If you look at Google's messaging products timeline, it's an embarrassing mess. If you viewed it in reverse-chronological order, it actually looks like progress.
I've never seen such a careless disregard for a user base combined with the cognitive dissonance of new product releases. Hangouts, Duo, etc aren't circling the drain, they're already in the sewer.
May the original Gchat (with open APIs) rest in peace.
They keep making new messaging apps that compete with each other instead of providing users with one great messaging app. Gmail's getting objectively crappier and they're killing off the much better Inbox interface. I'm not saying they make unilaterally bad decisions and I'm decently happy with my cheap Android phone but ten years ago Google was making new and exciting stuff and I haven't felt that way about them in years.
The problem is they can't settle down on something. I can't even tell you what their current messaging product is right now. Google Wave is dead. Google Facebook^HPlus is dead. I think Hangouts is dead? The thing in my GMail gives me notices that it's going away. Is it Google Voice? Why would I use a product with the name "Voice" to type "Text" to people, especially when it used to be a phone substitute. Certainly nothing is integrated, aside from whatever the thing in GMail is that's going away (and a 100 pixel wide chat isn't going to be useful for team discussions, anyway). Messaging for Google feels like "this ought to be something we can be good at, but can't actually figure out what to do".
Google makes "messaging products" but it's just something that floats on top on top of the sea of Google stuff. Like oil on top of water.
This is one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. The company that has had 47 different messaging apps and changes them weekly trying to lecture the company that nailed it first time. Grow up Google.
It's hard to get promoted at Google unless you launch things, and the Internal Tools team never launched shit. So they just latch onto any excuse to launch whatever they can, even if it makes no fucking sense. You'll see this a lot with other Google products too, Gmail being one of the worst offenders (totally unnecessary UI changes that piss everyone off, changing Gtalk into Hangouts just to have a chance to launch a new app, etc).
The Gtalk one is particularly ridiculous if you buy into their disingenuous arguments about combining disparate forms of messaging, especially given the spectacular failure of Wave, which tried to do the exact same thing. But if you view it through the lens of "Gtalk hadn't launched anything in a while, and their engineers wanted to launch something" it makes perfect sense.
Product has never been Google's strong suit, but I'm in awe of how incredibly poor their messaging/communication product strategy has been over the last decade. They had a decade long headstart and they more than squandered it through the selective application of neglect where attention was needed and attention where things were already great.
It's a cultural problem. Google fails to follow through after the initial shiny has worn off. In Google, you are rewarded for shipping not maintaining. That's why they have a gorillion messaging apps instead of one really good one. They weren't willing to commit the engineering time to implement those features because the interest wasn't there.
Can anyone explain the management at Google and why they continue to produce these products that seem to be copies of copies of programs that have been failures, before they even launch? Is it like an octopus where the 7th tentacle doesn't know what the 1st is doing?
I'm very curious about the decision making process at Google these days.
If the world needs anything, it's one more messaging app. /s
This is embarrassingly bad for Google. Their failure in creating a stable and long-lived messaging platform is well known but I can't believe they are committing so much into something with so much reliance on network operators and handset manufacturers that doesn't meed the needs of a modern, secure platform.
They have a history of pulling projects that people like, and seem capricious / chaotic about it. How many different chat / messaging platforms has Google put out in the last ten years, for example?
Other companies cancel things, but I’m not aware of any that seem to do so as often. Google started developing a reputation for this more than a decade ago and has just kept doing it if not even doing it more often!
Is it Google’s right? This is always a weird question. Sure, it’s their right. It’s also people’s right to criticize them for doing so.
I do question anybody who adopts anything from Google these days. I just have zero confidence that I can expect any new Google product or service to stick around.
LOL Google is pontificating on a messenger app, of all things? Google, I'm not sure you're qualified to have an opinion on this topic, given your historical failures in this space :)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...
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