Why Google+ Failed
I was an IC6 at Google when Google+ launched...<p>From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone was the biggest problem.  IMO this even foreshadows separating off Google Brain from the rest of Google and giving them resources not available to anyone else.  Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time.  I think the road to the Google we see today started then.  It's also the year they paid too much for Motorola and started pushing Marissa Mayer out the door.<p>Then there was the changing story of the 2011 bonus.  When I hired in, we were all told our 2011 bonus would be tied to the success of Google+.  That's a fantastic way to rally your co-workers, except...  Once they launched Google+, the Google+ Eliterati (so to speak) changed their minds and announced that any Google+ bonus was for Google+ people alone.  Maximum emotionally intelligent genius IMO.  Now your own co-workers have been burned.  Also not very "googly."<p>Finally, there was "Real Names."  The week of its launch everyone I knew wanted an invite and I used up every single one of them and continued to do so as more were made available to me.  Then "Real Names" happened and people stopped asking for invites overnight.  That's the moment for me when the tide turned against this thing.<p>I really liked the initial Google+ UI personally, but the UI ran head-on into the nonsensical "Kennedy" initiative wherein some brilliant designer seemed to decide that since monitors are now twice the size they used to be, they should add twice the whitespace to show the same amount of information as on a much smaller screen.  Subversives within the company took to posting nearly blank sheets of printer paper on walls with the single word "Kennedy" in a tiny font you'd only see if you got close to the things.  That said, my godawful company man manager would repeatedly proclaim how beautiful he thought the Kennedy layout was in our office for all to hear whenever they updated GMail or Search to use it.<p>Of course, there are other reasons beyond my tiny perspective here, but I did have a front row seat for this and it was really disappointing to see a potential Facebook killer die of a thousand papercuts like this.