That's basically the problem, isn't it? If it's effectively make-work, you get the kind of decisions we've seen. In the unlikely event that their hiring process failed badly enough to put me in a C-level position, I would have approached it as a revenue-generating service: invest some initial startup funds but have a plan that you're going to build a paid service around it, maybe with an ad-supported free tier but in either case you need a revenue model where the head person's performance is measured on people actively using the service.
There's also the "commoditizing your compliment argument" for building a messaging platform but does that strategy make sense if all your competitors are doing the same?
Yeah, I don't want to claim that I have the secret for how to monetize these things well. My thought was just that they didn't consider the costs either to their brand of letting users down or by providing a path where entire groups of people could influence other parts of the company with no experience bringing in business.
