> “I don’t really see what Google’s alternative is,” says Smarr. “People are going to be a fundamental layer of the internet. There’s no going back.”
From Inside Google+, published in Wired Magazine in 2011. As the article mentions, Google started dismantling Google+ in 2014. Three years appears to be the upper limit of their patience for "the long run". https://www.wired.com/2011/06/inside-google-plus-social/
I agree with that, but even so, the company leadership bought into Google+ in a big way, for a long time. It's incorrect to say it didn't have a huge effect on the company's direction and (perhaps indirectly) on just about every developer working there.
the consensus internally is that GCP is an obvious extension of the infrastructure work that is going to get done anyway.
Why then is it so far behind AWS in feature set and market share? Google's data centers and internal infrastructure were way ahead of the competition for years, but they were slow and reluctant to open them up.