Instead, they myopically saw Facebook as a threat and started one of the most user-hostile rampages I've been victim to. They hobbled existing products and over-complicated new products to force people onto a platform no one asked for. Facebook (and others) used this opportunity to grab communication away from Google.

It's all an interesting business case study of missing the forest for the trees.

IT culture in general and Google especially puts too much pressure on engineers to re-invent the wheel to get better visibility and promotions.

(Plenty do out of love for the product/customers/etc, but man it's soul crushing to not be recognized for it)

My understanding is that not everybody there knows where the corporate ladders are. If you don't (yet) know the terms of promotion at the GOOG, you'll be happy to knock out bugs and tweaks day in and day out. You're a Googler!

For example everyone says value "work life balance is balanced here and encouraged". But irrespective of whether they actually do it or not - if the two people output around the same ballpark but one is visible as more serious/responsible and seems more invested usually by virtue of more hours at work that becomes more "visible" than the "casual" 7-8 hr person with the same output.

My social group was dominated by BBM & Skype until iMessage & Facebook Messenger took over. I've always assumed Google's efforts around messaging were because they had a niche product inside Gmail that they wanted to make more consumer friendly, hence the constant attempts to rebrand it.

The reason I jumped out of Google ecosystem is, as you have mentioned, they forced me into closed ecosystems and I remained there for sometime but then the tools offered to me in the form of app, UI, and interfaces were beyond pathetic so I was out. So were my friends, family, relatives, and other acquaintances.

Orkut > Buzz > Wave > Chat > etc they did it one after another and they are still doing it. I mean you would think they would learn at some point.

I live in one of the wealthiest and advanced countries in the world. Ask a 12 year old girl what SMS is and she will not know. She will know WhatsApp.

And now they've decided to involve the carriers, using a technology that's not made to be cross platform but instead be dependent on phones. I can see RCS being a good solution for companies to send out rich boarding passes and similarly, but nobody around here uses SMS or MMS for person to person contact. Chat shouldn't be locked to or even routed through phones, and using a telephone number as an ID is impractical.

Disc: Googler, but this knowledge is my own as I grew up in India.

The fact that they failed to capitalize on it is what has allowed WhatsApp and others to become as big as they have. If Google hadn't messed it up, everyone would be using Google Talk, even in the 3rd world.

I often get disapproving looks when they realise I am not on Facebook :)

Clearly it would be a mistake to limit this to just phone users.

I agree with your point that in some countries people don't use Email and that's the face in China as well. But people use phone numbers just for register other services, as the online identity. We don't use SMS, and we prefer WeChat Audio over phone calls when it's available.

Having wifi but no cellular signal is such a rare usecase.

They should be trying to include everyone, telephone and non-telephone users alike.

For example, we recently launched UPI payments - that's like a banking address sort of thing (you can send from it and request too) and you usually get your UPI address like this "9876543210@upi". The number part is simply the 10 digit mobile number and that's it.

I read this piece [1] which centers on Jios impact on the telecom industry. It states that the rate of digitalization has been boosted, but doesn't really detail the societal impact. Do you recommend any particular article?

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/3f1fe4d6-e4e0-11e7-a685-5634466a6...

It would be possible to let people use both phone number and e-mail, that way I can log in on computers or my phone with a temporary SIM card while I'm traveling, and people in the developing world doesn't need to get an e-mail account.

Are you from a remote/small town or like tier 2-3 city? Freelancing maybe? As for the questions - it just got me curious.

Also flights are cheaper only nowadays. It used to be unreasonable.

Where are you located?

Mac/iOS Messages and/or SMS is my primary way of talking with friends and family. That seems pretty normal for my age range 25-45 and location (Seattle).

I think it has a lot do with mobile carrier pricing: here in Canada, mobile fees are enormously expensive, but SMS are almost always included for free. In Germany/Switzerland, many people use prepaid cards where SMS are (still) charged per message.

> Ik steur je wel even een appje

(I'll send you an message on WhatsApp)

is the norm in The Netherlands. My entire family, extended family, and everyone around them is all on WhatsApp. While I communicate with iMessage/SMS with friends in the US, that's not the case outside of the US. Everyone seems to have WhatsApp, most people don't use Google hangouts or other services alongside that, let alone SMS.

In English, you would never shorten the phrase "I'll send you a whatsapp" to "I'll send you an app" because the word "app" would be confused with a mobile app.

The Dutch still use the word "app" to mean a mobile app; "appje" means a whatsapp. So the diminuitive form allows them to disambiguate.

I'm also Dutch but I think 'app' is more like an alias for any chat service. WhatsApp is indeed huge though. Texting is basically dead in Europe afaict.

SMS is mainly used for bank alerts, confirmation codes, advertisement and scammers. I personally haven't used SMS for conversation in years.

Over to slack we go (which works fine).

I like imessage etc - little to no spam. I'll be curious how this carrier controlled approach will handle spammers.

Not everyone is on Gmail. There a untold millions of users who aren't interested in creating a Gmail account. Those users will never be reached with any "just use your Gmail account" strategy.

The downhill train wreck is not isolated to their messaging services. Google, as a whole, is a fragmented mess that has manifested with Android OS. Not only is Android OS crippled by Google's ADD-fueled incompetence, it's crippled by their inability to remove carrier-influence from their devices. Now, Google wants to double down on their boneheaded decision by doing the same with messaging. Google Messaging needs to be carrier independant, have SMS fallback, integrate with all Google services, and be bundled with Google Services on Android. I have lost /ALL/ faith in Google.

When I was working with ejabberd clusters servicing mobile clients it worked but I've had a lot less pain just using a custom protocol over websockets. My personal experience also seems to be mirrored throughout the industry as all the big players eventually move away from xmpp.

Riot Games is also using it for the messaging part of League of Legends (https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/chat-service-architec...)

XMPP is also used by military organisations such as NATO (https://www.isode.com/solutions/military-xmpp.html)

The sad truth about XMPP is that it just works, but it has a very bad publicity because there's just no marketing around it, and it's never used directly by users. So it suffers from that wrong image that is just completely outdated.

That sad truth is that people who actually use it end up dropping it. Its not some conspiracy. It just wasn't cutting it.

You also misunderstand what this api is referring to. These are APIs for your server to connect to Google's. This is not a direct http and xmpp connection to mobile devices. That's all abstracted away from this.

GTalk was awesome while it was federated.

Don't push your words on other people :(