Voice was a really frustrating product for me because it was so clearly years ahead of its time and also ignored by Google for so long that everyone else caught up and passed them.
In 2010 I was able to have one number ring multiple phones, automatic transcription of voicemail, text people from a web browser (!), switch between network providers without having to deal with number porting, it was great.
What killed it for me was that MMS was silently dropped, no images, but worse group SMS was handled by MMS so if people added you to group chats you just wouldn't get any of the messages and they would have no indication that you weren't getting them.
This went unsolved for years.
Eventually iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook - basically everyone else took this market. Then Google started some anemic work on it again, along the way making and killing a bunch of other chat products that all sucked in different ways.
Along with google plus and cloud, this is probably one of their biggest strategic failures.
In 2010 I was able to have one number ring multiple phones, automatic transcription of voicemail, text people from a web browser (!), switch between network providers without having to deal with number porting, it was great.
What killed it for me was that MMS was silently dropped, no images, but worse group SMS was handled by MMS so if people added you to group chats you just wouldn't get any of the messages and they would have no indication that you weren't getting them.
This went unsolved for years.
Eventually iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook - basically everyone else took this market. Then Google started some anemic work on it again, along the way making and killing a bunch of other chat products that all sucked in different ways.
Along with google plus and cloud, this is probably one of their biggest strategic failures.