IIRC the other major problem was that Orkut was invite-only for a very long time. That's partly was it was so popular in a few South American countries, it was very difficult to get yourself on the platform, and even if you did, it was difficult to use it to communicate with anyone locally.

Google was not the giant then that it is now.

Google has had more than one product that I've been excited to use but was invite only, and then only got the invite after interest had died both for the public and myself. Ones I can remember are Orkut, Wave, and Ingress.

GMail was also invite only IIRC.

The difference is that GMail is useful even if none of your friends are on it.

Making a social network like Google+ be invite-only when everybody was already on Facebook was an absolutely bone-headed move and I think was THE driving factor for its failure.

There were so many memes about people finally getting an invite to Google+ and then discovering nobody was there. Without your friends on it, you're not going to make it part of your daily routine, and eventually just forget about it entirely. By the time it wasn't invite-only anymore, the hype was gone and Google+ had already been considered to be a joke.

Inbox? or do you mean the game Ingress?

Orkut's biggest problem was that Google didn't want to devote any resources to moderation but its creator had enough political power to keep the lights on. It didn't take long for users to figure out they could do whatever they wanted.

It quickly became a cesspool of racism, child porn, and other illegal activity, mostly by Brazilians, who bullied everyone else off the platform

It wasn't for a lack of trying by brazillians[0]. I can't remember much racism if I'm honest, especially by mid 2000's standards, and Orkut wasn't like twitter or facebook(today), you only had contact with people you wanted to have contact, so I can't see it being a big deal.

[0]:https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna25514386

I don't think Orkut was successful for Google, where success in measured in annual revenue in billions.

I guess that's what the parent comment meant.

Google tries many new products (in-house developed or acquired). If it does not reach a user base of several 100 million users (or 10's of billions of revenue) after a few years then they will scrap it.

I am not so sure of those two either (at least free)... the search may stay.