Number of Active Users on Facebook

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Since its announcement in June 2011, many critics were impressed with features such as Hangout, circle etc. but were largely disappointed. It was said to be failure. This can’t be the answer to Facebook was the reaction of the critics. Yet, according to a 2013 study by GlobalWeblndex, Google+ now has more than 343 million active users and is growing quickly. It was ahead of Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Section C- Actual and expected deviation of the realized strategy from the intended strategy

Deviation from the approach to develop a product

Google’s approach to developing a product has been growth from a small project. There was a radical deviation of Google’s approach to Plus. It changed its development strategy of starting small and then growing organically in scale. The project had upwards of 1000 engineers working on it. Google also tied employee bonuses to the success of Google+. In his first week as CEO, Larry Page sent a companywide memo tying 25% of every employee’s bonus to Google+ success. Bonuses would depend on how well the company was integrating relationships, sharing and identity across its products. Associating extrinsic incentives like bonuses are great when the company’s goal is clearly defined and doesn’t involve much thinking or creativity. But for Google, the goal involved thinking and creativity and any extrinsic incentive would be ineffective and even counter-productive. Rather, Google should have been focused on making Google’s online services awesome.

Shifting from a Social integration platform

Google+ was launched as a social integration platform that would help integrate key capabilities like Google docs, chat, hangouts, email etc. It was positioned as a high value opportunity worth investing time and resources to cultivate. However, the executed product looked similar to Facebook. It had circles for grouping contacts which could be customized for sharing stories, hangouts for group video chats and provisions to upload photos along with good photo-editing tools. It basically was Facebook and a little bit of Twitter sprinkled into one. It essentially looked like a product just to surpass Facebook.

A product that would make it easy to connect with others

Google+ was developed to solve company’s own problems instead of making a product that made it easy for its users to connect with others. Logging into Google+ would connect users to all of Google’s products so it is not mandatory to manage a lot of profiles for its various apps and services. But it did not yield a social experience that was as simple as Facebook or LinkedIn. Users had to add people into different circles rather than adding someone as a friend as on Facebook or adding someone in your network as in LinkedIn. Google also did not move into mobile apps fast enough with Google+, also it focused on high resolution photos which were great for desktop experience but took a while to load on mobile devices. Also Google listened more to its employees than to its customers and hence, made the same error again and again. The assumption of Google+ was that the users enjoy spending time organizing their information. But here Google needs to realize that only geeks like organizing information while normal people don’t.

Restricting the users instead of helping them to freely connect

Despite the grand vision of a unified profile, the lack of market traction and organic interaction spelled problems. The users using the Google platform were frustrated as it tied them unwillingly into the Google+ ecosystem. It was mandatory for users to have a Google+ account to use other Google products too leading to a forced adoption.

Believe in Google’s mission statement

There has been a long disconnect between Google’s mission - organizing the world’s information and its main revenue model – finding stuff quickly, easily and elegantly. Although Google’s mission statement is clear and well defined yet its action deviates from its mission statement. Organizing the world’s information involves building a huge library which is never popular or profitable. However, the core business of Google doesn’t involve organizing the world’s information. Rather it depends on providing relevant stuff at lightning speed at the right time without intrusive advertising. Google’s users believe that the search tool is clean, neat and elegant. They are more interested in finding stuff relevant for them and least interested in whether the world’s information is organized or not. Thus, Google’s search business which provides its mainstream revenue is in “finding” business and not the “library” business. Google needs to realize that so long as it believes its core business is in organizing the world’s information it will continue to launch unprofitable businesses like Google social

Privacy Settings and Issues

Google plus has most user friendly accessible and easily understandable privacy settings. There is control over the information that is being shared and with whom the data is shared is facilitated in Google+ circles feature. Users have the option to download the information that is shared. But later Google plus was re-organized separately as two separate components -google photos and google streams due to privacy issues generated with Orkut and Google Buzz.So there were separate privacy setting options related to these individual components deviating from the original strategy of having unified privacy settings. In google streams- Problems were faced by users with the integration of YouTube with google plus profiles-Users had to sign in with their google plus profile in order to upload videos in their YouTube channels and also the functionality of YouTube channels suspended if google profile page was suspended. This was causing a major problem for users.