[deelowe]

Real Names didn't come from Eric. He was gone by the time G+ rolled out. Vic had a large hand in the real names decision.

[dredmorbius]

Schmidt was selling G+ as "an identity platform".

[billnguyen]

Schmidt, like any good CEO, will always always sell anything his company outputs. You'll never find him criticising anything Google does, maybe in retrospect but never upon launch.

[dredmorbius]

My point isn't that he wasn't criticising, but that he was explicitly endorsing the "identity service" angle.

[deelowe]

Maybe, but by the time it rolled out, Schmidt was gone. G+ is pretty much all Vic.