
P.S. Whittaker acknowledges Google+ as a failure one week after Google+ shepherd Vic Gundotra boasts of the platform's success:
Had Google been right, the effort would have been heroic and clearly many of us wanted to be part of that outcome. I bought into it. I worked on Google+ as a development director and shipped a bunch of code. But the world never changed; sharing never changed. It’s arguable that we made Facebook better, but all I had to show for it was higher review scores.
As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.
Just. Wow.