Agreed, and I didn't say that they should have kept focusing on one thing. Rather, I said that they suddenly found themselves having to defend that one thing, f

Agreed, and I didn't say that they should have kept focusing on one thing. Rather, I said that they suddenly found themselves having to defend that one thing, for the first time in their history. And they thought that diversifying into social was the best way to do so. So much so that they doubled down on it and tried to make a concerted, unified strategy around it. Totally agree that a company should never be in that situation to begin with (hence, my comments about the vulnerability of depending for 97+% of revenues on a single product). But they made a bet on social to be their "next thing" and, in retrospect, many smart people probably would have made the same bet. The bet didn't pay off, per se, but that may have been a function of lateness to market more than a function of strategic unsoundness. (And let's give them at least some credit: Google+ had a unique thesis about social w/r/t groups, and it came to market with a differentiating factor from Facebook. It was not simply the me-too product everyone retrospectively labels it as). I'm not writing an apology for Google's strategy; I'm just saying that hindsight is 20/20 in this case, and we shouldn't lose sight of that.