Why Google+ will become Google's only product

"And between these two giants, it will be no contest. Google will almost certainly have vastly superior search -- it's Google, after all -- superior messaging, superior office documents, superior spam filtering, superior video chat -- superior everything."<p>I think the author is drastically overstating the inevitability of Google's product superiority. Google already spectacularly failed once at messaging with Google Wave, and Gmail doesn't actually have the market share that most people think it has (even just considering webmail). Office documents don't seem to be a make-or-break feature for social, and Google Docs has had very limited success competing with Microsoft Office (in fact, my favorite Google office productivity product, EtherPad, was killed in favor of Wave). Spam filtering is legitimate, but it's not that hard of a problem really in a technical sense; Facebook could keep up. Video chat is a weak point for Facebook, granted.<p>Besides, integrating your competitor's product as a feature of your own doesn't always spell success. Microsoft integrated Bing with its operating system through the IE search box, and look how little that has mattered. Both Apple and Microsoft have tried to "feature-ize" Dropbox, and Dropbox seems to have emerged unscathed. Instapaper is doing fine even in the face of the Safari Reading List. The list goes on. (Sometimes the strategy does work, such as IE against Netscape, but it's hardly clear-cut.)

I actually hope this does come to pass, but I don't see it happening any time soon given the current state of affairs. Only a handful of my friends use G+, and they are the web/coder guys. All the social butterflies, the girls, the parties, and the pictures post on Facebook. It seems to me that many of my peers' internet surfing these days consists almost entirely of hanging out on Facebook. They have never heard of reddit, they don't follow blogs, they have no compelling interest in international news or trends, and if they have heard of G+ they consider it irrelevant. I think there is a key demographic of extroverts around which social gatherings coalesce that G+ needs to start making a dent in if they ever want to dethrone Facebook as the social space.<p>The other thing that concerns me is Google's prior lack of commitment to these types of projects. Facebook did not succeed only because it was better than myspace, I believe it was also due to just how bad myspace became that people started actively looking for an alternative. Remember the terrible auto-start songs, horribly mangled html templates, creepy spam and rampant security flaws? It might be the case that in a few years Facebook will start to implode in much the same way. Too many crappy Zynga games, an increasinly cluttered interface, questionable privacy compromises, a constant battering of status minutia updates and/or some catastrophic privacy event might drive people to begin migration to a new service. That might take years though. My question is, will G+ still be there, ready to accept them with a stable of polished features and seamless integration to the entire Google application lineup? Or will Google have abandoned G+ years ago, the same way it did with Wave and countless other "experiments"...

Apparently all this "integration" appeals to some people, but I can't say I'm one of them. The last thing I want is google+ integrated with my gmail (largely why I haven't signed up with google+). I'd rather just have my mail be my mail, not some sort of weird blob-like uber product trying desperately to force me to classify the people I kind of know into "circles". I get the value for the company, but as a consumer the idea of all this integration just creeps me out.

I put money down with a buddy (when Google+ launched) that within a year Google would drop the Google+ brand. This article basically agrees with me, but has it backwards.<p>Google+ will just become Google. Owning an Internet scale social-graph is just too important for Google; thus they will do whatever it takes to own one. This will include forcing users who just want search (or email) to have the functionality of Google+; but to avoid brand dilution Google will drop the "+".<p>(They will continue to use the + in the UI for +1, but that's different).

This is a well-written and persuasive, and I think Elgan does a terrific job at structuring his argument around the 'product-to-feature' angle.<p>What I don't agree with necessarily is the framing that Google's success is fait accompli. One skill that Google has <i>NOT</i> established is their ability to integrate separate services such that the whole is <i>at least</i> as much as the sum of its parts. One might argue the only case where they've had success in this is AdSense. Tell me if I'm forgetting something.<p>While Google's scale and technological advance is a major plus, if you don't design these integrated products cleverly enough, you end up with a bloated, confusing, nebulous morass that people can't grasp as easily as they would independent services. I'm sure Page is aware of this, but the devil is in the execution, and again, the precedent so far is not encouraging. It'll be intriguing to see how well they do this in 2012.

I can't see a future where the majority of people (knowingly) opt in to having their personally identifiable web histories stored and analyzed by anonymous nerds. Sure, that's happening already if one has a facebook account, and the battle's already over and lost there, but a lot of friends, more than I have on facebook, avoid social networks for that very reason.<p>That said, it seems like google's focus is now desperate imitation of anything remotely successful on the social web with subsequent bundling of the winners into one uber-product within google+. And it would be a real shame if this is as good as it gets. Is it?

This reminds me of this article: <a href="http://hubski.com/pub?id=2069" rel="nofollow">http://hubski.com/pub?id=2069</a><p>I think it's an interesting argument. Google+ might be Google's biggest success, and also sew the seeds of their downfall. Now that G+ is spreading into Gmail, there is no going back.

When I heard "center all their products around one product" I first thought of Gmail.<p>I'm not sure if I'm alone on this, but Gmail is by far the most critical part of my Google experience.

They center their products around ads, because that is where the profit margin is. Google is just unique in that it does a lot of externally tangential web services that on the outside don't make direct income but really keep the google brand going and strong. They are pretty much the only company to realize they can have a separation between what makes money and what makes customers.

No, the author missed it completely. Google's business is massively threatened in many different dimensions. Google is in a desperate fight to save their business, and the Google+ product is entirely a defensive reaction to the threat imposed by social networks, targeted searches (Yelp) and non-web searching (Siri) and information discovery. I do not forsee a future where people perform searches by going to www.google.com. A conventional search engine is going to look quaint in the coming years and that's bad if you make 97% of your revenue from something that has or will peak.