Because T-Mobile is a company that actually knows how to handle customer service and tends to value its customers and employees highly; a practice that is almost antithetical to TelCo business.
The complete culture-incompatibility the two companies have would destroy the value of any purchase.
I agree T-Mobile has stellar customer service, I contacted them about poor coverage in a new area I moved to. Got a $40 credit on my line, and within a month a network technician had fixed the issue and brought my coverage up.
It's amazing the difference though, I'd call Verizon and would get a generic "We'll send someone to check on it" months later nothing would change. It's nice to be with a company that will actually do something about your problems.
Google wants their services to be available on all US wireless carriers in the US, not just one. And however much they fail to demonstrate it sometimes, Google wants their services available in the rest of the world, too. Getting entangled in a particular wireless market would also be an issue.
If they bought/had control of T-Mobile why would that prevent Android phones from being sold on Verizon/AT&T/Sprint let alone on other carriers around the globe?
> What's new about this? Prior to Hangouts, calls to my Google Voice number always was routed to my cell phones and Google Talk.
As I understand, both inbound and outbound calling via the Gmail interface were nonfunctional initially for users who upgraded to Hangouts, so the "new" thing is that the inbound call functionality was restored; outbound is still pending (and it sounds like they are planning, ultimately, much deeper integration than just restoring what the old Gmail Talk interface had.)
If that was the case, then the same can be said with an iPhone. How do you know if someone is secretly recording your conversation with the iPhone in their pocket?
Are you sure about that? If I search for "plumber philadelphia", I'm looking at organic and paid sections of the results page. The results in the paid sections tend to be pretty solid. They are local plumbers taking the time out and spending their ad budget online. To me that's a plus, along with a solid website.
I think they are strategically working towards that end. If they simply turned them off they'd be alienating Twitter users who use those apps and it would lead to lots of bad press.
Instead they're stunting their growth and signaling the beginning of the end.
Not cutting off third party apps right away also buys them time so they can improve the iOS and Mac apps (where I think the majority of third-party usage is), but I agree that the bad press is a larger deterrent than crappy first-party apps.
Its happening. The writing has been on the wall since OAuth became the only means of authentication.
They'll still be small/niche apps to count how many times your friends mention their cats in a given day, but anything remotely resembling a client will not be allowed.
