If 100% of Google Reader users enthusiastically adopted Google+, would that have even come close to what they were hoping to ultimately get? That's probably a rounding error by Facebook's usage numbers.
I disagree. People who used Reader were early adopters and influencers. Perhaps it was only 8 million users from Reader, but they would have had a multiplier effect.
Maybe. But many of us are early adopters on Google+, because many of us are early adopters of all kinds of technologies. How effective have any of us been? I've got a ton of connections on Google+, but they're mostly other software developers or enthusiasts. All my real friends who are actually on Google+ created accounts and then apparently forgot they had them and never post. Probably because I'm the only person they know who was using it, and as awesome as I am (jk), one person is not enough to get someone to use a social network.
Our early adoption tendencies pair with a tolerance to nerd out over multiple competing systems. Studies have in the past suggested the average smartphone user only uses a few (5, 6?) apps that they've downloaded with any sort of regularity, the idea being they just don't have the time, patience or desire to check in on 6 different social location-aware deal apps.
Facebook is, generally, a better experience for a person that wants to keep up with their friends, because posting, discovering others' posts, organizing groups, having get-togethers in real life are quicker, simpler, easier for the general user.
So they'll ignore Google+ because they don't need that second social network if Google+ comes in second.
The thing is that g+ was pretty useless for early adopters because it lacked so many features - an obvious were events, it boggled my mind that Google had Google Calendar which syncs to every Android device, but g+ had no means of creating an event for almost a year.
You nailed it there - some internal hubris led to them assuming the tech crowd were no longer the driver of their business, and so they ignored us.
Now I don't have any reason to have Google Account, and so I don't have one†. Of the users I introduced to Gmail, some have since moved back to live.com (e.g. family) because they saw me complaining so much, even though they had no real reason to move.
I no longer recommend Android since after 2 attempts, watching both my phones with otherwise perfectly functional hardware have their software go unsupported and crumble into the ground as every new update got pushed. And so my mom still has a Blackberry (yep!)
† Not strictly true, I still have an apps account to forward my mail, but only because I haven't migrated the last remaining user off the domain.
Just curious, what have you migrated to from Google apps? I don't use much of apps except for mail, calendar, contacts and docs. I could live without online docs, but couldn't find slick email, calendar and contacts available seamlessly on any computer and phone I use anywhere else.
For personal mail I've moved back to a combination of live.com for one account, and mutt for the rest – shockingly, because live.com is quite usable nowadays.
Remaining stuff is all data, so its just on my laptop. Of my last three employers, two were big Microsoft Outlook houses, so that's how corp calendar sharing has worked.
For RSS I am running Selfoss. It's passable, but it's no Reader. After obsessing over sundry services like YouTube I finally just decided to delete the account - playlists and all, since services like that are basically huge wastes of time anyway.
Right now I'm carrying a phone that doesn't even support e-mail, never mind web, and honestly have no intention of changing the situation unless forced by an employer. It's great, the battery lasts about 2 weeks. The only real aspect of this that hurt initially was the lack of a good GPS, but since I don't own a car and live in a big city, turns out it was just another excuse to pointlessly glue my head to a screen
Do you normally use email, calendars etc via the browser? Just curious as you say you've not found slick versions elsewhere and I'm not sure what that means to you. For example, I hardly ever access these things via the browser so 'slick' for me is just fast sync between devices.
Yes, I access email, calendar and contact via browser only on all desktop computers I use. And on phones and tablets I use native Gmail and Calendar apps and have contacts synchronized everywhere.
I haven't used desktop client for private mail for years, and I don't see that changing, because of the privacy and security concerns. I'm willing to let NSA or some other faceless foreign entity snoop my email if that will prevent people around me that can get hold of my phone or computer from reading my mail.
