Google, The One Trick Unicorn.

A lot of people like having the discussion of picturing Google as this evil, all seeing dystopian future type conglomerate.
While Google does all but admitting to be one (A monopoly with more power than politicians, buying AI and robotic companies, creating self driving cars etc.), it's still a bit far from reality.

So let's take a step back, and see what Google is. It's the biggest ad tech company in the world. Google makes money from pushing ads.

Not a content company. Not a hardware/ space/ AI company. Not a social network, email provider. Not a hosting company.

A huge ad company.

How big is it?
It's about as big as Microsoft in terms of market capacity, but earns 44% less. And Microsoft does a lot more business than just ads.
Google is almost twice as big as Facebook, but Facebook is leaner and growing like mad these days - And video monetising is yet to come.

But the biggest fear of Google, being a one trick unicorn (I refuse to call Google a pony), is being disrupted. Because people are aching to disrupt them.

So Google is not just trying to take over the world. It MUST do that in order to survive. It needs another meaningful business. Something that IBM, Apple, Microsoft and other tech giants which are here to stay have done.

Facebook stabs spam

The war on spam has failed. Though email providers like Google and Microsoft get a relatively good spam detection rate, there will never be a 100% success rate. And these guys are getting smarter.
Even Facebook were not left out, and many people get spam sent to them (check your 'other' message box...)
Well now Facebook are making a stand against spam, by charging 1$ per message to someone you don't know.
I think that's actually nice.

What to do with Google plus...

I stumbled onto a recent article in techcrunch, saying that Google+ is stopping new acquisitions into its product. Could it be the beginning of the end?
Google+ is actually a cool product. Looks great, has improved a lot over its 15 month life, but still doesn't seem to move people away from Facebook.
Maybe functionality and cool mobile UX is not enough? Though Facebook's UX sucks, both in website and especially mobile, what good is it if you can't find pictures of your girlfriend's friend wearing a thong in Thailand?
It's like Google has created the coolest theme park, but no one showed up, and those who came to the premiere out of curiosity, didn't come back. One of the main failures during the launch was the fact that I was unable to import all my Facebook connections in one click. That meant I had to start building my whole network from scratch - Why the hell would I wanna do that? (Or, even worse, build the network from my gmail, which had irrelevant connections, family and a lot of spam suggestions).
Another big reason might be because g+ is all dudes. That's actually a great article, saying that G+ was designed by, and for, Googlers, and Facebook was designed by, and for, college students (Looking to score...).

Now tell me, for real - Which network would you prefer?

Short update:
gmail just added hangouts to its chat dialog. Once again (Like in the good ol' buzz days), + is coming through the back door. Considering that gmail has ~400 million users, Google might already HAVE a social network. Sort of.