> adequate technical talent, at a large enough scale, is a commodity

Then why did Google fail?

> they were already very successful before the facebook acquisition.

They had few million users - that’s pretty good, but far far for being really successful. Everyone (including me) thought that Facebook was crazy for spending one billion on some random hipster photo app.

Technical talent is necessary but not sufficient. You need other things: a niche that hasn’t already been taken over due to network effects, the right design to address that market, possibly the marketing chops to get the ball rolling. Sometimes you can try to tilt the playing field by exploiting advantages that you have. That is not a guarantee of success either.

Technical talent is plentiful in Silicon Valley as long as you have the secret ingredient, stock options actually worth a lot of money.

Google+ bungled the very first part, the need they were serving. It is somewhat common for tech giants to hire renowned technical experts whether in design, engineering, etc but totally bungle the very first part. Just throw money at these experts and they will suddenly appear. As you can see, money isn’t much of an advantage tech giants have against fast growing upstarts, especially with valuations of high growth tech companies.