I was flipping through an old issue of Wired magazine recently—October 2011—and one article immediately caught my eye:
Inside Google+
After waves of failure and false starts, the search giant has finally launched a social network that doesn’t suck.
After my initial guffaws subsided, I forged ahead. I found this exchange particularly rich:
Wired: Now that Google+ has been so well received, do you feel the company has debunked the charge that it doesn’t understand social networking?
Bradley Horowitz (VP of Products): Yes. I think that was never true.
Reading that in 2026, it’s hard not to smile.
Google+ is now remembered as one of Google’s biggest product failures, lasting only a few years before being shut down. Yet when it launched, many people genuinely believed Google had finally figured social networking out.
That wasn’t an unreasonable conclusion.
It was also wrong.
Why Everyone Believed
Looking back, it’s easy to laugh at Google+.
At the time, however, Google seemed almost uniquely positioned to succeed.
The company had the world’s dominant search engine. Gmail was exploding in popularity. Android was becoming the leading mobile operating system. YouTube belonged to Google. Chrome was rapidly gaining market share.
If any company had the talent, infrastructure, and financial resources to build a successful social network, surely it was Google.
Google+ wasn’t even a bad product.
Many people liked its interface. Circles provided an elegant way to organize contacts. Video Hangouts were genuinely ahead of their time.
The technology wasn’t the problem.
Social Networks Aren’t Just Software
That’s the lesson many people—including technology journalists—missed. They assumed that building a better social network would naturally lead to a successful social network. But social networks don’t behave like ordinary software. People don’t choose them the way they choose a word processor or a web browser. They choose them because their friends are already there.
Because that’s where conversations happen.
Because communities form habits, and habits are remarkably difficult to change.
Engineers often think in terms of features. But people think in terms of relationships.
Those aren’t the same thing.
The Lesson Still Matters
One reason that old Wired article caught my attention is that people continue making the same mistake.
Today, we often evaluate technology by asking which company has the smartest engineers, the biggest models, the most impressive benchmarks, or the largest amount of funding.
Those things certainly matter. But history suggests they aren’t enough.
Google had extraordinary engineers.
It had extraordinary resources.
It had extraordinary reach.
None of those guaranteed success.
Technology is full of products that were technically excellent but failed because they underestimated the complexity of human behavior.
The Hardest Problems Aren’t Technical
One of the recurring themes on this blog is that technology is often the easy part.
Human beings are the difficult part.
Whether we’re talking about artificial intelligence, social media, or space exploration, the biggest obstacles frequently aren’t engineering challenges. They’re questions of psychology, culture, trust, incentives, and behavior.
Those are problems that can’t simply be solved with more computing power or a larger budget.
They’re systems problems.
And systems involving people are notoriously difficult to predict.
Looking Back
Reading that Wired headline today isn’t amusing because the magazine got it wrong. It’s amusing because almost everyone got it wrong. The assumption was simple: Google had finally built a good social network, so success would naturally follow.
Fifteen years later, Google+ reminds us of a lesson the technology industry seems destined to relearn every decade.
Building a better product is not the same thing as building something people will make part of their lives.
Jayson L. Adams is a technology entrepreneur, artist, and the award-winning author of The Quantum Mirror, Ares, and Infernum.
His novels blend high-stakes science fiction, psychological tension, and character-driven suspense. Explore the books at www.jaysonadams.com.