Google+ to become more a platform than product, with key staff members moving to Android team, and fewer product integrations
Google+ Is Walking Dead — Today, Google's Vic Gundotra announced that he would be leaving the company after eight years. The first obvious question …
Context & Ripple Effects
Vic Gundotra's exit, confirmed the same day as this report (his departure after eight years running Google+), is the visible end of a build-out that began in 2011 when Google made the social network central to nearly every product. The repositioning now underway — fewer forced integrations, more of a platform layer — echoes Google's earlier consolidation wave, when it shuttered Knol, Friend Connect, and Wave rather than prop up underperforming properties.
The story travelled unusually widely for an internal reorg: Marketing Land, VentureBeat, Ars Technica, BGR and at least four other outlets picked it up within a day, reflecting how much of Google's identity had been staked on the social push. The confirmed move of key Google+ staff onto the Android team signals where Google thinks its social energy belongs.
First-order effects
- David Besbris takes over Google+ with a mandate stripped down from Gundotra's: fewer integrations across Search, YouTube and other products, and a team whose senior members are being reassigned to Android.
Second-order effects
- Developers and partners who built around mandatory Google+ hooks — sign-in, comments, authorship — face a loosening of requirements they were compelled to adopt, shifting the cost-benefit of those integrations.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Google's social ambitions settle into being infrastructure attached to high-traffic products like Android rather than a standalone network competing head-on with Facebook — a repeatable cycle of build-mandate-retrench that shapes how developers weight any future Google platform bet.
The trend: Google is unwinding its era of compulsory social integration, folding social features into the platforms users already choose rather than a network they were required to join.