Google announced on Monday that it is closing the consumer version of Google Plus. The stated reason was a data exposure the company found in March and did not disclose. The reason underneath it was in the same post, stated more quietly: ninety percent of user sessions lasted less than five seconds.
Five seconds is not a product. Five seconds is a wrong turn.
I remember the launch, because in 2011 everybody at my agency wanted an invite and nobody could tell me what they wanted it for. There were Circles, which asked users to do organizational labor they had never asked to do. There were Hangouts, which were genuinely good and are the only part anyone will miss. There was a real name policy that read as a rebuke of the internet it was trying to join.
What there was not, at any point in seven years, was a reason.
A product built because a competitor exists inherits that competitor's roadmap and none of its reasons for being.
Facebook was the anxiety. Everyone knew it at the time. Bonuses were tied to the social strategy, YouTube comments were annexed to force account creation, and a company that had already tried Buzz, Wave, and Orkut decided the problem had been execution rather than premise. So it executed beautifully. The design was better than Facebook's. The photo handling was better. None of that mattered, because the brief was never about a person, it was about a rival.
I get this brief constantly, in less obvious clothes. A regional grocery chain wants a loyalty app because the national chain has one. A brewery wants a podcast because a competing brewery has a podcast. The deck arrives with a competitive landscape slide and no slide about what the customer gets that they cannot already get.
The tell is simple. Ask what changes for one real person on a Tuesday. If the only answer is that your company is now present in a category, the category does not need you in it.
Compare that to something that worked. Instagram copied Stories outright two years ago and it stuck, not because copying is virtuous but because the behavior already existed on the platform and the format removed friction from it. The copy served a person. Google Plus served an org chart, and an org chart will keep a product alive for seven years after everyone has quietly stopped opening it.
Five seconds is not a product. Five seconds is a wrong turn.
Saturday I was back at the karaoke place in Southeast, the one with the sticky floor and the host who calls everyone baby. I sang Total Eclipse of the Heart. I sang it badly. I sang it because I wanted to, which is a better reason than most product roadmaps have.