Guy Kawasaki in love with Google+
Macintosh evangelist, turned author and venture capitalist, Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki), told a Google+ photographer conference last week he’s in love with Google+.
When I saw Macintosh for the first time it was somewhat of a religious experience for me. Fast forward about 25 years and I had a second religious experience — which is when I saw Google+ for the first time. When I started Google+ I didn’t need another social media/social networking service. I had plenty to do with Twitter and Facebook. But when I saw Google + it’s as if scales were removed from my eyes.
This as reported by Emily Price of Mashable.
Kawasaki sees a lot of similarities with the critics of Google+ today and those of Apple years ago.
I noticed something very parallel between Macintosh and Google+, which is I thought Macintosh is a better computer, it was used by far fewer people, and the experts -– I use experts in quotation marks euphemistically and sarcastically -– the experts were saying that Macintosh would die. Fast-forward 25 or 30 years, I saw Google+, thought it was better, fewer people were using it, and the experts were saying it would die.
I’ve learned a lot from Kawasaki over the years.
The first was when I read his Selling the Dream, when starting Prairielaw.com in ’98. Next was realizing all the mistakes I made with Prairielaw.com, when I read his Art of the Start when starting LexBlog in 2003. I also rethought my thinking on Twitter when Kawasaki told Robert Scoble that Twitter was the biggest branding tool since the television.
Sure, take what evangelists like Kawasaki may say with a grain of salt. He could be wrong.
Though I have not sat down face to face with Guy, he’s steered me in the right direction more than once. Including when he told me in ‘Selling the Dream’ to get a mac (my first one) or not to blame him if the business plan I was about to write on a PC would not sell.
In 1999, I picked up Kawasaki’s 1987 book ‘The Macintosh Way,’ his first book on a product. I am now going to buy what Kawasaki calls his only other product book, “What the Plus?” The $2.99 e-book available now is Kawasaki’s why and how on Google’s social network.
There’s only so many hours in the day, so adding another social network to the fray is not easy. But Kawasaki is not the only one telling me to re-think how I feel about Google+.
My friend Tim Stanley, co-founder of FindLaw and CEO and founder of Justia, told me a few weeks at a PLI program in San Francisco that Google+ is here to stay and is influencing search.
Kawasaki and Stanley are bright guys sitting in Silicon Valley. You may want to join me in taking another look at Google+.