Is there any history of this?
Google has been on the market for 20 years, if you can believe it. They have been here for a very long time, they have built a huge business and changed the way information is organized, found and consumed.
Google is a once-in-a-generation organization, and this is being told by a man who has a love-hate relationship with them (as do many SEO/online marketing people).
Despite their growth, they always had the same goal, to organize world information, to make it universally useful and accessible.
Google also focused on other areas, such as Social, but they did not achieve great success because they are better at organizing information than at making it.
The Authorship program was discontinued in 2014 (the post about SEL is HERE