Google plus was launched without any market research. It was waste of money from the beginning. I am sure some Boss in Google thought “I am gonna launch this thing. I dont care about the money. I want to make Google Plus great”.
Decline of Orkut and Stupidity of Closing It
Orkut was popular due to absence of a good competitor. The popularity of Orkut declined exponentially when Facebook entered the market. People in Google who ran Orkut decided to stop Orkut service. That was the stupidest mistake ever.
Orkut could have been upgraded by changing designs and bring in more effective sharing mechanisms. Instead they thought to bring a new system called Google Plus. I mean the users had no option to change Orkut to Facebook. Facebook was better, bigger and faster.
Google Plus Overtaking Blogspot
They launched the business but was unable to get customers. Google plus team tried to overtake the blogging space as well. They brought comment system for blogs because no one was using their system. Then they bought Authorship Snippet Profile for blogger and made it mandatory. Many of the bloggers with common sense predicted the closure of Google plus.
They brought share buttons, Author profile box, follow button, login button and many more. They were trying to copy the Facebook model. This was another huge failure. Imposing buttons on website admins and bloggers were useless. No was was using them as there were no active users in it.
Bye Bye Google Plus
Google was adamant enough to pursue it for long, wasting significant resources and money. As time grew more, Google had to shut it. What I have heard, even the Google Plus employees were using Facebook for social networking. How sad is that!!
What has happened now? Google is reverting back all changes and leaving a significant amount of branding with them. They accepted the failure and users do not even miss Google plus. That is the saddest thing that can happen to a product.
