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Comment by elvirs | Hacker News Reader

Its shocking how Google is embarrassing itself with these incompatible chat apps released one after another and abandoned right after the release. GTalk Gmail Chat Google Voice Hangouts Android Messages Allo Duo for fucks sake Google, just copy Whatsapp but make it stored on cloud, not on the device, like FB Messenger. Enable account recovery using email in addition to sms and enable usernames or email in addition phone number to add contacts. Thats pretty much all you need to do to beat the competition thanks to your android influence

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That's what you get when you apply reinforcement learning company-wide and set rewards +500k +promotion for completely new, "revolutionary" products ;-)

"and set rewards +500k +promotion for completely new, "revolutionary" products ;-)"

Do you have a source for this? Not disputing you, but would like to reference.

https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/

Thank you. That's a clear accounting of perverse incentives in action at Google.

"I adopted a new strategy. Before starting any task, I asked myself whether it would help my case for promotion. If the answer was no, I didn’t do it."

I think Google gave it a pretty good shot at competing with WhatsApp with Allo. The problem is that at the end of the day, the network effect is what matters with messaging. No matter how good the product, it doesn't matter if everyone I know doesn't use it as well. It's not an engineering question, it's a social one; a lot has to change to get people to switch from iMessage, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger today.

The theory says that you can get people to switch if you deliver a product that is x10 better than the competition, but really, how can you possibly improve messaging as it is today? It's not like people are going to go "Wow, this app sends my messages so much better than <current established app>, I'll go ahead and switch and tell everyone I know".

Is it that hard?, you force every android phone maker to install it as the default SMS client, and if someone else is using it you use allo network instead, and if the user's paying for sms say "sent with allo for free!"

If only allo actually supported SMS, which is the weirdest thing of it all...

Networking effects matter, but only when after you abandon a common protocol in favor of walled gardens.

GTalk, Gmail Chat, and Hangouts are all the same thing, and Google Voice works seamlessly through Hangouts. Android Messages is just an SMS app, it's no different from iMessage with the "iMessage" feature turned off. They were almost there until they released Allo and Duo instead of just refining their existing product.

Google has a culture where rewards and power go to the people who release products, not managers who maintain business lines. It means that they create great products but often don't support them well.

that + a desktop client/web app is all anyone wishes for, how can they be do blind and stupid.

It never ceases to amaze me how blatantly incompetent Google is when it comes to software, blind and stupid is not hyperbole, the proper thing to do here is absolutely crystal clear, users are begging for it (I know, I've googled trying to find a desktop solution that works and doesn't cost $5/month ffs), and they just keep releasing pieces of crap over and over. It's hard to believe this is real life sometimes.

Are you actually calling out arguably the most successful web software company of all time (primarily through search and adwords) for being incompetent? A company that profits billions a...quarter?

Maybe chat just doesn't make them any money so they don't really give a shit and all of these things are pet projects that get shut down on a whim?

The key to Google is that their real Users are advertisers. That's it. The "users" you're talking about are the product they're selling to their real Users(Advertisers).

Yes, yes I am. Because most of their software absolutely sucks.

You're talking about company, you expect coherent product vision/strategy of a single entity.

Reality is that all these products are result of autonomy given to teams - it's not really pushed top-down, so new 'innovative' ideas are spearheaded and pushed up for strategy's adoption.

Boom. This is why Slack and Discord expand so much. Usability plus availability. Sad people at Google get paid a lot of money to not figure these simple things out. Know your enemy and then reimplement their work in your own better way. Allo needed a desktop client and the video stuff should of been built in stop trying to copy Apple in that regard.

Hangouts has all that. What's wrong with hangouts? Why should it be replaced with something "newer"? Why does Google HO keep getting worse?

Hangouts doesn't have a desktop app.

PS. Please don't call that chrome window a desktop app.

You forgot Google Meet.

Don’t forget Google Wave.

Everybody forgot Google Wave.

They recently added a chat function to the Youtube mobile app too.

I like the Whatsapp solution. Why does it have to be stored on cloud? Web interface with Whatsapp Web (via phone) works well.

you must have never tried migrating whatsapp from iphone to android, major pain in the axe

So the solution could be to make backups and migration easier

I have and lost all messages (got them exported so can still search for them). Not optimal but I prefer it to FB messenger where it's much harder for me to access my data.

I also think the switch Android<->iOS is solvable, probably just an edge case and they don't think it's profitable to do.

I personally hate that aspect of Whatsapp. Having to scan a QR code to use chat on my desktop/laptop is a huge pain and is a major reason why I stick to Facebook Messenger and Google Hangouts.

Google Voice and Duo are not messaging apps. GTalk, Hangouts, and GMail Chat are the same thing at different iterations and were therefore fully compatible with one another.

If you're going to criticize Google for this, at least be correct when doing it.

Google Talk was federated and could chat with people who had accounts other Google, so it feels a bit unfair to lump that in.

It's like saying "Gmail is compatible with hypothetical Gmail where you can only send emails to other Gmail users, it's just a different iteration." Maybe true, but suddenly a very different service.

You make a good point but also make a broader, negative point against Google. OP's incorrectness is evidence that Google is obfuscating the purpose of their products. There’s a bewildering amount of names and products. At some point fatigue sets in for casual users/observers and everything starts to get lumped in together. I’m not going to sort it out and so in my mind these are all messaging apps.

Apparently Google is trying to do something in the communication space involving voice and text. It doesnt seem to be working and it’s ended up confusing a lot of people.

Messaging is a core feature of Google Voice.

Nope. Google broke GTalk (on purpose?) when Hangouts came out, that's not "fully compatible" in my universe.

No, GTalk was XMPP-compatible and federated, Hangouts was siloed.

So non-google XMPP users could speak to GTalk users, but not Hangouts users.

This was frustrating to say the least, if they'd just done a clean break it would have been annoying, but at least we all (I was using a third party client at the time) would have known what was going on, but they more or less silently broke it, but ony some of the time, and then strung it out for ages. I suspect it was a deliberate strategy to try and make the blame fall on the shoulders of third party clients instead of them for cutting it off, but who knows. I wish they'd just shut down the interop cleanly when they moved to hangouts, it would have saved me a lot of pain and debugging early on.

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