The Failure of Google+ Is Just One Example of Google's Last Five Years of Internet Products

Can you name a successful new Google product from the past five years?

After four years of effort, Google+ has failed anyway.

This week Bradley Horowitz, a Google vice president, announced that the social network Google+ will be split into two services: Photos, a cloud photo service, and Stream, a news feed. In a short post on Google+, Horowitz never once mentioned the name "Google+."

Meanwhile Sundar Pichai, the senior vice president who in practice runs Google's products, said in an interview at Mobile World Congress that Hangouts, the communication tool inside Google+, will be pulled out and run on its own as an instant messaging service.

The split, the renaming and the sudden departure last year of Vic Gundotra, who started the project, cannot hide the fact that Google+ has been pushed to the margins.

Google+ did not start until June 2011. By then Facebook was already preparing to go public, and Twitter users were sending 140 million tweets a day. Over the next two years Google poured existing resources into it: it made Google+ the first service in the sign-in bar at the top of every Google site; it added blood-red notifications; it folded in the photo service Picasa and the instant messaging tool GTalk. Google CEO Larry Page did everything he could to push the search giant into the age of social networking.

Here is the result. The services around Google+ are being spun off as separate projects, while the social service itself is set aside. Photos, which spread through Android, has become the most valuable relic of the whole social network. Hangouts, built by merging several messaging services, now stands on its own. And Streams, supposedly the core social feature, still has no clear new direction.

Google+ is not Google's only failed social product. Google Wave, a personal communication and collaboration tool, opened to the public only in May 2010 and was handed to Apache to maintain by the end of that year. Google Buzz, an email-based social tool launched in February 2010, lasted less than two years before it was shut down at the end of 2011.

Look back and you will see that the decline of Google+ is just one example of what has happened to Google's mass-market products in recent years. The Google internet services everyone knows today, such as Search, Gmail, Chrome, Maps and Translate, were nearly all born before 2010. Of the mass-market products Google has launched in the past five years, how many do you remember?

TV: From Google TV to Android TV, Even the Name Has Changed More Than Once

The Logitech Revue, launched in 2010, ran the first-generation Google TV

Google's push into television has had many twists: the complicated, hard-to-use Google TV; the dead-simple, cheap and best-selling Chromecast; and, last year, Android TV, which stresses simplicity and syncing across screens.

First came the failed first-generation Google TV. In 2010 Google launched Google TV in the United States and, with great fanfare, signed up Sony, Intel and Logitech as partners. The arrangement resembled Google's deals with phone makers: the manufacturers supplied the hardware, and Google supplied the operating system and brought in the content.

But soon after launch, several American TV networks and internet video services blocked Google TV. NBC, ABC, Fox, CBS and Hulu all refused to supply Google with content.

Google TV was designed from the start for a small, geeky audience. Many Google TV devices even came with a keyboard, so users worked the TV screen as they would a computer. The New York Times' verdict on the first generation was that Google TV might interest tech enthusiasts, but it was not made for ordinary users.

Because it used an Intel processor, the first-generation Google TV was essentially a small computer, and it often cost several hundred dollars.

The second-generation Google TV, launched by Hisense in 2012, looks more like today's set-top boxes

After Google TV failed, Google launched Chromecast in 2013, a US$35 TV stick that sold very well from the start. Chromecast sends content from a phone or tablet to a TV screen through an HDMI port. A year after launch, it had been used more than 400 million times.

Chromecast is only the size of a USB flash drive

In 2014 Google TV came back under a new name: Android TV. Having learned that Google TV failed because it was too complicated and too geeky, Google simplified both the Android TV interface and its developer tools, and promised to update the TV version on the same schedule as Android itself.

After four years, Google's TV effort has gone full circle and is back where it started, competing once again with Apple TV.

Google Does Everything Twice, and Mobile Payments Are No Exception

Google launched its own mobile payment app, Google Wallet, as early as 2011. For three years of groundwork it did only lukewarm business, and it drew attention only when Apple Pay arrived and gave it a tailwind. Before Apple Pay launched last September, Google Wallet had only about 16 million active users, according to an estimate cited by The Guardian. Around November, Google Wallet's transaction volume suddenly rose 50%, and its user count doubled.

But Google Wallet's reputation is poor. Fully 20% of its reviews on the Play store are one- and two-star complaints: "This is not a mature product," "Can't see my bills," "Freezes."

As for what Pichai called "old wine in new bottles" in mobile payments: at Google I/O this May, Google will finally release Android Pay, a payment interface for the whole Android system and a technology that competes with Apple Pay at the platform level.

But like every unified feature Google has tried to roll out across Android, Android Pay faces built-in obstacles. Few people run the newest version of Android (Lollipop, released a year ago, is on only 1.6% of devices), and makers of low- and mid-range smartphones may not bother installing NFC chips. By contrast, three months after Apple Pay launched, by the end of last year, it already accounted for 1.6% of transactions at the five largest US retailers, a decent start for a new service.

Google Glass, a Consumer AR Device for the "Post-Smartphone Era": The First Generation Failed

Google Glass was meant to be a new kind of consumer product for the "post-smartphone era." But because of privacy concerns, legislation and its limited uses, the plan to sell it to consumers has been halted.

