[nwallin]

It doesn't make any sense to me.

There are parts of making a chat platform that are hard. Want to support end to end encryption? Very hard. But google doesn't give a shit. They're going to warehouse all messages in plaintext in a forever database that they'll use to train NLP models anyway.

Interop between a dozen different providers is hard. But google isn't doing interop with a dozen different providers. They're doing interop with themselves. They can say "oops this API sucks" every four months and that's fine.

How Google can make Docs a thing and make it work well but can't figure out chat is bananas. Or gmail. What is chat but email with message size limits and the explicit removal of interop as a feature?