Years ago, the US carriers tried to make a mobile wallet to compete with Google Wallet and Apple Pay. It did not go well, and not just because of the unfortunately first attempt at naming it.
I am so discombobulated by yesterday’s news that the four major US carriers are banding together to make a whole other company to replace SMS with RCS and ship their own app that I barely know where to begin.
I guess at the beginning.
One of the biggest botched opportunities in all of Silicon Valley in the past few years is Google’s repeated, persistent, tragic-on-a-Greek-scale failure to get its messaging products right. Six (six!) years ago I detailed Google’s massive effort to unify everything under Hangouts. Every year since then has been either a fiasco, catastrophe, retrenchment, or an outright retreat.
After five years of that, Google threw in the towel and put the carriers in charge of text messaging on Android. It went all in…