[MGzBezycyjEQrk5]

lesson learned: large companies can afford to be wasteful.

google can afford to fight all these ideological battles and employee spats because of their large revenue. If they weren't raking in so much dough, I doubt they would be willing to humor employees complaints on the scale cited in Wired (an entire social network for employees and supported by the company?). I'm sure similar incidents occur at other large corporations. They definitely happen at mid-sized companies, albeit with lower intensity. working in HR for google must be quite the safari

[skybrian]

Well, yes, and there are lots of other things Google can do because they have so much money, like their various research projects.

But remember that Google+ was a company-wide initiative intended to compete with Facebook, which is kind of a big deal. Yes, they had lots of money to throw at it, but it was for a purpose.

The internal version was originally for testing. (Also, the business version of Google+ is still a product as part of G suite.)