Passionate and knowledgable users would be good for early users. However, betas and paying customers don't mix well. People seem to miss that Google Apps is really meant for enterprise, government and education. So, the driving factor behind decisions for Apps users isn't the hackers and power users who use it for their own domain, but people like NYU, the City of Des Moines and Virgin America. It makes perfect sense to open it up for them last. It is just there happens to be a large vocal group of people who use Google Apps for their own personal use.
I get the point you are trying to make, but I think these circumstances are different. Your point is valid if you are talking only about consumer users. However, any enterprise App account is going to be run by a (generally speaking) technically literate administrator who decides what features to enable for their App users.
As long as Plus is sold as 'beta' or whatever, there is no real risk to opening it up to App accounts - regardless of whether they are personal users or enterprise users - because it's a conscious opt-in process being made by technically literate administrators.
And as many of others have already said, there is a big downside to treating your App administrators as second class citizens who can't make their own decisions - you lose the very people who have an appetite to try new things (why else did they move to Apps instead of using MS Office or whatever), and who are generally drinking the Google Kool-Aid. It's probably not the best analogy, but I think it's like Apple releasing the iphone 5 and saying 'Anyone who bought a previous iphone within 30 days of when it was released is not allowed to buy the new iphone 5'.
1: if I were going to roll out a product like this and I had google apps admins that are, almost without exception, total product advocates for google apps, I'd get them on board asap and give them a fat packet of training materials. Google has the resources to do this. The fact that they didn't do it shows lack of strategic vision. Let admins hold a half day session, give them video, handouts, whatever. They will sell the heck out of it and look like superstars if it's a decent product.
2: While Google+ appears to compete primarily with facebook, it also had the chance to cement the business market early on. Salesforce and others have been aggressive in pursuing this (chatter, et al). Would/will be a big differentiator for Google.
3. Additionally, apps wasn't always so aggressively positioned for just business and personal use. Early on it was very poorly positioned (looking back at some of the early how-to posts shows lots of "what exactly is google apps for your domain" type posts). There were certainly many, many power users that signed up in those days before it became clear just how poorly coordinated service rollout was between google and google apps.
4. Finally, regardless of what Google Apps is "meant for", what it is "used for" includes lots of users that are, indeed, excellent beta testers.
"if I were going to roll out a product like this and I had google apps admins that are, almost without exception, total product advocates for google apps, I'd get them on board asap and give them a fat packet of training materials. Google has the resources to do this. "
Are you kidding? You do't even get a "fat packet" when you sign a company with 95 employees. I got an email. Which had a link to log into the Admin account.
I had to write up training materials and provide them to the other employees. And don't tell me, all the docs are online. They'd (the employees) would never browse them. They too busy.
Google does a horrible job in this regard.
I got Microsoft knocking on my door this week. Trying to convince me to switch us to their cloud. They'll provide all the retraining and support. But they also trying to push Windows Server on me. So Google is lucky. :)
I'm an admin who deals with a very large number of mail flow patterns. Everything from multiple versions of Domino to all incarnations of Exchange, all the major Unix flavors Postfix, Exim, Sendmail, Qmail as well as most major anti-spam vendors. I can say that most of the people I deal with who have switched to the Microsoft Cloud have been less than happy. Just an anecdote for you if you reconsider the switch.
I would say this is actually the reason why it doesn't make any sense for Google Apps to support Google+.
As you say, the core use case for Google Apps is for an enterprise, university, or some other kind of organization to give accounts to users that are managed on their behalf. In essence, all of the accounts are owned by the organization, not the user. Now, what happens when the organization revokes your account, because you graduate? The idea that that is possible is absurd.
(In case anyone reading doesn't see what I mean yet, imagine if Facebook locked you out of your account when your University cancelled your e-mail address after graduation, instead of just letting you associate a new one; your Google Apps account isn't just an account associated with an address at a domain, it is an account that is equivalent to an address at a domain.)
I have my own Apps account and was peeved at having to create another Google account for Google+, but now I'll continue to use a "personal" Google account for Plus. This way my Google+ will never be tied down to one organization (even if it happens to be my own at the moment).
They really need to decouple a Google account from a person's email address(s).
