How it missed the social networking bus

In mid-2004, at a time when Hotmail and Yahoo! were at their prime, Gmail came up with a novel concept.

“I was so eager to get an invite to sign up to Google that I would go around asking frenetically,” reminisces Sirish Reddi, co-founder, Voxta, a voice tech start-up. One of the things that he wanted to check out was the “thread” feature in emails. And then came G chat, which one could use from inside the email and I was like ...wow, he added.

At the outset, Google seemed to have it all — Orkut a social media platform (through an acquisition) which came into existence before Facebook, a chat interface integrated with email that was used by majority of the users. Yet, Orkut had to be shut down in 2014 and its subsequent attempts to woo users to its social media platform (Google Duo, Google +) have not made much inroads.

To understand Google’s lack of success, one needs to take a step back and look at is strategy. For many, some of its involvement in projects such as SpaceX, self-driving cars took too much management bandwidth. While it continues to keep an eye on search, its bread and butter, other areas such as social media suffered. “It was ahead of its time,” said Anil Joshi, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures.

What Joshi means is that while these projects can be looked critically in hindsight, this is the philosophy of Google – dream big and learn from failures. Sanghamitra Khatu, Founder of The Tribal Box, opines that Google’s ‘attitude that failing is ok’ helps the company strive for almost impossible things. They are sitting on the largest depository of data and they can create a social networking platform anytime or buy one, she adds.

Focus on Search

Vineet Chaturvedi, Co-Founder, Edureka, stated that Orkut was a deviation from their original business focus and when the venture failed, Google put it behind them and continued focussing on Search.

Also, Orkut lacked basic privacy features as one had to chat via a scrapbook and anyone could read messages, according to software developers. Many also believed that it could easily be hacked, by a simple fake login page or via scripts with which you could send all your friends a message at once.

Another key aspect is to do with the behavioural shifts, especially since the smartphone revolution. Most of the internet users in India in that era used devices that were non-portable (desktops) and the cost of accessing internet was more than ten-fold. Google at some point also realised that Orkut or IM weren’t major revenue drivers and hence focus on these divisions were reduced. Mayur Milan, a marketer, pointed out that Google’s failure as a social media platform can be attributed to the fact that it is fundamentally a search company.

Google also seemed to have not kept a close eye from a consumer perspective. “Their focus has always been on building technology and then getting people to use it but that logic cannot be applied to South Asia,” said Kavita Reddi, co-founder Voxta.

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