Number of Active Users on Facebook

Section B - The executed strategy of the company as per action in the market

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Figure 1: Number of active users on Facebook

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/

Google has delivered many successful products in the past. They created best search engine, best email app with Gmail, popular smartphone operating system but when it comes to social Google still doesn’t know how to enter. Google Wave, Dodge ball, Google buzz has not been successful.

On the other side, Facebook was growing at influential rate. In 2011, it was valued at 50 billion USD and had 700+ million active users. Google saw that Facebook is consuming progressively more of users’ time. And the average minutes per visitor was increasing more rapidly for Facebook than for Google.

Google saw the disruptive potential threat of social media, particularly Facebook coming. They asked hard questions within themselves and decided to do something. Google+ was the answer to emergence of social media and disruption of Web 2.0. But Google+ can’t be just a product which is competitor to Facebook. It has to be long term strategy with its own benefit and fit to Google’s long term plan of organizing online data. This time it was personal data.

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Figure 2: Valuation of Facebook

Source: https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/tracking-facebooks-valuation/

Implementation part

Google+ was not a usual release, developed under code name – Emerald Sea. Vic Gundotra was appointed the lead of Google social efforts. He says, “They are transforming Google into social destination at a biggest level and scale which was never attempted before. An order of investment in magnitude, in terms of people was greater than any previous project executed.” Google set a target to launch this effort in 100 days. It is greed or fear which can effect change at a large organization. Fear is the powerful one.

Fourth floor of building 2000 on Google campus was the early hub of the initiative. While working on the Emerald Sea project, Google already had hundreds of millions of users, unparallel mastery of determining information and capital to acquire relevant small firms which were active in social space. Emerald project was expanded to cover 18 existing Google products. Around 30 teams were working in concert.

Google+ was the key focus of Larry Page, since he took the control after Eric Schmidt. He shifted his office near to the project and would spend nights and weekends on the product. For weeks his focus won’t drift from the product. Lot of unconventional things was done for the Emerald Project (which was not allowed for other google project). On the hundredth day, Emerald project was not yet completed. But it was making progress.

It was in October 2010, Emerald Sea was ready for in-house testing. Gundotra emailed invitation to 50 fellow Googlers to join Emerald Sea. It was overwhelming, hard to comprehend, hard to understand. The feedback was to SIMPLIFY. The Emerald Sea team got to work re-conceptualizing and streamlining. Some features were postponed to until future releases. Others – like the +1 button – were unmoored into separate products and launched separately. (Emerald Sea Acceleration Plan – The unofficial name of ESAP)

On ‎June 28, 2011, Google plus was launched and made available to public. It was result of urgent and lengthy effort of hundreds of engineers involving all the products of the company. Features of Google+ were:

• Stream: Centerpiece of news, Google social. It resembles more or less to Facebook feed feature because it has some similarities. Once you enter in Google+ two types of info flows to you. One is news. Photos, stuff shared by your friends, family, colleagues etc. Other one is Spark.

• Spark: Here users type in subjects of their personal interest. Then Google streams articles regarding that topic into your feed. These results have been different if searched on browser. It was totally new and fresh results. It signals google effort towards personalization. Google was able to leverage its search optimizing technology. Sparks would provide content which users would like to share within their circle. It was almost as if the Emerald Sea is creating an anti-Google. On the long term note, Google will try to mingle content from social and sparks into one and provide personalized content to users. With information in depth about their users, Google is capable of delivering comprehensive, tailored information to user’s need.

• Circles: This was something which was not accomplished by Facebook. When user opts for Google+. S/he can divide his/her contacts into various groups (circle). Google believed with circles they have tackled sharing problem which Facebook has failed to address.

• Hangout: Video Hangout allows user to connect for video chatting spontaneously up to 10 participants which Skype was not able at that time.

“On Facebook I overshare. On Twitter I under share. If Google hits that spot in the middle, we can revolutionize social interaction.” — Shimrit Ben-Yair, product manager in charge of the social graph. This was something Google tried to position them in social network.

Integration of Google+ into the search result

When Google+ was launched it was matter of time to integrate with google search result. They did it in different ways and it started showing as shown in the below figure. As we see +1 button was being used to share. Schmidt acknowledged you won’t see much difference in technology change but there is lot to come. After launch of Google+ within 1 year, hangouts, suggested users within the Knowledge Graph area was introduced. Biggest change appeared when Google+ for Business, Search Plus for your world was introduced.