[xab9]

Because it's good. When firefox started slowly killing xul and the clusterfuck called IE stopped being the top (rabid) dog, a new kid had to come along.

Google+ seemed like an afterthought, a way to create a facebook clone without creating a facebook clone.

[enitihas]

Google+ was given the most importance of any project within Google as far as I know.

[chii]

Politically, it's given importance, but users didn't see it that way, unlike chrome.

It just goes to show that an exec pushing a project doesn't mean much when it's a shit project.