Comment by nogrammer

It may have been a nice story as viewed by some of us privacy-conscious people (I remember rooting really hard for it, and a couple of my most shy family members still use it), but it wasn't a viable strategy when trying to steal significant (>10%) market share from an incumbent, especially when the target audience was the general public.

G+ positioned itself against Facebook sort of like DuckDuckGo went against Google: we made the same product, but fixed X!!!, where X is some gripe about the incumbent's product that only a small percentage of the product's potential userbase cares about (privacy, in both of these cases).

That was (and is!) a fantastic strategy for DDG, for whom a fraction of a percent of all search traffic counts as massive, life-changing success. Google is not DDG, though. G+ would have needed a much larger share of the social networking market to be considered a win for Google, and the initial differentiation was not anywhere near clear enough to get there against a rival as strong as Facebook.

I also agree about the UI mess, and all that, of course, it was not a great product to use out of the gate.