Google didn't realize building healthy, interoperable, internet technology wasn't their core strength & drop it. The story is much sadder. Their new head guy showed up & personally demanded things go his way & that everyone build his pet project, Google Plus. A vanity Facebook competitor with a real name policy, with no extropic/network benefits, no connection to the rest of the net (although you could send some data in to it: literally it's only api, one method): just another shitty little social app.
Google eventually realized this product was trash & insisting every team creatively find ways to interoperate with it was a mess, and canned this shitty little social app. (One I used & enjoyed, but which was of scant real enduring value, was deeply disconnected.)
There's two eras here. They look like opposite ends, to me.
As for Meta. Well. There is a lot of the vanity project bent, judging the book by it's cover. But I also think it's good to increase the engineering challenges, to go big. To find new hard problems. Google Plus was just a cheap knock off, a facsimile, with some narrow twists (Circles). Facebook is at least trying something. I have sincere doubts about headsets, but the idea of virtual place, & of re-materializing the virtual makes a lot of sense to orient & re-ground (what a pun) computing - could do a lot. But Meta could walk either of the two Google paths I just described: they could walk the open, interoperable, ecosystem path & kickstart a new era in computing with a buoyant healthy technical ecosystem, or they could walk the Google Plus era path & create a closed, proprietary product or series of products that try to succeed so strongly on their own that they inflate a new market singlehandedly.