People forget that Google had a perfectly good messaging service called Google Talk that lived inside Gmail (the biggest product besides the iPhone at that poin

People forget that Google had a perfectly good messaging service called Google Talk that lived inside Gmail (the biggest product besides the iPhone at that point), interoperated with XMPP and AIM back in 2007, and threw it all away in 2011 as part of their mad dash to make a Facebook competitor in Google+. With Google+, we got Hangouts, which later became a standalone product in 2013 so that they could sunset Google Talk. If they had just kept iterating on Google Talk and made it similar in functionality to iMessage, they would be in such better shape today. Instead, they’ve thrown away the last ten years on messaging.