Google is, of course, free to do whatever they feel is best for the company, but I've always thought that social is very tangential from their mission, which is

Google is, of course, free to do whatever they feel is best for the company, but I've always thought that social is very tangential from their mission, which is to organize the world's information. You can spin social all sorts of ways to cram it into the mission statement, but I think it's telling that they've never really obtained critical mass in the social sphere despite several attempts. Now they're leveraging their most successful product to attempt to boost something at which they've historically failed. There's a huge risk in doing this; many tech people have moved to a new search engine to avoid the social focus and tracking, and while these people may not be the majority, I think they're ultimately the trendsetters on the internet.