Just a datapoint, but out of all the invitations I sent out when G+ first launched (100-150, I don't recall), 40 or 50 friends signed up. ~3 of them still use it at least once a week.
From my observations, G+ still seems to consist primarily of three major user groups:
1. Tech celebrities
2. Technologists in general
3. Non-US users
Facebook's feature set is killer, but at some point, I really would like to use some social software that doesn't silently launch a blinking GPS signal when I'm reading my news feed (I know, I can disable it, but still...).
How do they define 'user', for Google+? Facebook's metric is 'active users' which I believe are people who have visited the site during the past 30 days.
If Google+'s definition of 'user' is simply someone who has registered for a Google+ profile, then they are overcounting enormously.
My feeling is that they are indeed disingenuously overcounting, in the same way they do with Android, where they talk about the number of 'activations' rather than device sales.
In the case of android, Google doesn't even have relationships with every carrier that sells android phones so 'activations' are the only metric that would actually cover everything.
why do you think that they are not using a 30-day active definition of user?
Because I know a lot of people who use Facebook, and next to none of those use Google+ (even though many registered in the beginning). This is the same for many people I know. So I'm taking a guess.
As far as I can tell the only people using Google+ are tech people.
"Cash – As of September 30, 2011, cash, cash equivalents, and short-term marketable securities were $42.6 billion."
During this quarter, Google made $302 million on interest alone. That's an impressive 11% of this quarter's net profit. I wonder what they plan to do with all that money.
Buy patents apparently :-) More seriously, I asked once about this when they were removing bottled water from the local mini-kitchens and dropping over 1 billion dollars a quarter into the bank. My question was "Gee, can't you spare a couple of million this quarter to keep the bottled water restocked?" and obviously the answer was that they could not.
But from a corporate/strategic point of view having a lot of cash on hand makes executives more aggressive and that can be a good thing for the company. Just like employee's that are too afraid to lose their job to say what they really need to say, executives who are too afraid that their next decision could doom the company won't take those risks.
Removing bottled water is not a financial decision, but an environmental one. Every new employee is given a water bottle they can fill with water an infinite number of times.
If they took away bottled water, I'm sure they replaced them with fruit juice, organic teas and all sorts of ambrosia.
I should have noted that the bottled water 'discussion' at Google was long and heated and what Googler's would call a multi-centa-thread [1]. There were folks who shared the position stated above that it was environmentally 'better' to not have bottled water in the mini-kitchens. And there were folks of a more empiricist frame of mind who analyzed data and came to an alternative conclusions. Understand the company is very data driven.
Watching it unfold was educational on so many levels.
[1] A 'Centa-thread' being an email discussion that gets to 100 replies where Gmail would fork it and start new conversation.
They replaced bottled water with a water dispenser that dispenses ambient, cold, and sparkling water. Many engineers still choose to drink ordinary water even with all the flavored options.
Bottled water is a scam. Most of the stuff comes from water hoses. I'm sure the stuff they had at google was laced with tasty minerals and went through purification processes. There is so much plastic that ends up in the ocean/street because of bottled water. Its really a shame.
Yes and no. My understanding that most bottled water is re-packaged tap water which is sold at a markup. A number of people miss the functional aspect of bottled water which is that you are going from point a to point b and you want to drink something on the way.
As it turns out, the data collected supported the hypothesis that a significant fraction of the bottled water drinkers were of this category (not drinking it because it was 'better' but drinking it because it was water convieniently packaged for transport in a single serving). The result was that removing bottled water simply lead to substitution of other beverages which were not 'water' but were convieniently packaged.
A lot of folks suggested carrying around a drinking bottle or mug so that you could refill it at various points. And, giving free water bottles to people, that did meet some of the need (not sure how widely that program was tried).
A proposed solution that was never even tried was to have Google bottle its own water on site (very eco, very doable) and stock that. This would have satisfied just about everyone except it didn't pass the 'saves money' test, which was, ultimately the basis for all of the changes.
And it is always the responsibility of management to manage their costs effectively. Generally the debate was around the true cost vs the ledger (dollars and cents) effect.
They basically proved that our benefits were their safety cushion. The water bottles were only one example. Remember when they changed the shuttles and screwed a bunch of people's schedules until the backlash forced yet another recalculation?
Oh absolutely, at some level 'quality of life' benefits always have the property that if you are in danger of not making your numbers for wallstreet you can quickly shut them down, just giving an internal measure of control over one part of the profit/loss statistics.
For the quarter, which would be over 3% for the year. Which doesn't seem to bad if your not putting your money into overly risky things. Treasury bonds may be yielding less?
You're right: The long bond is less, so what are they invested in? "Marketable securities" with 3% yield means that they have something not AAA (which probably makes sense on such a large cash hoard) but there will come a day when interest rates go up. That will cause the value of their bonds to drop substantially.
True. But consider Google's effective inflation rate. A lot of things they care about - say, Palo Alto real estate - are getting more expensive faster than 3 percent. That money is losing value. Spending on acquisitions or otherwise investing in the business should yield a far better return.
If the right acquisitions present themselves, they already do a lot and at their level there just aren't as many easy win companies to acquire. I think if I was an investor I rather them lose a little bit of opportunity on their pile of cash than say drop $10 billion onto something like groupon.
Why would this comment be downvoted? He's pointing out the interest is not all that impressive and if that's 11% of profit then the results are probably even less impressive then claimed.
An interesting meta data point here is that out of the short few sentences they chose to quote from larry page, more than 50% of it was about Google+. Even though it generates no revenue and has a tiny user base compared to the rest of Google's products.
Which is to say, whatever you think about Google+ it is undeniable that they see it as a huge strategic priority.
I know I need to just be patient and wait for Apps users to get Profiles/Plus, but I don't find it particularly sympathetic of Google when they keep saying that "everyone" can use Google+ now, even in their financial results announcements. From the CEO.
(Yes, technically anyone can use it by signing up with a free @gmail.com account, but I consider that a cop out.)
You don't need to use a gmail account. You just need to create a Google login that isn't an Apps login. You can use the same domain as your apps account - I use that, just with a slightly different username for Google+
While this is true, it's in the same class of work-around as just registering a @gmail.com account. It doesn't let an Apps user use their Apps account in a unified way, which is what I was getting at.
I don't think Google+ will ever be a Facebook killer (Is Bing a Google killer?). Google's strengths are search and advertising, but not social networking. Given that Google+ is integrated to many google products, its not going to die soon IMHO, but it will be just there for sometime (Yahoo/excite never closed after google success).
Contrary example is gmail which caused a dent in Yahoo mail and still gaining momentum. But gmail was re-inventing email access (gtalk integration), but Google+ is no way close to revolutionizing social networking.
The fact that high-schoolers couldn't join Facebook for years didn't seem to hurt it too much.
Edit: downvoted?
To quote Wikipedia:
The Web site's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. However, based on ConsumersReports.org on May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts, violating the site's terms.
Something like 20 million of their users are in India, a lot of those look like Orkut (Google) converts (edit: maybe notsomuch, add FB and look at last few years).
Their naming /branding scheme is not good. Google + sounds like an API extension or a bad programming language. Sometimes it's better to give a product a human face...beginning with a name that communicates what it is.
From my observations, G+ still seems to consist primarily of three major user groups:
Facebook's feature set is killer, but at some point, I really would like to use some social software that doesn't silently launch a blinking GPS signal when I'm reading my news feed (I know, I can disable it, but still...).