Definitely something else. The original motivation (and one of the reasons it never took off) was to have a rich messaging service under control of the operators, just like SMS and MMS today - meaning they can bill you per message, if they want to. Parts of the problems the protocol has also come from the design requirement to keep the operator in control, when it isn’t really a requirement for a modern messaging service.
In the current setup with google running their own service that won’t happen - but it seems google is cooperating with the operators for that, i.e., as the operators couldn’t pull it off themselves they were happy to partner with google when google offered it. I don’t know about you, but “a messaging system with the control split between google and the operators” doesn’t sound like a very desirable thing to me.
Definitely something else. The original motivation (and one of the reasons it never took off) was to have a rich messaging service under control of the operators, just like SMS and MMS today - meaning they can bill you per message, if they want to. Parts of the problems the protocol has also come from the design requirement to keep the operator in control, when it isn’t really a requirement for a modern messaging service.
In the current setup with google running their own service that won’t happen - but it seems google is cooperating with the operators for that, i.e., as the operators couldn’t pull it off themselves they were happy to partner with google when google offered it. I don’t know about you, but “a messaging system with the control split between google and the operators” doesn’t sound like a very desirable thing to me.