It's worse than that- Google+ broke the basic syntax in google search. Adding + before a word used to make it mandatory. They change it to quotations marks so they could have +username instead of @username for google plus. That still bothers me and Google search doesn't work as well.
That is my single biggest complaint about G+, that they would have compromised search for the biggest boondoggle google has ever created.
I would definitely say that implementing that was 100% when I saw that google was done making good decisions and on the path towards making their core product worse.
Every company has their time in the wilderness - MS just emerged from theirs, Apple had theirs, and Google started theirs a while back.
They're usually caused by hubris, and learning humility, to not antagonize your customers, and that you can make mistakes - like Microsoft seems to have - usually fixes things.
Really good point, unfortunately I think one of the biggest reasons any big company does get out of "the woods" is through competition starting to scare them.
Its fairly obvious that google is not really afraid of any large competitor in their space.
More than anything they are just buying up the next google (like msft did) to ensure that nobody can come up from the depths.
Except that it was likely investors pushing Google to come up with a response to Facebook that caused them to create Google Plus, even though in the process they had to kill several more vibrant social networks that had organically grown around their existing products.
Desperate imitation of Apple caused additional problems.
Heh, Google killed Reader so I could consider any alternative to Google before using their products. So it's been DuckDuckGo, Firefox, box.com, other OpenId providers etc. I still use gmail, because i only use email for boring stuff like amazon or whatever, not communication with friends, and it's not like I see any of their ads anyway because I use adblockers (part of the reason i use firefox - you can't block ads using chrome on android). I use Android. That's good. They're not screwed that up yet, although i'm sure given enough time they will.
I also really wish that they would revert this change. But maybe Google+ was created just because they wanted to get rid of the + operator in Google search?
