Let’s be generous and say that Google+ was a somewhat muted success as a product, even if the engineering was excellent, it was late to market and not especially innovative versus Facebook for the typical user.
There’s no useful way to say “I don’t want to use Google+, thankyou” which has meant that Google+ turned many who would otherwise just ignore the product they don’t want into active critics.
Google Mail - great! Google Docs - wonderful! Google Calendar - fantastic!
Google Drive - 2nd to market behind Dropbox, but I’m not forced to use it
Google+ - I can’t avoid it. I get followed by people I don’t want to know, and I have to spend time redacting posts that are put there automatically as a side effect of using other Google products. That’s actively irritating.
I can well imagine the leader of Google+ wanting to make a fresh start with an original idea, and deploying that engineering prowess against a problem where there’s the potential to be first to market.
