There are ultimately two ways to push a new product to market: reactively and proactively. A business (or the Jobsian visionary at its head) may identify an existing need, an opportunity where demand outstrips supply, and create a product to fill that gap. Alternatively, the visionary may anticipate a need where it does not yet exist, or go a step further and create that need — or desire — with a quality product and astute marketing. (The iPad is a shining example of the latter.)

When Google unleashed Google Plus (often written as “Google +”) in 2011, it was doing neither. Numerous social networks were already crowding the market: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn were just the big three, with many more niche ones either in their infancy or close to hatching. Corpses of those that came before, like MySpace and Friendster, were already all but forgotten.

No one asked for another Facebook-type network, but that’s exactly what we got. Like the child of a rich parent who sees the neighbor kid’s scooter and demands one immediately, Google coveted success in the social network sphere. For four years, it threw enormous funds and resources at its bambino.

With seemingly inexhaustible coffers of both capital and talent, Google has been known to pitch things at the wall just to see what sticks. To be fair, much of it does, as the company can be credited for countless products that are not only top notch in their quality and usefulness but have been integrated into our lives so well that we don’t even think about them as anything other than our natural extensions. (I could list a few, but do I really need to?) There are also products that no one wanted (Buzz) and great products that are sorely missed but no longer suited Google in a business sense. (Google Reader: a top of the line creation that was nearly impossible to monetize.) And yet, in the case of Google Plus, the company waged a lengthy, exhausting campaign, using its influence, huge sums of money, and even coercion to convince the masses to adopt the network.

While many initially signed up for the platform, interest dropped off precipitously soon after. As early as August of 2012, tech media began referring to the platform as a “ghost town” — the term that eventually became synonymous with the Google Plus brand if you kept up with mar-tech blogs. While the attractive interface, as well as excellent bundled tools for photography and video chat, drew in early adopters and even inspired certain niche communities to claim real estate, users went back to other platforms where action was already in full swing. It doesn’t matter if the club looks good when you’re the only reveler in the room.

When enticing users with features like Circles (which forced people to split all of their connections into groups, and proved more annoying than anything) failed to draw engagement, the company pivoted, trumpeting the network as not just a social platform but a central hub for all of the user’s Google-related online properties. This could have easily been accomplished with a central account — the path that the company eventually took, and continues to pursue today — but the fact that, for no apparent reason, Google Plus was at the center of that universe reeked of both desperation and coercion.

Google aggressively promoted its social network, demanding that anyone with an email address sign up for Google Plus, even if the individual was already converted. If you had three Gmail accounts — say, one for work, one for personal business, and one for casual communication — you would often end up with three separate Google Plus accounts. The results of this cross-identity push ranged from annoying to outright comedic, as evidenced by this email I received in one of my Gmail inboxes a couple of years back:

Internet existentialism aside, these practices also allowed the company to claim three platform users instead of one, and to spit that data out at conferences. Dig deeper, however, and you would see that only one account per user was active, if even that. To be fair, Google also provided ways of linking your multiple accounts to create one identity across its platforms, but the process was daunting even for experienced users. Also, in an age where online privacy is a growing concern, giving any online entity such wealth of information is bound to turn off a lot of people.

At the same time, Google realized they had a captive audience for their embattled platform. Digital marketers of every stripe — SEO’s, PPC specialists, social media and community managers, branding strategists — live and die by how well they do across Google’s properties. Other platforms matter too, but no one has earned a raise by doing well everywhere but on Google.

Google Plus was thus quickly established by the company as an essential platform for a brand’s online presence. Not because that’s where the customers were, but because it was widely believed that without a Google Plus business page and a strategy for marketing it, you were losing out to competitors who had that edge.

While the company mostly denied that having a strong Google Plus presence allowed the search and advertising giant to favor you over your less enthusiastic competitors, the SEO and inbound marketing communities weren’t entirely convinced, and kept posing this question until the platform’s demise in 2015. After all, even Google’s local business services were tightly bound to the social platform.

Thanks to these strong-arming tactics, Google Plus became something far worse than just a ghost town. It turned into a barren field from advertising hell where hordes of digital marketers dotted the landscape, regularly shouting their brand slogans and repurposed content into dead air at an audience that didn’t exist.

Google had one more trick up its sleeve to keep marketers from fleeing this timesuck. Authorship was introduced in 2011, and was imposed on the online world for three painful years. Authorship markup (which also included markup for publishers) was touted as a verification system to keep original content appearing above various pilfered digital garbage in the search results. It was supposed to provide good content producers with online authority and additional visibility.

In reality, Google’s own studies have shown that Authorship (which required a ponderous, confusing, borderline inane process to implement) was being used by relatively few online entities despite its three years on the scene. Of those who had implemented it, the majority did it wrong. To make matters worse, the company eventually refuted its own early studies that Authorship’s visual features, such as author photos appearing next to their linked articles, produced much benefit in the clickthrough department. The program turned out to be an enormous failure. In August of 2014, the whole thing was publicly scrapped.

As Google’s own platform user numbers came under fire by both media analytics firms and other social networks, a steady deflation of the Google Plus dirigible followed. Vic Gundotra, the architect of the platform, left the company in spring of 2015. The majority of Google Plus staff was shuffled into other departments. Applications like Google Photos and Hangouts were quickly unbundled and became standalone products.

Marketers also left in droves. With no Authorship to implement, no search engine benefits to reap, and no users to engage, relieved social media interns stopped posting to the platform. Google finally gave in and handed the users what they wanted: a central Google Account sign-in to link all tools and properties together without Google Plus as the nucleus.

Google’s current stance on the product — what’s left of it — is that it will remain a space where niche communities can network and collaborate. In other words, Google Plus has been booted from its parent’s lavish mansion and is joining its new buddies MySpace and Friendster in a halfway home out by the railroad tracks, where it will continue to die of neglect, malnourishment, and probably substance abuse. Make no mistake: it’s over.