Google+ was meant to be dead

Google announced that Google+ would officially be shut down and the public didn’t react surprised. Google+ was never a huge success and allow me to say that it was never meant to be.

But let’s go back to the beginning, because this thought of mine comes from years of reading, experience and meeting people. It was November 2014 and through my usual newsletter I see that Bill Gross, Chairman and Founder of Idealab, is hosting a private event in San Francisco. Perfect occasion to meet other startuppers and to meet Bill Gross: if he created more than 100 companies with his Idealab, maybe he could really give me a hint on how to move forward with my idea. He basically practiced for a later TED Talk he gave in March 2015 and while treasuring every word he was saying I also noted a book he recommended to read: “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel.

At this point, my mind was full of enthusiasm. The speech he gave made me understand that, for a company like mine, there were mainly 5 factors to consider if I wanted to succeed: the idea, the team, the business model, funding and timing. The idea was already there, ready to take off; the team was the one that helped me develop the idea; the business model was already planned and ready to be modified if needed and we were already planning our funding round A but timing, timing was crucial. According to what Bill Gross mentioned, amongst all factors, timing is the one that influences everything else the most, it’s the single biggest reason why startups succeed, it accounts for 42% of the differences between success and failure.

If we apply these principles to Google+, we see that the idea was nothing new from what the market was already offering: Facebook launched in 2004, Twitter in 2006 and many more in the meantime were joining the social media fever. Timing was not right either and Google knows about timing, they became who they are thanks to it. They waited until June 2011, to launch Google+, a place where people could post photos and status updates to different groups and communities (circles), chat with multiple people at the same time, videocall and text, organize events and upload/edit photos to private cloud-based albums.

The team? The team was the right one apparently. The creators team was made of ex Microsoft managers like Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz (now VP at Google). Funding was not needed as well as the business model, both of them were not essential since the platform belonged to Google itself.

What I asked myself is why did Google let it fail? It’s not the first Google failure, many more preceded it: Google Glass, Google Answers, Google Wave, Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook and so forth and so on. I still can’t believe that a company with a revenue of $110.86 billion lacks of vision, resources and insights to make a product work. What I do believe, is what Peter Thiel wrote in the book Bill Gross suggested me to read (“Zero to One”): Google is a monopoly in the search engine market. As of today, they own 92.31% of the market, followed by Yahoo with 2.51% and bing (2.27%).

How does a search engine earn money is clear to everyone: the main source of revenue advertising. According to Forbes “Advertising revenues on Google’s own platforms, or Google Properties revenues, make up over 70% of Alphabet’s net revenues in recent years, and have grown at around 20% annually in the same period”.

Let’s now go back to the beginning, Google+ was never meant to be a success because (in my opinion) it was always meant to be a distraction from Google’s monopoly of the online advertising market. Why? Because monopolies like Google tell lies and pretending to face fierce competition is something that keeps them far away from anti-trust lawsuit. Google+ was meant to be dead because I think that Google was (fortunately) created to stay alive, no matter what.