Gtalk is their window into a bbm style experience. They just need to capitalize on it and develop it into thwir next os update.
Sent from my DInc2 using Tapatalk 2
It's too late. Google took too long and they baked Google Talk into the OS in a way that makes little sense - it should have been broken off after GB when they realized how much of a PITA it is to add huge futures to it and have it propagate to phones decently (remember even GB phones needed a small update to get Voice and Video Chat). Also, carriers like AT&T are blocking the functionality in the FW. It was as dumb decision.
Blackberry was very smart about BBM. They just developed it as a separate app and pre-loaded it on their devices (similar to Google+ app, but without requiring you to sign up for a another social network, and with way superior feature set for messaging, of course). That means when they rolled out BBM Voice Calling, devices just updated the app on BB 6/7 devices and they could use it. Android devices required FW updates to a specific subversion of GB before they could even use that. If you didn't get a FW update (or hack your phone and install a custom ROM), you simply didn't get it.
For Google Talk to be competitive with BBM it would require YEARS before enough phones are update it to propagate it properly across their user base, and the OEMs won't help as they still develop new low-mid range phones with old Android versions. RIM still has over 80M devices world-wide, not counting people who are going to go back to BB or perhaps buy one of the new ones as their first smartphone.
Google+ Messenger was the wrong way to go as a lot of people simply don't have the time to use it heavily. A lot of people use it like a glorified RSS reader, they don't actually share anything just troll comments.
I think your last part of that statement pretty much sums up the issue with their messaging services and development strategy. "develop it into their next OS" is actually a pretty terrible strategy.
However, Facebook and Skype may fix that for us, in a cross platform sense. Skype is practically there, already. It only misses Sent/Delivered/Read statuses.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft is releasing Skype as a separate app instead of in-built functionality to avoid having the carriers cripple it the way they do with Google Talk on Android phones.