I think Google is totally lost, because since when centralized communication is a bad thing? They didn't get why Facebook released Messenger as a separate app or why they bought WhatsApp.
This is not about technology, this is about user war. Back in 2011, Google got seriously scared about Facebook growth. So they naively came up with this Google+ idea, which of course died and joined the long list of Google's embarrassing tries in the social networking space.
It is sad to see the negative effects of Facebook, on one side on users and stealing their privacy and data, and on the other side on giants like Google, who used to create cool projects like Gmail back when the internet was a cool breath.