[kriro]

I think they could have done Google+ and the whole social aspect better but they are still driving a couple of important buses. I think they should work on an open source WhatsApp clone with strong crypto.

- The browser it the platform of the future...they have a good browser

- Mobile is in everyone's pocket...they have a mobile OS

- Shocking newsflash...people still use mail...they have a good email service

- They provide "cloud office"

- Search is still search

And they have a bazillion other good projects.

If you want to say they slept on something I wouldn't even pick social. I'd say their biggest mistake in recent tmes was that they let Amazon get such a lead in cloud hosting/infrastructure and they aren't the #1 there.

[higherpurpose]

The problem with Google and also open source apps is that they don't promote their products very well. It's more understandable with open source projects, though, since they don't have the funding, but Google has no excuse.

Take Hangouts for example. Android is now on over 1 billion devices, and will be on 3 billion in ~2 years. Most of those people should have Hangouts by default. But I'm willing to bet most of those people will not use Hangouts. Most of them won't even know what the heck Hangouts is. And since Google isn't promoting it heavily, that means that even if someone wants to use it, he knows it's going to be hard to get his friends to use it if they haven't even heard much about it or what it does.

Larry Page was right about needing to be "all-in" with a mobile company like Motorola. It used to be much worse while Eric Schimdt was leading it, with products like Google Checkout or even Google Docs being in a sort of coma-like state for years before you'd see any improvements. But even today, Google still seems to make a lot of stuff just for the sake of it, and don't seem all-in.

It feels like they want to just do the minimum amount of work for a product. With Hangouts they probably think "we've made it available to everyone with an Android phone - we don't need to do more than that now, do we? I should just become popular by itself!"

The difference between Hangouts and Whatsapp is that the company behind Whatapp treated it like a product - a product they needed to be as successful as possible to survive. Google treats Hangouts as a feature - a feature of which they don't necessarily think they need that bad to survive. That's why something like Whatsapp becomes popular, and something like Hangouts not so much.

That being said, I've love for them to integrate TextSecure/future Whisper (1) into Android, at the very least as an underlying layer, the way CyanogenMod did it recently (2). As soon as Whisper is out, I'm going to recommend everyone I know to use it, and same for e-mail as soon as a nice DarkMail-based client appears that's easy to use. But if Google offered me all of that, I wouldn't have to do it.

1- https://whispersystems.org/blog/a-whisper/

2- http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/whisperpush-secure-messaging...

[toyg]

The problem is that Google is not just a developer, it's the platform owner, i.e. the company who has to sell the platform to manufacturers and carriers.

Carriers don't want features like Hangouts because they eat into their margins for crappy but expensive features like video-calls. If carriers don't want something, manufacturers (who have to sell to carriers) don't want it either, so Google (who have to sell to manufacturers) has to downplay it as well. Same goes for IM: carriers would prefer that you used their metered SMS services rather than ubiquitous GTalk or something equivalent.

Third-party developers like WhatsApp don't have to maintain a relationship with carriers, so they can push anything they want as hard as they want.