> the sense of purpose and mission died when Emerald Sea started and good projects (reader, google talk, code search) were being canabalized to prop up a pipe dream that was never going to work.

Interesting way of putting it. And it also jives with the fact that Google+ always looked half-baked even from a pure UX perspective, and is now dead altogether. Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, we can speculate that Google leadership should have tried to move in that direction while still meshing with the existing "sense of mission and purpose", not just suppressing it.