So it's really easy to predict Google. Just ask the following questions:
- can Google run ads to every user of the product? - can Google extract usage data to build a better user profile, in order to charge more for above ads?
The answer with regard to Talk or any interoperable service, is almost always no to both.
The incoherency we see is related to the fact that not every engineer or manager at Google is fully plugged into the above or sometimes they create a product that fails to answer the above with the hope they'll figure that out later. Sometimes the nature of the product or the fact that it's an open standard makes it impossible to evolve the product to get the questions right.
I loved that I could use my native Mac messaging app to communicate with colleagues in google chat. It was real-time and all messages were logged and available in gmail. I guess that's going away.
Google is a feudally organized collection of fiefdoms and this shows in their product strategy.
