The dying Steve Jobs had a wizard wheeze to sink his rivals which was based on the assumption that they were dumb enough to listen to his suggestions.
Google+ is largely a failed social networking tool which could not compete against Facebook. And part of that is thanks to a design which came from the genius of Steve Jobs.
According to Silicon News, the Apple CEO met with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Page was the Google CEO by that time and has always seen Jobs as a bit of a mentor.
He suggested to them that Google had too many products spanning several services such as Search, GMail, YouTube, and Maps. He would unite them all under a "fluid user experience".
Rather than thinking "Jobs hates us now" and "what will the regulators think of that?" Page and Brin accepted the suggestion as a the word of God on high.
Google Plus was formed to link of all of Google's products and services. Of course it required the the formation of a controversial unified privacy policy which sent the watchdogs barking.
Everything done on non-Search services was added to the "filter bubble" where search results are filtered based on what a user likes on YouTube, Plus, and Gmail.
A user's "fingerprint" of browsing habits and their profile was bolstered up by linking all of the data gathered across all of the separate services under the new privacy policy and linked via the Google Plus login.
All that data targets advertisements to users more effectively to rake in more cash and it mirrors what Jobs' Mob is also doing with its iOS's iAd program and API.
As time is moving on, Google Plus is no longer attempting to be a social networking site as its primary focus instead is trying to link in Facebook and everything else.
It effectively creates Jobs' dream of having a walled garden which encompasses the world and is controlled by a central source.
It is possible that Jobs did it because he wanted to impart his own philosophy onto Google. But equally he must also have known that it was going to get the outfit into deep trouble. While Apple can get away with such things it does not have Google's global reach.
While it has privacy problems of its own, these are nothing like those that Google faces. Either way, it seems that Jobs was planning to have a good laugh on the other side.
Apple lives from its image, while others actually have to sell something of value for the customer. Why people buy e.g. Mercedes Benz cars? There are cheaper cars with stronger or more effficient engines, with more room, more leather or better design and equal or better reliability. You buy it because of the star. Sure it mustn't be utter crap, but the trademark image alone accounts for a substantial price premium. This price premium was for example the reason why Apple could get the tablet market going, because noone else could sell a tablet for more than the manufacturing price back then.
When Cruelty is facing you, you'll then become the Innocence/Mirror for Cruelty but the duty of a principle being to replicate, when you too then became cruel[-cunning because Cruelty cannot exist without its alterego, Cunning], your Innocence, oka the Expression/Experiencing of Wisdom, is then lost. Whatever others are, they are not and can never be self other than trying to make one a replica of them. To do that, the distraction and then the fragmentation of one's Attention [through one's inherent Duelling Duality] is the key, but not when the reality of The Attention is unknown to almost all, especially The Stupid and Their Dumb[ness].
When the puppet has yet to realised that it is merely a puppet, the saving grace is still possible but when that same puppet has been groomed to imagine/think that it is not a puppet but a master puppeteer, whatever grace there was would have departed long ago and this is where Humanity is now, so far into our own dungeons which we have been groomed to believe that it is our paradise because the opportunity is there to having it all. Not when every birth has to end in death not to mention suffering all the emotional, the physical and the intellectual/"mental" ills before the snipping of one's Mortail Coil.
Should, say, a chimp has the same tools and weaponry every self-indentifying/determining human has, will it do as that human does by way of self-destruction and blaming it on another? Really? 'Cos Cruelty is another and never self? Should there be more dimensionalities than the 3 under the direct control of every human, namely, Subjectivity, Objectivity and Projectivity, it will be very sad moment when the Epitome of Crreation, the human, has been reduced to being less than a chimp with some being worse that vegetaton. To devolve as opposed to evolving and all because "Others" are there for one's justification. As Gandhi had observed, "We must become what we seek [first]", if only because there is no such thing as The Desire for Purity, oka Others, when The Purity within Desire, oka Self, is lacking. A Simplicity which Eludes especially when The Dumb is finger-pointing at The Stupid without realising that Dumbness/Feminism is merely Stupidity/Machoism expressed whereas Stupidity is none other than Dumbness suppressed, Femininity being The Kinetic and Masculinity being The Potential. When Truth is suppressed, that is because Love has not been expressed, Love/absolute, unconditional-love, being the Experiencing/Expression/Flow/"Tao" of Truth, oka Freedon/absolute-freedom. As such, Freedom is not what others gave you or what you'd taken from others, Freedom is [a reflection] of who or what you are - of Self and not of Others. As such, which "leader" whom you know of realises this other than merely knowing it all, Reality being An Example and not A Leader, A Leader being the abortion within Relativity - to empower through Division/Hierachy/Cruelty-Cunning.
It would be wise not to finger-point at Jobsman because what he is now going through is his own doing, regardless of how he'd duped, reacted, etc, and nobody else's unless others want to share in his dilemma/reality, there being no such thing as death other than not physically existing on [Grandmother] Earth because Spirituality, the 4th human dimension [but THE Dimension in Reality], is not only real but it is beyond The Material, oka ElectroMagnetism. Beyond as in being blind to as in Colours being blind to those who were born blind. Beyond as in being impossible no matter how you'd tried Emotionally, Materially and "Mentally" other than Spiritually [with many having tried "spiritually", of course]. Should it still elude The Stupid and the[ir] Dumb, realise that should Spirituality exists, physical birth and therefore physical death is but an illusion-delusion to shackle those whose reality is not only of the material, they also then lack the means to venture onto the spiritual.