Honestly, what I think we're seeing is evidence of an existential crisis in some quarters in Google. There's a lot of people who still believe in "do no evil" and who furthermore believe that part and parcel of that is not building walled gardens. Then you have other people - including Larry - who think walled gardens are the only solution. The PM for RTC at Google wrote a long email about how basically interoperability is dead, XMPP is dead, federation is dead, and every attempt by Google to build open standards has been effectively exploited by competitors.

So a lot of influential management thinks going full FB is the way to go. But a lot of other people at Google think open standards are still the way of the future, or can be if a company like Google is willing to champion them.

The result of all of this is a complete and utter dumpster fire from a product perspective. It's the classic "if we're not pulling together then we're rowing against each other" problem. I think Google would be able to execute just fine if they could settle on what they want to achieve. Instead we have this.