No, not really. It seems they stumbled on some good solutions and nice features by accident during their random walk process to IM application design, but they

No, not really. It seems they stumbled on some good solutions and nice features by accident during their random walk process to IM application design, but they forgot about them just as soon. The first step in figuring it out is to get something compelling in an useable state, and then commit to it because people are not going to use something they’d drop in a year. They did it with Google Talk but could not replicate it, which tends to show that they (collectively; I am sure some people at Google could predict what would happen) did not really know what they were doing.