Enlarge / Just a few of the many Google messaging logos. Can you name them all? (credit: Ron Amadeo)
Google has been unable to field a stable, competitive messaging platform for years and has thoroughly lost the messaging war to products with a long-term strategy. At least some divisions inside the company are waking up to how damaging this is to Google as a company, and now Google's latest strategy is to... beg its competition for mercy? Google—which has launched 13 different messaging apps since iMessage launched in 2011—now says, "It's time for Apple to fix texting."
Google launched a new website called "Get the Message"—a public pressure campaign with a call to "tweet at @Apple to #GetTheMessage and fix texting." Google hopes public pressure will get Apple to adopt RCS, a minor upgrade to the SMS standard that Apple uses for non-iMessage users. Google has been pushing this strategy since the beginning of the year, but coming from the company with the world's most dysfunctional messaging strategy, it just comes across as a company tired of reaping what it has been sowing.
Worldwide, iMessage isn't that popular (people tend to like Whatsapp), but in the US, iMessage is enough of a cultural phenomenon to have Billboard Top 100 songs written about how much it sucks to have a green (SMS) iMessage bubble. One of Apple's biggest competitors—especially for online services—is Google, and Google's inability to compete with iMessage has contributed a great deal to the current situation. Google apparently feels iMessage's dominance is damaging to its brand, so now it's asking Apple, nicely, to please stop beating it so badly.
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