This might sound controversial but I believe it would actually be better if Google would close down their service. There is too many people using it for their

This might sound controversial but I believe it would actually be better if Google would close down their service. There is too many people using it for their email which creates unhealthy imbalance, also the shut down would not be as painful since there are plenty of other mail providers. For that reason though they won't do this. I agree with the authors suggestion regarding that Google does not want any service that acts as "dumb pipe". It explains what happened to Dejavu (currently Google Groups), or current separation of Google Talk from the rest of XMPP network. It seems like Google Voice will be next, I am starting to think that they used it for training their voice to text functionality, but since now there are other services such as Google Now/Voice Search they probably no longer need it.