Create a social network or risk everything.

That was the original pitch for Google's Facebook rival, Google+, a refrain hammered over and over by the social network's chief architect, Vic Gundotra, in meetings with the company's top brass.

Gundotra, described by colleagues we spoke with as charismatic and politically-savvy, eventually persuaded Larry Page, the Google cofounder who returned as CEO at the beginning of 2011 after a decade behind the scenes, to turn the company upside down for this cause.


Vic was just this constant bug in Larry's ear: 'Facebook is going to kill us. Facebook is going to kill us,'" says a former Google executive.

"Vic was just this constant bug in Larry's ear: 'Facebook is going to kill us. Facebook is going to kill us,'" says a former Google executive. "I am pretty sure Vic managed to frighten Larry into action. And voila: Google+ was born."

It was 2010 and Google didn't exactly look like a company at risk of being overtaken by anyone or anything. It had long since dominated online search and was quickly becoming a major player in the smartphone era thanks to Android. Google had mapped much of the world, indexed millions of books and was just getting started on building self-driving cars.

For all that success, the Internet giant just couldn't seem to figure out social. A simple Google search reveals the long list of failures and false starts: Orkut, launched days before Facebook in 2004 and quickly overtaken; Reader, a cult favorite RSS feed launched in 2005 and killed in 2013; Wave, its head-scratching communication platform; and, of course, Buzz, that ill-fated social network built on the back of Gmail which imploded fast in early 2010 after a catastrophic privacy issue.



As Google stumbled and failed and stumbled again, Facebook grew larger and more influential. By 2010, Facebook was privately valued at $14 billion and approaching 500 million users — accounts with real names, birthdays, photos, a network of connections and vibrant news feeds. Google was far larger, with a market capitalization of around $200 billion, but missing much of this data. Worse still: Facebook was poaching more and more Google employees.

"There was a bit of a fallout from Google Buzz — how did we get it so wrong and what do we do now? Facebook is still this existential threat," says Paul Adams, a former member of the Google+ user experience team who helped inspire the idea for Circles and later went to work for Facebook.
The rise and fall of Google+

Google's effort to build a social network to rival Facebook began with a bold, company-wide yell. Now Google appears to be winding down Google+ with barely a whimper.

This week, four years and one month after launching Google+ with the stated mission to "fix" online sharing, Google announced it would eliminate a much-criticized requirement to use a Google+ account when signing on to other Google services like YouTube. The move is the clearest indication yet that Google is ditching its playbook of trying to push everyone in the world use its social network.

Google earlier this year began to spin out the service's most popular features, like Photos and Hangouts. What's left is being re-worked (or pivoted, as Google+ chief Bradley Horowitz said in his latest blog post) to find a salvageable kernel of a social experience that might still be built up to appeal to a large audience. Google+ launched with big aspirations but no well-defined purpose for users; now, very belatedly, Google is trying find some purpose for the social network as those aspirations shrink.

Google+ has become a favorite punchline in the technology industry, but the objective was deadly serious. Interviews with more than a dozen Google insiders and analysts in recent months, many speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, paint the Google of 2010-2011 as increasingly fearful of Facebook snatching away users, employees and advertisers. Google tried to mobilize itself quickly, but approached the task with all the clumsiness of a giant trying to dance with a younger, nimble startup.



Google launched Plus without a clear plan to differentiate the service from Facebook. It bet on a charismatic leader with a flawed vision, ignored troubling indications about the social network's traction (or lack thereof) with users and continued throwing features at the wall long after many had written Google+ off for dead.

The slow demise of Google+ sheds light on how a large technology company tries and often fails to innovate when it feels threatened. The Google+ project did lead to inventive new services and created a more cohesive user identity that continues to benefit Google, but the social network itself never truly beat back existing rivals. Facebook is now larger than ever, with 1.4 billion users and a market capitalization more than half of Google's. It continues to poach Google employees. Facebook and Twitter are also slowly chipping away at Google's dominance in display ad revenue.

"Google+ built a seamless identity and a social graph that rolled out to all Google products so they could log on using the same identity," says Punit Soni, a former Google product manager who worked on Plus and is now chief product officer at Flipkart. Finally, Soni says, "Google knew who you were."

"What it could not do is give Google another destination to consume stuff," he adds. That's where Facebook continues to win.

Kent Walker, Google's general counsel, was even more candid in his remarks about Google+ during a meeting with business leaders and antitrust regulators in Germany this March. He referred to the social network as part of a "painfully long list of unsuccessful Google products."
The 100-day march

The massive Google+ launch effort had all the hallmarks of a technology corporation: a code name ("Emerald Sea", an artificial timeline (100 days to launch!), a dedicated secret building (with the CEO relocated there) and a full PR blitz once completed.

“We’re transforming Google itself into a social destination at a level and scale that we’ve never attempted — orders of magnitude more investment, in terms of people, than any previous project,” Gundotra told Wired in a 2011 interview to promote the launch of Google+.

Gundotra did not respond to multiple email requests for comment. Google declined to comment for this story beyond the blog posts put out on Monday.

"It was absolute madness," one former Google+ employee says of the speed and "intensity" of the work during the crucial early months. "The best way to succeed in Vic's ecosystem is to be speedy. He has a bias for action. He may need to do more work on strategy."



For those elsewhere in the company, Google's approach to Plus represented a radical departure. Most Google projects started small and grew organically in scale and importance. Buzz, the immediate predecessor to Plus, had barely a dozen people on staff. Plus, by comparison, had upwards of 1,000, sucked up from divisions across the .....

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