Comment by skinkestek
10 months ago
Picasa could have had the same promising future as Sketchup.
For Google+ I cannot say, but what I know is that even if the launch, the initial iterations and the leadership was bad, destroying the thing just as people starting to settle in might make sense in a short sighted way but it destroyed any chance google had to be trusted in the next decade. Just watch how people openly discussed here and elsewhere from time to time if GCP will continue to exist.
It also probably destroyed any chance google had to capture a significant chunk of social media and as time passes I think this is a good thing.
Same goes for search. People have complained for years, but the quality keeps declining. And I am starting to think this is a great thing since we now see more promising search engines that wouldn't have had a chance against 2012 Google Search.
"Picasa could have had the same promising future as Sketchup."
Depends what you mean. if you mean should have been spun out - it was a day and age that Google was still too young and immature to do that sort of thing, so yeah, no idea what would have happened.
If you mean it would have won or stayed viable - I dunno. Personally - i doubt it. Desktop apps were dying, and things like photo features were being moved into the basic OS distribution. Maybe it would have survived long enough to be killed by Apple Photos, or some halfway-lightroom product Adobe would have launched if Picasa stayed popular, but I doubt it - i think it would have died before then. But the vast majority of photos aren't on desktop anymore, and it's hard to see how picasa would have survived, even with picasa web.
But right or wrong, I also think killing it was within the range of reasonable product decisions to make.
As for G+, I don't actually disagree with that view. Google, like lots of tech companies, had (and still has, though they are better than they used to be!) a lot of trouble understanding the social aspects of products and trust. They want things to win becuase they are technically good, or because they are cool, or ...
Even when Larry spent time pushing on trying to improve user trust, by being careful about what and how things were shut down, it was pretty clear they overall didn't get how humans work.
The bad news, though, is i think this is pretty common in tech companies - while some do in fact get it, i think they are pretty few and far between :(