Hopefully this is a sign that Google is changing course and focusing on providing value.

For a glimpse of the future if course is not changed, take a look at ABC/Disney, where the whole org has bought into partisanship so much that they are now tearing the whole company apart trying to find a the person responsible for leaking the video talking about their Epstein cover up.

> The source added ABC investigators have been rifling through staff emails, news logs and grilling staffers. The company has been isolating certain employees and putting them under pressure to turn on their colleagues in a bid to find the culprit, the source also claimed, adding the investigation reports back up to the very highest levels at HR at ABC’s parent company Disney.

https://pagesix.com/2019/11/12/abc-scrambles-to-figure-out-i...

Thank god they kept all those spies from stealing that primo Google+ IP ...

Hindsight is 20/20, but Google+'s plan (circles of friend) is the current situation of social networks. People communicate selectively with circles of friends through iMessage, WhatsApp, Snapchat groups, selective Instagram accounts, etc.

So Google+'s IP could have been very valuable

I remember at the time of its release, social media was pretty monolithic as well. All of my friends at the time thought it was a joke that the search engine company was trying to ape Facebook. Twitter was big, sure, but nobody I knew had one for socializing with people they knew, mostly just for following celebrities or news personalities. These days, Snap Chat, Instagram, and others have opened the field up more, so maybe if it had been released in that age people would have been more open to giving it a shot. Then again, it feels like privacy is much more in the zeitgeist, so maybe the idea of giving google access to even more of your life would be more laughable than it was previously.

> unrealistic expectations

Basically thinking "Don't do evil" and being a profitable competitive corporation are compatible.

There is nothing evil in keeping company secrets secret.

Unless the secret is evil.

You're plain wrong. It always depends on the secret. Secret acts are just acts that some people don't know about. The debatable thing is if there are secrets that are not evil, which is difficult to answer.

It's entirely possible to be a profitable competitive corporation and not do evil.

We will never know if it's just wishful thinking or not as Google chose the dark path and basically everybody hates them as much as FB. People still use their products as the're forced to, but are switching at the earliest occasion. So I don't know what the final result would be in the long run.