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Comment by throwthisawayt | Hacker News Reader

As an xoogler, this tells me that the voice team is now staffed again. It also tells me that the executive team is thinking about reducing headcount and focus on hangouts, but still are uncertain.

Finally, it tells me that google still has no idea how to crack the messaging space, and has so no team internally that is taking charge but a bunch of teams with different approaches, all jockeying for executive support.

Google will lose this space because it lacks focus while Facebook is owning it through focus on the messenger platform and the acquisition of whatsapp.

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The answer to this is easy: copy imessage. If Apple had even a little bit of common sense they'd support imessage on windows and android and just charge a small fee of some sort to make money off of it. They're blackberry right now, they could own the market if they were willing to eat their own market share.

As for google: I have no idea what is up with the stupidity. What people want is simple: an app that works on the PC and the phone, that can do messaging that falls back to SMS if the other-end isn't capable of "data" based communications, and ideally has encryption as an option and video chat as an option. Hangouts was like 90% of the way there, and then for some reason they went insert offensive analogy here and decided to release allo and duo with half the functionality. And oh by the way, after the release of those two apps, Hangouts started acting goofy for a month (which I struggle to believe is coincidence as much as I hate conspiracy BS).

In Apple's case, I don't think a lack of common sense is the problem. With the iPhone making the bulk to Apple's revenue, this is a textbook example of a "strategy tax" [0], and the thing about strategy taxes is they're really hard to overcome even when you can see the issue staring you dead in the face. It takes very uncommon leadership to hobble your cash cow.

[0] http://scripting.com/davenet/2001/04/30/strategyTax.html

After reading that article, it honestly sounds like the author is arguing against the entire concept of strategy, and would probably love Google's "I realize we already have two of those we put no effort into maintaining, but let's compete with ourselves by launching a third and telling everyone it's the future" anti-strategy strategy. Hell: what I want from Google is to see a strategy, as all I am seeing is complete and total chaos. What this article calls "strategy tax" would be better called "bad strategy", and I don't really see the alternative suggestions as better, as there are assuradely solutions (such as making your web browser a component and sharing a layout engine with the word processor, allowing the browser to edit and save simple documents in the format of the word processor, which is then essentially a paid upgrade to the basic editor) that make more sense than "let's sacrifice our high ground on what sounds like a bet".

Opening iMessage to other platforms would cannibalize iOS sales. I hear soo many people say they'd try Android, but they can't lose iMessage

I don't think "desperately force our users to stay in our ecosystem" is a very successful business model.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ibm

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ORCL

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CRM

In what way is Apple desperate ?

Apple doesn't make money through advertising they make it by selling phones. How does opening iMessages up to Android help them to sell more phones ?

Steve Jobs famously believed in cannibalizing their own sales. (Or, to be less charitably, he believed in that when it was convenient to believe that).

Whether the culture has carried over, who knows.

Even as an iPhone user, I never would have thought iMessage was even in the top 5 or 10 reasons to keep using the platform. But I'm old, don't text all that much, and have unlimited SMS anyway.

I imagine all the cool kids these days are using alternative data-based services anyway. Snapchat, the like. For us old folks, WhatsApp, GroupMe, etc.

It's not necessarily the experience on the phone that is lacking in other SMS based apps on competing platforms -- I see it as the ability to leverage being able to message anyone from most platforms be it conputer, iPad, or phone and have it all in sync. That to me is the massive draw to it.

I kind of wonder if there isn't more to this. Perhaps it's why Continuity [1] never fulfilled its full vision of moving seamlessly between iOS and macOS. Lack of support for third party apps, especially messaging apps, felt intentional.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X_Yosemite#Continuity

> I imagine all the cool kids these days are using alternative data-based services anyway.

Yes and no, because friend groups are fragmented across services and iMessage or text is the common denominator, especially for group messages.

Apple wanted to open it up, supposedly, but I read somewhere that they were apparently blocked by lawsuits with VirnetX (an apparent NPE/patent-troll), ongoing since 2010.

