Google tries again, again, and again, to create a decent messaging app, and fails every time. Whether it's bad marketing or management, it's clearly not the simplest thing in the world to achieve what apple did with iMessage (unless now you want to posit that the billionaires in Google also have no idea what they're doing ever) and the discussion is relevant especially when we are reviewing their management style.

Google Talk was fairly successful for its time. Why Google were unable to replicate that success again, I have no clue.