I wouldn't be worried. This is just Google operating from the same playback as when they failed at social. It's as if Google wasn't invited to the party, so the

I wouldn't be worried. This is just Google operating from the same playback as when they failed at social. It's as if Google wasn't invited to the party, so they decided to throw their own. And then go on about how some of the guests at the former stole their outfit and game ideas. If you recall, Eric Schmidt and Larry Page put the company on high alert and made it a priority to integrate Google+ into all their products with the same finesse as mixing oil and water with predictable results. However, if Google's failure at social and their complete inability to seriously penetrate any other mass consumer market via organic efforts without an acquisition shows -- Google may have deep technical chops but their product and go to market is essentially broken. This is not a technical issue that can be fixed with the same approach Google takes to everything, but rather a culture issue from within the company itself. They have repeatedly demonstrated they can't launch anything new that remains sticky -- what is the last major new Google product you can't live without? They publish a lot of papers but routinely can't see the forest for the trees. Google had all the technical resources in the world (and in some cases, even a launched product) to compete with social but lacked the culture of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram at the time to adequately compete with it. Executives are so far removed from what actually happens and comfortable such that they aren't willing to take big bets and have a limited attention span, with too many choices for which to pick their favorites. We're talking about the same company here that tried to innovate on one of their core products with Google Wave. The bar for success is so incredibly high at Google and that is their weakness: they are unable to make any single new thing a success. A startup has a limited amount of time, money and pivots; at Google they are essentially unlimited and that will be their downfall.