In 2012, when Google Glass was unveiled, it was the darling of the fashion and tech worlds; Google co-founder Sergey Brin even wore it down the runway at New York Fashion Week. In 2013, soon after the developer edition shipped, the craze cooled, and public places in Seattle, the UK and elsewhere began banning the device, saying it invaded people's privacy. In 2014 Google Glass became a byword for privacy invasion and a target of ridicule; one wearer was attacked in San Francisco, and mockery spread faster than positive coverage. Over those three years Google Glass rode a roller coaster straight down.

Today, unless you are a partner in Glass for Work (a Google program that puts smart glasses to professional use), you can no longer buy Google Glass as an ordinary consumer. With the Explorer program ended, the Glass team has also been declared a graduate of Google X, the company's secretive lab. It will now report to Tony Fadell, head of the smart home division, and keep developing future versions.

Shopping: Just Getting Started

Google Shopping is a shopping guide built on the search engine. Like other Google products, it has taken many forms: Google Product Search, Google Product, Froogle.

Google Shopping offers price comparison and lets users click through to a merchant's site to place an order. Late in 2012 the service was renamed Google Shopping, and its business model changed: merchants now pay Google to have their products listed in search results. The service is available only in selected countries (it has since withdrawn from China).

To push Google Shopping forward, in 2013 Google shut down its other comparison services and focused on Google Shopping. The same year it paid US$125 million for Channel Intelligence (CI), which provides marketing and commerce services to other companies and online retailers.

"In fact, our biggest search competitor is Amazon. People don't think of Amazon as search, but if you are looking for something to buy, you are more often than not looking for it on Amazon," Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said in a speech in Dublin on October 13 last year.

At the end of 2014 Google shortened the Shopping checkout, letting users order straight from the search page instead of going to the merchant's site. But Google still stays out of delivery, warehousing and the like, and people have not formed the habit of shopping through a search engine. Google Shopping is still some way from taking on the e-commerce companies.

Google Play's Media Services: Er, Have You Heard of Them?

Google wants a share of every kind of product. In 2013 it bought Songza, a music recommendation service, and set up a streaming music service called All Access inside its app store, Play, aimed squarely at rivals such as Spotify. Yet the service has made no impression at all.

In November 2014, Zahavah Levine, head of Google Music, vaguely disclosed some figures for the service, and it still appears to be spending more than it earns: "30 million songs have been played, bringing the music industry several million dollars in revenue a year." Google, by contrast, has already spent US$2 billion on music rights, and will have to keep burning cash.

Instant Messaging: Several Apps Melted Into One Hangouts

Google's instant messaging products used to be scattered across different places:

• Google Talk, the chat app built into Gmail and the Google service closest to QQ and MSN;
• Google+ Hangouts, a multi-person video calling service sold on being free;
• Google+ Messenger, the private messaging service built into the Google+ social network.

For three years Google kept all three services running side by side. Not until Google I/O in June 2013 did it unify them under the name Hangouts.

In April 2014, answering user demand, Google merged its text messaging service, SMS for Hangouts, into Hangouts. Android users no longer had to switch between two apps.

Commercially, though, Hangouts has struggled. Helpouts, a paid service launched in August 2013, will close this April. Google has proved once again that it is good at launching tools, not at running a community. In 2014 it turned to enterprise customers, unbundling Hangouts from Google+ and folding it into Google Apps.

Google Now, Seen as the Most Successful Voice Assistant of Recent Years

Google Now is seen as one of the more successful internet products Google has made in recent years. It is regarded as Google's answer to Apple's voice assistant Siri, although the predictive search Google Now attempts is much harder than what Siri does.

Google Now debuted at Google I/O in 2012 as one of the headline features of Android 4.1. It works like a socket that one service after another plugs into. That October it added Gmail cards, which show information from a user's Gmail account, including flight details, package tracking, hotel bookings and restaurant reservations. A year later it came to the desktop, in Chrome and Chrome OS. It also began linking up with the smart home platform Nest, and is considered the killer app on Android Wear smartwatches.

Most recently, Google Now has added cards from more than 30 third-party app developers.

Beyond that, it is adding support for more languages, car rental services and so on.

Nest and Smart Hardware: Just Getting Started

Google came late to the smart home. Samsung had already formed its Smart Home alliance by the time Google built a smart home system of its own by buying Nest.

Google acquired Nest in January 2014. The company was founded in 2010 by Tony Fadell, a former Apple employee known as the father of the iPod, and Matt Rogers.

So far Nest has designed only two products: a thermostat and a smoke alarm. A third product, Dropcam, came from an acquisition. Nest has made two acquisitions: Dropcam last June, and last December Revolv, a central control system for the smart home.

Nest is the whole of Google's investment in the smart home. Integrating Google's smart home efforts and building a system have both been handed to Nest CEO Tony Fadell. Fadell's strategy is to do a few core Nest products well while working with other manufacturers to bring new kinds of smart home devices onto the Nest platform.

In January this year Nest announced that its "Works with Nest" program was adding products from 15 new partners, including the August smart lock, LG appliances, Philips Hue bulbs and the Withings sleep system. "Works with Nest" now has 31 partner brands in all.

As we can see, apart from the newly launched Nest smart home platform and the relatively niche Google Now, none of the internet services Google has released recently has made much of a splash.

Compare the services Google launched in its first 15 years, which kept redefining what "free" meant: Gmail in 2004; Google Maps and Reader in 2005; Calendar, Translate and Docs in 2006; Android in 2007; the Chrome browser in 2008. For all its imaginative bets on the future, such as balloons and self-driving cars, Google still needs new services that give users what they want. The products of the past five years are not a good sign.