You're fine, Cadmus. We all get distracted with real life at times...you have nothing to apologize for.
Last night I finished reading
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, which was basically a history of the company from its origins to 2011. The last few chapters were about Google's controverisal entrance and exit from China and some of the then-modern shortcomings of the company, such as their failure to perceive how big social networking would be in spite of owning some of the earliest social networking properties like Blogger and Orkut.
In the end it all comes to vision, I think. Microsoft had the vision of a computer in every house, and that was largely accomplished...but then what? Microsoft began to flounder for lack of vision. It would miss the opportunity to purchase Google very early on because internet search wasn't part of their vision at the time. Likewise, Google's vision could basically be boiled down to data-driven decisions and cloud computing, which lie in the heart of the algorithms behind everything they do. Social networking, with its emphasis on people and relationships, didn't have much of a place in that vision and Google in turn not only missed the chance to develop its own properties, but I believe missed the opportunity to purchase Facebook early on. I won't even go on about Apple, whose vision appears to have died with Steve Jobs.
But that's not really a bad thing, I suppose. No one company can envision it all, no matter how open and empowering they try to be. They're all successful companies in their own right, but it was interesting to read how various ideas and products came to be and developed.
