Paul Adams and Google’s Engineering Culture
In spite of Google+’s relative success, there is still a good deal of negativity about Google and social. Many people claim Google can’t understand social because they are engineers, I think most of them work at GigaOM.
Paul Adams, former Google employee, creator of the circles concept and current Facebook employee, wrote that Google has a culture that makes it difficult for non-engineers to get anything accomplished. I can get why an ex-Google employee on his way to Facebook would have something to say about Google. To this day Google is still blocking Adams from publishing his book.
My intention isn’t to bash Adams; I have no idea what it’s like to work at Facebook or Google. The point is that for the myriad of people that claim Google doesn’t get social, is too rigid, too stuck on search, and dominated by engineers, Google has created a fairly remarkable product.
Engineering may be the answer to the social problem after all.
Why Google has made the best social product yet
Engineers are accustomed to looking at a problem head on and then seeking to solve the problem in the most efficient manner possible. Engineers are calculated, analytical and make decisions based upon data rather than emotion. Engineers, in short, are problem solvers.
I may not know the process by which Google+ was created, but my guess is that a few simple Google searches, Twitter searches, perhaps even a few Facebook searches turned up a myriad of results (data) about what people didn’t like about existing solutions, primarily Facebook. From then it was just laying in the various pieces that have become hallmark traits of other social networks: a news feed, connections, buttons for the web, etc.
It doesn’t take an engineer or a rocket scientist to know that many people hate seeing those stupid Farmville posts in their Facebook stream. You don’t have to graduate Harvard with top honors to know that individuals have a multitude of different groups of people in their lives, individuals that may fall outside the singular classification of “friends.” And it isn’t the result of “building a smarter planet” and using a pentaflop computer to see people have concerns about privacy on social networks.
Google made a product that took the limitations of existing products, plugged the leaks and engineered a better product.
Google is far smarter than people give them credit for
This video, created by Epipheo, explains it quite well. Continue reading once you’ve watched the video.
Both companies want to keep people using their service. Google wants more Google searches to serve up ads. Facebook wants people to spend more time on site to serve more ads.
Google started in search, something Facebook is simply terrible at. They made money through ads, better than anyone else. Then they continued to add other products, from email, documents and rss to mobile phones, a web browser…and then added a social network to tie it all together.
Why is that brilliant?
Because Google needs only to pull people from Facebook to Google+ to fully own the web.
Facebook needs to pull people from all of Google’s services over to Facebook. The most difficult of which is pulling people from Google to Bing in order to take advantage of Facebook’s search integration.
While Facebook has been building everything out from the social network. Google has built everything else first and now ties it all together with Google+. It also doesn’t hurt that Google Chrome and Android are both on the rise.
Facebook isn’t social and neither is Google
Both companies are built by computer scientists, programmers, engineers and geeks. Look at Mark Zuckerberg and tell me THAT guy really “gets” social. Both companies have their motives. So let’s cut out all this nonsense about how Google doesn’t get social because they are engineers.
The social side of these social sites aren’t the sites themselves…it’s us, it’s how we use them.
I think Google built a better product BECAUSE they are engineers. All of the data, that we created, supported the features now available in Google Plus.
So someone tell me again why engineers can’t do social?