I wasn't there for the beginning of it, but I was for at least some of it, including the end. Google+ was a devastating event for Google. Like finding out that I can't even imagine how much time and money was wasted on making it, shoehorning it into other products, trying to foster adoption of it and ultimately deprecating it and trying to _extract_ it from those same products.
You spend as many years as they did talking about only hiring the best of the best, it was inevitable that they would disappear up their own asses and lose any ability they ever had to tell good from bad. In that light I can't imagine them being devastated by anything other than the humiliation of a golden child getting a B. Beyond that, when you're sucking untold billions out of the industry (and society) while they slept, the "waste" of money was just points on a chalkboard. I mean, look at it from a few steps back: even with what you/they would describe as an existential competition against Facebook, that's what they came up with. "The best of the best." As a corporation they aren't businesspeople, they're rich kids with more money than they can ever spend and they have been that for at least 20 years.
It's kind of weird to claim they tried to foster adoption with the whole real name thing going on. Google was nuking accounts if they decided something was not your real name, and destroying e.g. a gmail account for someone who decided to join Google+ with the same name. Any cry for help was met with the usual Google Wall Of Silence. After a few very visible failures, people got the message quickly: Stay away from plus if you have any other valuable data in the Google world.
I still wonder what they were smoking. If you want users on your platform, not banning them randomly seems a good start.
