Now, it's perfectly valid -- maybe even necessary -- to look at Google's situation and declare it highly vulnerable. Any company that relies to such a singular extent on one product is in a precarious situation, because any fundamental disruption of that one product's market will sink the entire ship. Historically, Google had attempted to future-proof itself by functioning like an AdWords-subsidized R&D lab: using its massive and easy profits to pay for all sorts of cool, out-there, innovative technologies. But over the years, none of these technologies was proving itself commercially viable in a meaningful way. So Google could be forgiven for shifting to address the threat of social in general, and Facebook in particular, to its core advertising business.

To put it another way: when Google had no meaningful competitors, it could afford to play around with its money. When a serious competitor finally emerged, Google decided to put the toys away and focus.

It's easy to apply 20/20 hindsight and say that Google+ was never going to be the answer. But that wasn't always obvious. In fact, I remember when Google+ was first running its invite-only beta, and the HN community was singing its praises. And to this day, social integration with search seems like a good idea. Google may (or may not) be too late to own social search, but it wasn't fundamentally wrong about realizing that social was a paradigm-shift in web behavior, and not simply a passing fad.

Now, I can't speak to the author's complaints about the company culture. I have never worked at Google. If, as the author says, the company has stifled its atmosphere of innovation and creativity, that is a damned shame. (But I'd like to see more evidence to support this theory). The idea of forward-thinking R&D (20% time, etc.) seems like it should still be a core part of Google's culture -- especially for the sake of fostering a highly productive and innovative environment.

But it seems too easy to look back at Google+ and say that Google had fundamentally lost its way. From the standpoint of Google in 2010-11, Facebook was the first serious, potentially existential threat the company had ever faced. In a way, it would have been irresponsible for Google not to have put a lot of eggs in the social basket.

In fact, if you're looking for hindsight vs reality, I don't think Google and Facebook really were competitors -- until Google decided to build a copy of Facebook's product. So what if both sites were monetized with ads, whoop-dee-doo. The overlap in their product functionality and expertise was basically zero. There's a very abstract connection that comes out of Google's central dogma: We are how people find things on the Internet. We are how they discover links. We're their homepage. What if Facebook takes all of that away? We have to eat their lunch.

Google acted out of some combination of fear, insecurity, and pressure from Wall Street, along with some grandiose thinking about their role in the universe and the threat of Facebook. I believe the changes inside Google are significant, and also not inevitable or "what anyone would have done at the time." We'll see how the effects play out.

Respectfully, I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Google saw Facebook as a potential identity platform and de facto backend for the entire web. It might have been paranoid in its assumptions of just how much of Google's lunch Facebook could have eaten -- but the move into social was very much a defensive move, not an offensive one. They weren't trying to eat Facebook's lunch; they were trying not to get theirs eaten.

It's (still) not a stretch to think that advertisers would transfer dollars on a zero-sum basis from AdSense to a Facebook-credentialed web. As for AdWords? That's a harder lunch for Facebook to steal, but it's not inconceivable.

"Google acted out of some combination of fear, insecurity..."

Smart companies should be afraid and insecure, to some degree, about potential competition. I highly recommend Andy Grove's excellent book "Only the Paranoid Survive."

"...pressure from Wall Street..."

Just the opposite. Wall Street wanted Google to keep milking the cash cow and trying to expand its market share overseas -- which is a pretty typical Wall Street-pleasing playbook. Wall Street likes steady expansion of existing markets; Wall Street hates big bets in unproven products or markets.

I realize this is what Google felt, and what also seems to be accepted wisdom in the Valley, but I just don't get the logic that leads to cloning Facebook.

I do sometimes forget the whole thing about how the "advertisers (not the users) are the customer," so maybe I was wrong that they weren't competitive from that point of view.

Are we approaching a world where Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft each have their own phone, tablet, set-top box, search engine, email service, maps service, login, and "universal identity" for the web? Why does every tech company past a certain size need one of all of these things to be "competitive"?

"...pressure from Wall Street..."

Google execs were always in search of the "next billion-dollar product," so their stock would keep going up, so their employees' options would go up. It's a direct consequence of the mindset that company health equals X% growth that if you are taking over the planet in one category, you have to take over the planet in another category before long or be declared a failing company. Companies like Google try to shape the numbers as best they can to tell the story Wall Street wants to hear, but it's difficult and in the long run leads to extreme contortions.

Instead, they've been very forceful with their attempts to bring people in (Google+ is a great example), and that's clearly not working. It's bad enough that people scrutinize their every move (evil, too much data, etc), but to make matters worse, Google then starts acting like a used car salesman.

It really is a shame.

ironically, you just described their first and main product.

Perhaps it's not so easy to do the same with social. (Not saying that forcing people to convert is not a good move)

Totally agree that a company should never be in that situation to begin with (hence, my comments about the vulnerability of depending for 97+% of revenues on a single product). But they made a bet on social to be their "next thing" and, in retrospect, many smart people probably would have made the same bet. The bet didn't pay off, per se, but that may have been a function of lateness to market more than a function of strategic unsoundness. (And let's give them at least some credit: Google+ had a unique thesis about social w/r/t groups, and it came to market with a differentiating factor from Facebook. It was not simply the me-too product everyone retrospectively labels it as).

I'm not writing an apology for Google's strategy; I'm just saying that hindsight is 20/20 in this case, and we shouldn't lose sight of that.