bdowney

You're not missing anything. Most if not all of your concerns were voiced during the internal dogfooding phase and, as usual for G+ and Vic Gundotra, duly noted and ignored.

And still is really sad that Google employees still waste time creating memes about Michael in their stupid internal memegen site many months after his departure.

Personally I'd love to see a community driven extension to XMPP, with its corresponding RFC, which would allow feature parity with Google's proprietary crap while keeping interoperability and federation, so people could give Google the finger on this one.

Yep, I already warned about this a few days ago. I would like to encourage everyone to avoid using this walled garden service and make sure you tell both your friends and Google why. Say NO to proprietary network protocols!

The Netflix competitor is paid Youtube channels, except it only works in a few countries and it's not as good as Netflix.

Google has bet everything on social and are creating these satellite services to fuel G+ usage and adoption. You won't see anything revolutionary coming out of GOOG for a while.

I currently use Spotify and there is no way I'll be switching to a Google product. In fact I'm trying to reduce my dependence on Google products.

There is no successor to Reader, it's gone. Forever. Babel (Hangouts) is not theoretical, is very real and has been leaked already. It's just a walled garden (they threw XMPP away and went with their own proprietary protocol) so I personally would steer clear from it.

You should not be surprised, those people are stuck in the 12th century. I wish the rest of the world stopped buying oil from those idiots.

No they didn't. This is actually run by a third party as Google does not own these offices. FWIW Google has a pretty decent security team, although for some reason most of them are arrogant assholes (e.g. Tavis Ormandy)

Google just paid him so no more anti-Google articles will be written. Very clever of them.

My sentiments exactly. I've met plenty of condescending assholes at Google but them being geeks was not the reason why they behaved like jerks.

That's because that joke stopped being funny 10 years ago.