To make sure we're clear - I'm an engineer and I spend my days writing code. I'm not in PR.
Also, I appreciate the dialogue and the discussion. I hope I don't come across as defensive or argumentative. My specialty is writing code, not communicating with the public :-)

We all live in bubbles of various sorts. Working at Google is clearly a bubble of a sort. A lot of more information gets shared internally than gets released publicly. As a mild digression - sometimes it gets hard to keep track of what information is private and what has been shared publicly. I think most of us err on the side of caution and default to talking less than more.

"figure out how to communicate with people outside of Google who have a billion other things to worry about in the ordinary course of their lives that are far more important to them than Google"

This is where I'm sure there is a lot of ground for debate on how an announcement like this should have been made.

On one hand, I could argue that - given that there are a lot of people that could care less about Google, or about this announcement - posting it on Google+ was exactly the right thing to do, since the announcement was about Google+.

After all - HN is itself a big bubble and there are plenty of topics that people within the HN bubble care passionately about but that people outside of this particular bubble care much less about <shrug>. The G+ names policy is (IMO) one of those issues. It's a topic that people seem to either be really passionate about, or completely indifferent. I'd say the portion that care passionately is over-represented in the HN community (for the record - there are probably even a higher percentage that are passionate about it within the company. This was, and is, a hotly debated topic internally).

I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong about whether making this particular announcement on G+ was the best move - just that I think it was a reasonable one.

"Google's leadership may have had such a vision, and may have communicated it with some clarity internally"

It wasn't really messaged much differently or with much more clarity within the company, as far as I can tell.

My perspective comes more from having a front-row seat for watching the sausage being made :-) (obviously this is something that is hard to scale)

There is - unfortunately - very little hard science or hard data available for how to put together a product like G+. A lot of it comes down to having a vision, making some assumptions and trying to build a product around those. And then paying attention to what happens.

There have been plenty of decisions about the design and policies surrounding G+ that I haven't agreed with over time. What I have respected, though, is the fact that the team and the leadership have listened and have paid attention and have made course corrections as things have developed.
There have been more of those that we got to witness while the product was still in internal-only beta. This is kind-of the first significant course correction that is publicly visible. I'm sure it won't be the last.

I've also observed during the making of G+ that it can be easy to posit ulterior motives to people when they are making decisions that just seem so wrong to you. I've been guilty of this myself :-) Over time, Vic/Brad/Yonatan/et al. have won my trust that there aren't ulterior motives behind the decisions, just strongly held opinions/assumptions/visions that are different than my own.

I don't know how to share that with the world, other than to show up here and talk to people when I have something to say :-)