Exactly. Any other company would kill to have the massive amount of chances they had to be _the_ communications network. Most of the current winners (WhatsApp, snapchat, Facebook) probably could've done it with a fraction of the opportunities Google had. But instead we got literally a decade of them making seemingly arbitrary choices about their messaging products to the point that my prior has made a 180 degree turn: a messaging product coming out of Google is to be avoided like the plague, not preferred.

My usual bias is towards giving companies a pretty huge benefit of the doubt, since these problems are usually very difficult to get right. There's just so, so much data here (from inside and outside the company) to suggest that this was actually pure incompetence.