First-order effects

• Google now has top-level executive validation behind Google+, with Schmidt publicly framing user numbers as evidence of success before the product is even broadly available.
• Orkut users get an explicit answer from Google — via the PC World pickup of Schmidt's remarks — that the older network will continue alongside Google+ rather than being folded into it.

Second-order effects

• Prominent early adopters like Kevin Rose redirecting their personal domains and engagement toward Google+ gives the network an influencer distribution channel it did not buy or build itself, pressuring Twitter and Facebook on the attention economy front.
• Coverage measuring Google+ share against Tweeted news links sets up a public scoreboard where every usage statistic — official or third-party — becomes ammunition in the narrative war over whether the launch is working.

Third-order effects

• If Schmidt's framing holds, Google's structure shifts from a company whose social efforts are experiments to one where social graph data is treated as core infrastructure alongside search and Android — the same diversification logic Android used to answer the "one-trick pony" criticism Schmidt himself has been rebutting since at least his 2009 TechCrunch interview.
• A pattern of executives defending young products with aggregate user counts, as Schmidt does here at Sun Valley, pushes rivals into responding with their own disclosure norms around active-user metrics.