If you can find the source, I'd love to read it.

You may be thinking of FaceTime. Apple was going to open that, but a successful lawsuit by a patent troll (I think it was VirnetX) put a stop to that, because Apple had to change FaceTime to proxy through their own servers, which meant that opening it up wouldn't do any good.

That said, VirnetX has also sued Apple about iMessage, so it's possible there's something to what you've said (but I've never heard it said before that Apple was going to open up iMessage).

At least some of the stupidity must be due to how many good ex-Google engineers I've met - and how many lame duck engineers who have positioned their resumes and lives just to be hired there for status purposes.

Why did google mess up messaging in the first place? It seemed like this space was ripe for their taking. (Basically, just replicate the gmail concept for messaging. Keep it sorta-open-enough and free enough. Seems like a no-brainer.)

I mean, what was the specific root cause?

The specific root cause is Google's practice of promoting based on product launches; it literally doesn't matter whether that product goes on to be successful. This practice creates a strong and perverse incentive to continually launch new products while discouraging iterative development of existing products.

I've never worked at Google, but... didn't Larry Page announce a full-blown program to fight that like 3-4 years ago? Work on features/depth rather than new products?

Perhaps it was launched but it literally didn't matter whether that product went on to be successful.

That is ironically insightful.

At least he got that promotion, though.

He can launch programs all he wants, but unless that trickles down to management, and the incentives are aligned to at least reward iterative development as much as launching new products, it's not going to change anything.

Seems like he should be in the power of defining the reward structure at Google though.

He should have a bit of say in that, yeah. But if he didn't use any of that influence, then it wouldn't happen.

Do you have knowledge or experience from within Google? or is this your own conjecture from the outside. My perspective as an outsider is that you are right, but I'm just curious if you have any special insight.

I am well qualified to comment.

I think the specific root cause is that messaging is actually a number of different spaces with different ideal solutions, which I think Google is starting to get even though I don't think they've yet actually nailed any of the subspaces (or even necessarily correctly not identified exactly what they are.)

Except that Apple and Facebook managed to largely nail all of the spaces with a single app.

Facebook has at least two (Facebook messenger and Whatsapp.)

Facebook also nailed cross-platform native and web.

I really like the messenger.com [1] version of the client.

[1]: https://www.messenger.com/

Facebook has done a pretty poor job of unifying their messaging offering with WhatsApp. Long-time WhatsApp users may see this as a blessing but it's odd that you have seemingly competing teams owned by the same company putting out competing products, one of which has an outstanding API and the other which is basically a walled garden.

Google was in a unique position to deliver a best-in-class messaging client and own the space: they have more users than Facebook or Apple and more good will than either of those companies (based on my own personal opinion and interactions).

Despite that, they've had numerous messaging platforms: Google Talk, Waze (kind of), Hangouts, and Google Voice. I wouldn't call any of them great products - they've all done barely good enough to stay useful, falling short in the areas of cross-platform reliability, group messaging, and multimedia messaging. Meanwhile companies like Slack are eating their lunch. I love Slack (and have in fact moved to using a private Slack team for personal messaging among friends) but it still saddens me a bit that a Google has failed to deliver a solid offering here.

The Hangouts app fixed the missing MMS/threading issues. So if we've switch from Voice to Hangouts ... do we have to switch back now?

It's pretty confusing and there are so many services that won't take either of my Google Voice numbers.

Hangouts API is discontinuing, and the app is buggy as heck. We've already moved away from it and are experimenting with in-house solutions or looking for alternatives. Slack is too pricey, everything else seems shite.

You mean Google is discontinuing the API? (They had an API? They removed XMPP federation and eventually support, if that's what you mean).

The libpurple/Hangups projects for chat clients is the work of reverse engineering the existing Hangouts protocol (which apparently heavily relies on protocol buffers).

Yes, they had an API which could control and customize Hangouts https://developers.google.com/+/hangouts/

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