I understand your point (and the points above) but it's those 'redundant jobs' that built the company into a viable purchase for Google. How can they value it at $3.1Bn then ditch the very machine that created that value?
It's the removal of redundancies which can make a merger greater than the sum of its parts. Why should Google maintain a separate set of HR, sales and administration departments when it already has those in place?
Isn't the value in replacing the competitor's product with your own? As the article said, all that they really prize is the user base. It's not like that's the first time they have paid for a possible competitor in order to assimilate them and wipe out their product (I'm thinking Dodgeball, Dulance, etc), it's just on a larger scale.