"Google has made moves to indicate that Google+ is not a finished product, or even a 1.0 release."
Honestly I hope Google destroys FB but let's stop apologizing for their half finished releases. G+ was released 9 months ago. For 6 months they've defaulted new g-mail users to sign up for it. This is not a beta, full stop.
If it's unfinished, if there are no APIs, if they broke a lot of the custom apps that were made for their struggling social service with their month 9 redesign, those aren't things you make excuses for. Those are things you list as negatives.
For any other company, sure. Google has a habit of pushing incomplete products out.
When Minecraft was first released to play, was that broken? Was Notch making excuses when he said "I'm still working on it"? Was it not continuously updated. And he charged money for that. Let's not forget how long GMail was in "beta". Google does betas. They push unfinished products out, for free, and update them continuously until they are finished. That's not a negative, that's Google being Google. Anyone who's been on the Internet for more than a year knows this is how they operate, and that most of the time it ends up being pretty cool.
The comparison with Minecraft is absurd. Google already has a whole ecosystem of well-rounded services. They have huge amounts of resources (both money and brains). They removed the "labs" feature by themselves and I take it as a sign that they don't want to push unfinished products to users this way. And when you force users who use Gmail to sign up for Google Plus, it's clearly not a beta product anymore, it's production ready because you are welcoming users by the truckload.
Don't use the "this service is beta" flag as an excuse for the flaws of Google+ and their (mostly horrible) redesigns of their core services. It's clearly not the old Google anymore.
I think the parent's point is that if that's how you're going to roll, it can count as a negative. There's a difference between breaking functionality, and not providing new features until it's ready.
Google Plus is not marketed as a beta product. With all the computer science-type smart folks at Google, I don't understand why big breakage is OK.
> They push unfinished products out, for free, and update them continuously until they are finished.
Well, it's not 'free', since the users are the product. And yes, some things get finished, other unfinished things like Wave just get cut at some point.
Did they break their published APIs? They've only ever published a handful of frankly useless API calls. If it was someone just scraping unpublished routines, that's hardly Google's fault.
Honestly I hope Google destroys FB but let's stop apologizing for their half finished releases. G+ was released 9 months ago. For 6 months they've defaulted new g-mail users to sign up for it. This is not a beta, full stop.
If it's unfinished, if there are no APIs, if they broke a lot of the custom apps that were made for their struggling social service with their month 9 redesign, those aren't things you make excuses for. Those are things you list as negatives.