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>but were also smart enough to bring in Eric Schmidt and others with deeper tech >industry business experience for "adult supervision"

>(Now, of course that original Google vision is just laughable as Sundar and Ruth >have completely eviscerated what was left of it, but whatever)

Those two things happening one after another is not coincidence.

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I'm not sure I agree. Having worked there through this transition I'd say this: L&S just seem to have lost interest in running a mature company, so their "vision" just meant nothing, Eric Schmidt basically moved on, and then after flailing about for a bit (the G+ stuff being the worst of it) they just handed the reigns to Ruth&Sundar to basically turn into a giant stock price pumping machine.

G+ was handled so poorly, and the worst of it was that they already had both Google Wave (in the US) and Orkut (mostly outside US) which both had significant traction and could’ve easily been massaged into something to rival Facebook.

Easily…anywhere except at a megacorp where a privacy review takes months and you can expect to make about a quarter worth of progress a year.

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