They've been off that course since at least 2005 or so. Notice how now they're putting money into social when things like Book Search are relatively stagnant.

Their real mission is something like "exploit cloud computing".

Not if the article's argument is correct and this is really about the social graph.

There's tons of money to be made off social games alone.

And to the extent that it's about "the social graph", it's about making money off the social graph. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but as Google becomes increasingly involved with owning, controlling, and/or providing content, as opposed to just "organizing" it (indexing the web, organizing email, etc.), their mission statement becomes more PR fluff than truth.

With Search and Gmail, their ability to obtain user data at least hinged upon Google's superior ability to index web and email information and make it "universally accessible and useful." Obtaining social graph data through an existing social games developer isn't like that at all.

In my opinion Google is all over the place, everywhere at the same time which could lead to overextension of resources and finances. This could ruin Google at some point in the future, they are losing focus.

Big tech companies should be all over the place. If they focus too much, they will die, because ability to change is a survival strategy in tech sector.

And this particular case seems to very strategic for Google. It's believed (inside Google too) that Facebook could be the major thread to Google, if people start searching in Facebook first and go to Google only as a second option. Thus, attacking Facebook directly is very strategic move.

And it seems to fit nicely to Android strategy too.

Yes , they are all over the place, but some see it as trying to optimize and defend the whole value chain of their main products. sort of vertical integration , in the unique form it shows on the internet.

It is still organizing the world's information. They've just learned that there is a prioritization people see in that organization: information from people they know trumps information gleaned from Page Rank.

I don't think so. Games are a gateway into the living room, which plays into the other half of their mission: making that information universally accessible and useful.

You can have a mission, but you also need to make money. Business.