Comment by stogot
Buying competitors is not insane or a weird business practice. He was probably advised to do so by the competent people under him
And what did he do to keep G+ from becoming a valid competitor? It killed itself. I signed up but there was no network effect and it kind of sucked. Google had a way of shutting down all their product attempts too
If you read Internal Tech Emails (on X), you’ll see that he was the driving force behind the key acquisitions (successes as well as failures such as Snap).