Why is that? Are those people more likely to be "taste makers", influencing and connecting other people? I think Google Apps users must wait for new features because of technical difficulties that Google would like to defer to a post-1.0 version.
Yes. Absolutely. There are lots of early adopters like myself who jumped on Google Apps the moment they became available and were strong advocates for Apps and other Google offerings. Lately though it's like we've somehow become second class citizens in the googleverse.
I doubt it. This is somewhat speculation and somewhat observation, but Google seems to build produces with fairly independent teams. As the recent rant shows, this means that very often the projects don't have strong api's to interact with.
However, what the rant did not touch on is how integrating things into a large infrastructure can slow down development. It's much easier to iterate on a product when you don't have to maintain stable APIs or meet the numerous requirements needed to tightly integrate into a larger system.
My guess is that Google chooses the style of development it does precisely so that it can create and test products quickly and with independent teams. A downside to this is that is that they need to spend a lot of extra time when they finally do integrate a product into something like the Apps framework.
I certainly don't think it's "deliberate" in the sense that they would ever want to exclude Apps users, but I think it's deliberate in the sense that they saw fixing the Apps problem as a much lower priority, perhaps because they know there's a high degree of vendor lock-in for us (it's not like I'm going to move to a Microsoft offering). From their point of view it could be a totally rational business decision, given finite resources, but it's still shafting your most loyal customers.
