You cant force people into a social network.Sure You can merge different services under a single "login" system,but dont make it a social network where things are published on a public profile,that's insane.
People dont need 10 social networks...doesnt mean there is no room for competition,just that G+ didnt innovate,or try to have a fresh take on social networks.
I'm one of the few people who actually uses G+ by choice, and has done since public launch. But I'm not delusional about its glaring failure.
You try saying "G+ is a failure" on G+ and see the hilarity that ensues as people say "MINE is great", "You're not using it right", "Your link doesn't talk about metrics in [unspecified niche] where I assure you it's TOTALLY popular" and literally call you a Facebook shill. Good Lord.
I mean, I stick around for the few people and one community that isn't on Facebook. But G+ is a huge planned subdivision built in a desert, all the roads built but no houses, with a few people camped out around a fire going "WELL THERE'S LOTS OF PEOPLE AROUND THIS FIRE."
It can be (there's a Linux fire and an RPG fire, for example). The fundamental problem for me, as another long-time user, is that they started right ("G+ is Facebook you can control sanely") that then progressed into so many of the things people hate about Facebook (trying to ram it into places you didn't want it, the real names policy, and so on). Once they eroded the perception that G+ was a privacy-enhanced Facebook, it was a dead man walking.
I mean, bloody hell. People desperately wanted Facebook the application without Facebook the company. Google could have had that if they just hadn't fucked up and hadn't gotten greedy.
The thing is, Google already had that. I have a pre-Google+ account that I've never upgraded, and I've always been able to log into everything (aside from Google+ itself) just fine.
Sergei and Larry (possibly mistakenly) felt like they wanted to rebrand Google as a "social network that manages all information you could ever want," as opposed to a "web search engine that also provides email, messaging, picture sharing, and a bunch of other random stuff." If you look at it that way, rather than forcing everyone into a social network, they were trying to pull everything else they offered underneath their G+ umbrella -- Imagine if FB started out as say, just messaging. Then offered "friending," basically to the extent of LinkedIn - see job info, school, etc. Then offered photo albums. And then one day said "oh all this goes into your facebook profile, we're a social network now." The end product would be the same as what we have today.
Would we would probably all be shoveling the shit onto them too? Probably. But that doesn't inherently make "facebook" a terrible product, or the idea of tying all those services into a single social network "insane," I don't think.
I think from a meeting-room/white-boarding level, what google was trying makes a LOT of sense. It makes Google's offerings more cohesive. That it doesn't happen to be the way YOU as a customer sees or wants to see Google was not considered (and that's their failure). They seemed to just be running on the vision of what the end product would look like, which would be a competitor for Facebook, but with VERY different, several unrivaled sub-offerings. Turns out they forgot that how they get there matters a lot too.
I also think they were on the pathway to innovating further, starting with Hangouts...no other social network where nearly all your friends were gave you multi-way voice+video chat, sharing the same YT video, etc. I think they could have done more, but G+ just sucked so much that it could probably never get any of its labs features off the ground.
I hate G+ as much as the next guy, and especially hate how Google tried to shoehorn such a bad product into every google user's lives. But that doesn't mean their vision was nonsensical. It was probably a bit of tunnel-vision though, and it unfortunately did not take their existing userbase's sensitivities into account. Oh well.
Where users asking to have their activity on youtube and gmail and photos all tied together (and public!)? I don't think many where.
Did users want youtube videos to disappear off the corporate site (marked private) because the documentation person said no when she was asked to add google+ to her paid google apps account? Probably not.
Did they think their users wanted another fb-style "privacy" settings (oh look, yet another thing is unexpectedly public, and we redesigned the privacy settings again to make it even harder to understand and to make things private.) Viz the fiasco with buzz, and with google+ name-search. You could either believe that pms in google are so stupid they don't know some users have people they really do not want to be contacted by, or you have to find an alternate explanation. And the one I've settled on is Google doesn't give a shit.
To be fair, this theory also accords the fact that google's users aren't you and me; they're advertisers.
I mean, Occam's Razor can lead you astray, but in this case I doubt it. The most obvious explanation also explains the majority of Google's behavior. First, Google executives saw facebook not sharing information such as friends lists and heard hints of facebook building a search engine far before this was public knowledge. They'd get this through friends -- the industry is a small world -- and also hiring patterns. Then they saw facebook refusing to let google crawl most of their site. Pants were shit. Founders were scared. Google decided that they needed to compete directly with facebook, and that having their own social network was more important than anything else. Aspie computer nerds who've never talked to a normal human being or enjoyed an easy conversation with a MOS where put in charge of social features, with orders to copy facebook or else. Users where forced to use Google+, whether they wanted to or not. Bonuses were tied to Google+ performance. Hell, someone inside Google thought "plussing" doesn't make you sound like a tool. And the rest follows.