Google gives up on Google Allo

FWIW, I'd much rather read a journalist's take on what Google is doing with messaging than a Google PR piece from a site which mostly writes PR pieces.[1] But there's probably good cause for multiple threads on the topic to be merged together.

[1]Mostly when a company does exclusive interviews with a site, you should be very skeptical of anything that site says on the matter. Especially if they have a design team making custom animations and such for said exclusive article.

Also it was reliable and interoperated fairly well despite other chat providers' sporadic attempts to build moats.

Wasn't it called Google Talk? And it was based on Jabber/XMPP, which let you use any compatible client.

I hate that they dropped support for it, choosing to go with a proprietary protocol without any public APIs.

For me Gtalk was the Yahoo Messenger of late 2000s. Me and my friends almost exclusively used Gtalk since it was very lightweight, it worked well, and you could use any of the large number of free clients with it.

Google had Slack too, two years before Slack, in the form of Wave.

I'm pretty sure most iOS users were at least once aware they were using Apple's messaging service because they were required to initially sign into iCloud (or create their iCloud account for the first time) and explicitly opt into iMessages.

But because the service and application are reliable and consistent and because upgrading between iPhones is also mostly seamless and carries those settings forwards between device upgrades, it just fades into the background as something you did 5 years ago and don't need to think about again.

That's what I want, too. The thing is, that's so very much not what the carriers want. They don't want to be a commodity (like corn or bacon): one provider of a commodity is very much the same as every other, which means that there's a race to the bottom on price. What the providers want is to differentiate themselves from their competition, in order to add friction to switching and thus help sustain higher prices.

The thing is, with general-purpose computing devices in our pockets we can run just about anything. We don't need special carrier features, and in fact those are anti-features: why would I want something I can only use with those of my friends on the same carrier?

Ultimately, of course, this also applies to OSes: why would I use something Android- or iOS-specific when I could use something universal instead? Right now, there are plenty of iPhone users using iCloud services which lock out their Android-using friends & family, but over time social pressure will lead the to find more platform-neutral ways to share.

The web is eating the world, and that means being in the ISP or OS space is a losing game (in the long term: in the short term, of course, there's plenty of profit to be had).

That's the great comedy here: Everyone succeeding in the chat market has been around for a number of years. Google tries something for about a year, decides it doesn't have enough immediate traction, and then dumps it before anyone even has an account. And they keep abandoning the little shares they gain each time.

If there's anyone who I have to chat with in the Google world, it's likely they still use or have Hangouts, because, including Talk, it's been around for a long time. As soon as Google decided to abandon it's existing, sizeable user base, it basically left the market.

I don't see how this ties you to a carrier -- if RCS ends up being what it promises to be, inter-carrier operability should not be an issue.

SMS/MMS is already operated through your carrier. RCS is no different, in that regard. My main peeve with this whole Google Jibe thing is that we, as consumers, won't get to opt in or out of Google collecting our conversations.

Since we didn't all decide to send Google our chat conversations, Google has decided to start convincing carriers to hand over our chat conversations in bulk without our permission.

Getting unified messaging "right" is very hard. I don't know if Apple has really solved it either. I recall people having weird problems if they switched away from iPhones because Apple would still try and prefer their own proprietary protocol over SMS. There's like a web portal now to remove yourself from iMessage, right?