[josh2600]

Mms is not practical to support because of the absurd implementation in the us. Emailing a picture is easy, but making an investment in an mmsc at a time when mmsc use is being deprecated makes no sense (unless it takes 20 years to be deprecated).

Google has to keep their costs down since GV doesn't make any money. You're not paying for the calls, you can't really complain about the quality. If you care about quality, setup a really simple PBX with call forwarding and connect it to flow route. Better quality and under a penny per minute.

Google isn't going to devote time to fixing the existing GV product, they want a new GV product, but there are infrastructure integration problems within google (grandcentral had a robust telephony stack but I imagine elgoog had quite the time integrating their switch into the infrastructure fabric 'google-ifying'). They likely see no benefit to improving the old platform as its just a loss leader, and increasing use of GV increases the losses. It's an almost Faustian bargain; buy Grandcentral, control the patents for VM transcription with an iron fist and never innovate.

It's both terrible and strategically correct in a view of absolute profits and losses (one that google admittedly rarely operates in).