With Google's track record of customer service and product abandonment, I can't see doing business with them, except when there is no alternative.

Why would a company as rich as Google want to be in the domain business? It can't ever be material to them. I wouldn't be surprised if Google abandoned this business and transferred domains to, say, Godaddy.

>Example is google voice which is frozen in time.

No kidding. The integration with Google Hangouts has been a disaster, and me moving to iOS has made it even worse. Of course, there are no good competitors, so I'm stuck in the holding pattern just hoping some of the ridiculous issues get fixed.

As a long-time Google Voice user, I've been pretty happy with Hangouts integration. Texts, VoIP, cross-platform use... could still use invisibility and a (much) better set of "stickers," but I'm otherwise pretty happy with it and Google ecosystem integration. Admittedly, I'm on a Galaxy Note right now and can't attest to the iPhone experience.

GVoice used to have ATROCIOUS call quality that seems to have been ameliorated by Hangouts. Calls within the US and Canada are still free, voicemail service is second to none, and I'm extremely happy with the texting integration with Hangouts. What else do we want?

Here's a simple thing: I want to SMS a friend. I type in their name in my Hangouts OSX app. It brings up their GTalk interface. No. I want to SMS. In iOS texting or Android texting, all I need to do is search the name (obviously) to call/SMS. In Hangouts I need to know the person's number, so what I do is open the Google Voice app (which is deprecated), search their name, copy/paste their number into Hangouts, and SMS them. Ridiculous.

EDIT: Also, the OSX Hangouts app crashes about every 2 hours with no error message. This is a "known issue" of varying types on Google's site, but customer service with them, well, you know how that is.

Ah, I think it's a UI problem. Open up your friend's name. In the bottom left corner is a little green chat icon, which signifies that you're sending a Hangouts message. Tap that and you should see the option to send a text to the associated phone number.

It's not necessarily intuitive unless you know to look for it, and it might not work if your Google Contacts are incomplete (as in, you don't associate your Hangouts friend with his phone number). But it works really well for me.

That doesn't work. I search for Bob Robot. I see Bob Saget (wtf) and other celebrities named Bob. OK that's not helpful.

Oh finally, Bob Robot comes up. I click it. It says "Bob Robot isn't on Hangouts right now..." Well I don't want that. I want to send an SMS.

OK let's look for a green chat icon. Nope, just a smile button to put emojis in there.

This is OSX's Chrome plugin as stated.