None of G+ was Page's idea. There was a product manager (who left for facebook!) who did the big pitch deck that got it rolling. Then they put Vic Gundotra in charge and gave him carte blanche to modify multiple products. I agree that was the wrong person for the job. But you can't even imagine the amount of groupthink and ego that Vic surrounded himself with.

I don't think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but social has turned out to be a growth product that led to a minefield for the successful companies (look at Twitter and Facebook now) because the growth strategies were so sketchy that people and the government ultimately had to reject them.

Ultimately, it's on Page, though. He stood up at TGIF and told all the player to "get along" when Search had made a coherent argument that coupling the Social brand with search was brand suicide. I think Google could have made a much less obnoxious social network, maybe it would have been good, but without aggressive growth strategies, it wouldn't have been popular (a lot changed since the Orkut days, most people forget Google had a social network with half a billion users at one point!)