As someone who thought Google+ doomed facebook, because of Gmail accounts and everyone with Google as their homepage already, I learned not to overestimate Google’s abilities.
FB is what it is because of advertising revenue. Google already had a giant advertising business where jettisoning Google+ made no difference to their bottom line.
1. Google had recently exploited their home page to push chrome browser successfully altering the browser market. They pushed anyone visiting Google to chrome with a popup on the home page. The same opportunity was there for G+, but with updates from friends.
2. Everyone already had a Google account and many millennials were using Google Talk at the time. It appeared Google could undermine the network effects.
3. The UI of G+ appeared better
4. Facebook had released the newsfeed otherwise known as ‘stalker mode’ at the time and people recoiled at the idea of broadcasting their every action to every acquaintance. The circles idea was a way of providing both privacy and the ability to broadcast widely when needed.
5. Google had tons of money and devoted their world class highly paid genius employees to building a social network.
You can see parallels to each of these in AI now. Their pre existing index of all the world’s information, their existing search engine that you can easily pop an LLM in, the huge lead in cash, etc. They are in a great position but don’t underestimate their ability to waste it.
Google definitely benefited from being able to push Chrome on the homepage, but it was also a bit of a layup given every other browser completely sucked at the time. Chrome said that browsing the Internet didn't have to be slow and caught MS+Mozilla with their pants down. Safari is still working on pulling theirs back up.
> Safari is still working on pulling theirs back up.
not sure about this take, given that chrome‘s rendering engine was famously based on Safari‘s - WebKit - before they forked it (Blink). V8 was indeed faster than Safari‘s JS engine at the time. However, today, Safari is objectively faster in both rendering (WK) and JS performance (JSCore).
They caught up in performance but failed at what Apple was historically good at, vertical integration. Safari still sucks, and nobody talks about it because nobody uses it.
I'm with you on this. I've been an early paid Antigravity IDE user. Their recent silent rug pull on quotas, where without any warning you get rate-limited for 5 days in the middle of code refactoring, enrages users, not simply making them unsatisfied with the product. It actually makes you hate the evil company.
So is Gemini tbh. It's the only agent I've used that gets itself stuck in ridiculous loops repeating "ok. I'm done. I'm ready to commit the changes. There are no bugs. I'm done."
Google somehow manages to fumble the easiest layups. I think Anthropic et al have a real chance here.
Google's product management and discipline are absolute horsesh*t. But they have a moat and its extreme technical competence. They own their infra from the hardware (custom ASICs, their own data centers, global intranet, etc.) all the way up to the models and product platforms to deploy it in. To the extent that making LLMs work to solve real world problems is a technical problem, landing Gemini is absolutely in Google's wheelhouse.
You are stating generalities when more specific information is easily available.
Google has AI infrastructure that it has created itself as well as competitive models, demonstrating technical competence in not-legacy-at-all areas, plus a track record of technical excellence in many areas both practical and research-heavy. So yes, technical competence is definitely an advantage for Google.
Just imagine how things change when Google realizes they can leverage their technical competenence to have Gemini build competent product management (or at least something that passes as comparatively competent since their bar is so low).
I use Claude every day. I cannot get Gemini to do anything useful, at all. Every time I've tried to use it, it has just failed to do what was required.
Three subthreads up you have someone saying gemini did what claude couldn't for them on some 14 year old legacy code issue. Seems you can't really use peoples prior success with their problem as an estimate of what your success will be like with your problem and a tool.
People and benchmarks are using pretty specific, narrow tests to judge the quality of LLMs. People have biases, benchmarks get gamed. In my own experience, Gemini seems to be lazy and scatter-brained compared to Claude, but shows higher general-purpose reasoning abilities. Anthropic is also obviously massively focusing on making their models good at coding.
So it is reasonable that Claude might show significantly better coding ability for most tasks, but the better general reasoning ability proves useful in coding tasks that are complicated and obscure.
Hard to bet against Hassabis + Google's resources. This is in their wheelhouse, and it's eating their search business and refactoring their cloud business. G+ seemed like a way to get more people to Google for login and tracking.
Thats pretty telling that on the search's / ad placement on the web where it matters, OAI has had no impact or its muted and offset by continued market power / increased demand for Google's ad-space on the web.
A couple months ago things were different. Try their stronger models. Gemini recently saved me from a needle in a haystack problem with buildpacks and Linux dependencies for a 14-year-old B2B SaaS app that I was solving a major problem for, and Gemini figured out the solution quickly after I worked on it for hours with Claude Code. I know it's just one story where Gemini won, and I have really enjoyed using Claude Code, but Google is having some success with the serious effort they're putting into this fight.
They recently replaced “define: word” (or “word meaning”) results with an “ai summary” and it’s decidedly worse. It used to just give you the definition(s) and synonyms for each one. Now it gives some rambling paragraphs.
My google gives me the data from oup for word meaning, and doesn't show any AI. It opens up the translator for word meaning language. It is really fast and convenient.
I think they had no choice but to release that AI before it was ready for prime time. Their search traffic started dropping after ChatGPT came out, and they risked not looking like a serious player in AI.
I thought it was a far superior UI to facebook when it launched. I tried to use it but the gravity of the network effect was too strong on facebook's side.
In the end I'd rather if both had failed. Although one can argue that they actually did. But that's another story.
I very much wanted Google Plus to succeed. Circles was a great idea in my opinion. Google Plus profiles could be the personal home page for the rest of us but of course, Google being Google...
That being said, tying bonuses for the whole company on the success of Google+ was too much even for me.
Everything was obviously DOA after it dies. I also thought it wouldn't last but it wouldn't be the first or last tech company initiative that lived on long after people thought it would die. Weird things happen. "Obviously" isn't a good filter.
It was a little different. Facebook was eventually (after harvard only) wide open for college email holders so it wasn't some exclusive club that kept people you want to be in their out. It kept your parents out though and your lame younger sibling. You could immediately use it with your friends. No invite nonsense like with g+.