The Google Apps case is harder because of the existence of a separate "domain administrator" role with some powers over the user account. Many people on Google Apps domains are employees using their work email for personal business. If you want to create durable identities around email addresses, these people are kind of a problem, because the obvious way to do things gives control of their digital identities to their employer's IT department.
Why is that? Are those people more likely to be "taste makers", influencing and connecting other people? I think Google Apps users must wait for new features because of technical difficulties that Google would like to defer to a post-1.0 version.
Yes. Absolutely. There are lots of early adopters like myself who jumped on Google Apps the moment they became available and were strong advocates for Apps and other Google offerings. Lately though it's like we've somehow become second class citizens in the googleverse.
I doubt it. This is somewhat speculation and somewhat observation, but Google seems to build produces with fairly independent teams. As the recent rant shows, this means that very often the projects don't have strong api's to interact with.
However, what the rant did not touch on is how integrating things into a large infrastructure can slow down development. It's much easier to iterate on a product when you don't have to maintain stable APIs or meet the numerous requirements needed to tightly integrate into a larger system.
My guess is that Google chooses the style of development it does precisely so that it can create and test products quickly and with independent teams. A downside to this is that is that they need to spend a lot of extra time when they finally do integrate a product into something like the Apps framework.
I certainly don't think it's "deliberate" in the sense that they would ever want to exclude Apps users, but I think it's deliberate in the sense that they saw fixing the Apps problem as a much lower priority, perhaps because they know there's a high degree of vendor lock-in for us (it's not like I'm going to move to a Microsoft offering). From their point of view it could be a totally rational business decision, given finite resources, but it's still shafting your most loyal customers.
Let's hope there's a way to switch existing Plus profiles over (retaining posts and circles, etc.). I know, probably not going to happen, which means I won't be able to use my Apps account.
What I'd personally like to see is a way for multiple logins to work. Switching between my apps account and my gmail account is horrific. Myself and many others have taken to opening an incognito mode/privacy browsing session whenever we need to access them. Integration, a way to sync mailboxes (that doesn't use pop), or at least better cookie management so I can log out of one then log into the other is what I really want.
Then you can just switch account from the dropdown on the bar at the top, most apps remember which account you use with it, and you can even use gmail with different accounts in different tabs.
I find that solution to be quite decent. Generally, when I hit a google website it will prompt me to pick between my two different accounts. Even using googles oauth will prompt me to pick between the two accounts! Apparently, it isn't supported for some things, but I haven't come across anything yet.
I find it interesting that Google thought they would have had more time.[1] I would have thought that they'd know that social networks these days either grow exponentially, or stay flat. Google should have been betting on the former, which would have made plain that they wouldn't have much time. Perhaps they thought they could limit it through the invite only stages?
Launch and iterate is why i think they delayed on this. prioritization is difficult (especially for such a large project) and I'm sure that many other things were prioritized over this feature. Now whether or not that prioritization was correct is debatable, but im pretty sure every software project in the world "thought they would have more time". That's just Hofstadter's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadters_law).
People didn't sign up for Friendster, Myspace, or Facebook based on an invite. Social networks take up a lot of their own space and with Facebook for personal, Twitter for media/marketing/information/distribution, and Salesforce taking the attention on the social enterprise construct over smaller options like Yammer, etc.
Search for the most part is a tool. E-mail is a tool. Office productivity applications are mainly tools. Personalized and direct.
The social experience is different - you dont use Facebook because its useful itself, you use it because you get facility out of the fact others use it. Inclusion matters.
This is a different problem entirely. Google always approaches a space from a technology angle. Its the difference between "this code solves the problem" and "this code contributes to a full vision."
Receiving and acting on an invite attempts to give access special meaning, as if the getting an invite is all you need to make the pain go away.
The truth is while early adopters and media will jump on in with excitement, the vast majority of people who use Facebook will continue to use Facebook.
The reason they didn't take off exponentially in my eyes isn't based on release date as much as it is a technology/culture mismatch when taking the product to market. This is an internal gestalt in Google most likely, and externally manifests as a branding problem.
Google Apps users could have signed up with a normal Gmail account (or create a new one). I dont understand the frustration that it wasnt possible for Google Apps since you dont really own that mail account, the domain admin can delete it!
