The VP in charge of Google Plus hosted the Friday all-hands several times to get us all excited about what they were building. It was obvious to me and many others that there was no reason for people already on Facebook to switch from Facebook. Someone asked a direct question, but the VP deflected and talked about how easy it would be to group your friends with the Circles feature — which was not at all a reason to switch.It seemed like Google didn’t have the processes or experience to get the product strategy right. “Who are our potential users and what does it take to win them?” is product strategy 101. Maybe someone raised this question in an exec review, but it didn’t become a launch blocker. Google+ never took off, and was eventually shut down.

If Google didn’t start with a conviction that they needed the product, it makes sense that they wouldn’t have the stamina to keep iterating and investing. Most other companies don’t have the money to build and launch products with such little conviction and oversight. Other companies need their products to succeed, so they try harder & smarter to make the products successful.

IME people often don’t realize that product strategies are actually way more important and influential than company strategies. Simply because it’s the products that have an impact on people’s lives, not the company.

Google has a company strategy, but they don’t make product strategies.

Google’s company strategy is “Hire all the smart people.” Hire all the smart people and let them build. Hire all the smart people so they can’t work at a competitor. Hire all the smart people even if we don’t have something important for them to work on.Google acts like a venture capitalist, investing in promising people with the expectation that most will fail. They invest broadly in search of the idea that will deliver 100x. Let 1000 flowers bloom, and see which are the best.

People are not interested in visiting websites about a topic; they, by and large, just want answers to their questions. Google has been strip-mining the web for years, leveraging its unique position as the world’s most popular website and its de facto directory to replace what made it great with what allows it to retain its dominance.

Artificial intelligence — or some simulation of it — really does make things better for searchers, and I bet it could reduce some tired search optimization tactics. But it comes at the cost of making us all into uncompensated producers for the benefit of trillion-dollar companies like Google and Microsoft.

Search optimization experts have spent years in an adversarial relationship with Google in an attempt to get their clients’ pages to the coveted first page of results, often through means which make results worse for searchers. Artificial intelligence is, it seems, a way out of this mess — but the compromise is that search engines get to take from everyone while giving nothing back. Google has been taking steps in this direction for years: its results page has been increasingly filled with ways of discouraging people from leaving its confines.