My recollection is Google+ was independent of Orkut and kind of a "WTF, you have Orkut already?"

I was also working in MSSQL and .NET at the time. MySpace was a MSSQL shop as well. There was a real battle going on at the time between the LAMP stack and the MS stack. I can totally believe that running Windows inside Google was not straightforward - MS really was late on the DevOps trend and you can still see it. Running MS software at scale sucked.