Calling it now, within 5 years there are at least 5 different Google services for streaming music (up from 3 now, Play Music/Youtube/Youtube Music) at least 2 of which are also somehow messaging apps.
It's even plausible, one for VR music videos, one for streaming in your self driving google car?
1. YouTube
1.5 YT Music (basically a music-oriented front-end to YouTube)
2. Google Play Music All-Access
3. YouTube Music Premium (from the article)
4. (or 3.5) VEVO
I particularly enjoyed this quote:
> The days of jumping back and forth between multiple music apps and YouTube are over.
As the above list shows, this is demonstrably false. Given that YouTube Red (or YouTube Premium as they'll soon be rebranding it as) is also part of this package, Google Play Music All-Access is beginning to resemble something of an AV-oriented Prime membership. Lots of benefits, not a lot of focus, but hey, maybe they'll buy up PornHub and add PornHub subscriptions to the stack whether you want it or not, just to make your recurring monthly payments a bit stickier.
Purely from a payment processing point of view, unless Google wants to fight Visa, MasterCard and other institutions this will never happen. There are a lot of restrictions around content and payment processors that you would assume is covered by freedom of speech that in a practical sense isn't.
Credit card companies don't want to be held responsible if your CC payment is being used for the sexual exploitation of people. They don't want to be associated with revenge porn, etc. I'm sure there's a puritan reasoning in there too somewhere, but TBF I doubt that's the primary reason given how big the porn market would be for companies like that.
Tried to start a site that wasn't for but did allow adult content and every payment processor closed their shutters on us
With bank transfers, no one except law regulates what you can pay for. With EC, same. With VISA/MasterCard/PayPal, selling cuban cigars in Germany from a German company to a German customer gets you banned.
Visa and MC should be broken up, or at the very least regulated to the extent they can't cough without regulatory oversight.
It does, the same way it covers everyone else: corporations are actors who have freedom of speech, a fundamental component of which is the ability to choose what speech they will and will not participate in, either as initiator or intermediary.
There is an obvious hole right there that I'm sure they could fill with a blockchain or anonymous gift cards. Or both! They could be the leading service provider for using the blockchain to verify gift cards in a distributed ledger and use it as middleware to convert gift cards into Google Points. What are Google Points good for? Anything cash is good for! So buying ad placements (on Google), music subscriptions (provided by Google), extra cloud storage (in the Google Cloud of course, 'scuse me, Google One), stock (in GOOG) and groceries (via Google Express).
Or you know, they could just inherit whatever agreements PornHub has with their existing payment processor that covers PornHub Premium on their way to reinventing Prime. That isn't as sexy as making 5 more payment apps though. Definitely not as sticky and not enough blockchain.
o_O
Why do you think I'm being sarcastic?
For me this makes it incredible useless. I doubt they actually want to build anything intuitive for that problem.
See for example the Instant messaging apps they have done: 0) Google Wave 1) Google Talk 2) Hangouts 3) Google Duo and Google Allo 4) Android Messaging 5) other ?
and of course of course the Task mess good has implemented in Google Assistant, Google Tasks, Google Calendar and Google Keep.
Seriously Google needs to plan better their brands and services.
If this is your lens then their drunk sailor march of products is not much of a surprise. In fact, those who see it as a monopoly might even suggest its "failures" are intentional, or at least ultimately a (regulatory) positive for The Google.
Side note: In the hands of just about anyone else, Wave would have - and probably still could - bury Slack. Wave was the future. A future that would have been mucked by ads. That was its downfall.
I mean they did open source it and hand it off to Apache:
http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html
Me and another online friend agreed that Wave was just too hip and cool and ahead of itself that regular users would never appreciate it, and I think Google realized as well, it would of been cool to have seen Google Code feature Wave as a feature of Google Code back in the day, maybe it would of made it more popular back then.
It still saddens me to see Microsoft (CodePlex) and Google (Google Code) both shutdown GitHub alternatives which just needed more love and care given to them.
"Too hip"? Early on MySpace was too hip. Twitter, FB, etc. all too hip. That said, eventually such things mainstream. Given how well Wave reflected actual conversation I think it could have caught on. Again, it was better than Slack, and look where Slack is.
No disrespect of Slack. But Wave was actually something special.
Possibly. I see these products more of putting a bunch of smart programmers in a room with no management. Everyone wants to throw out the old and build something new. I've seen it myself at many companies, just at a much smaller scale. Google can get away with this because their search cash cow.
A good analogy is team building for a single product and only having experienced master programmers. Is there enough interesting work for a team of only master programmers? Teams usually work best with a mix of experience so that the grunt work for one member is learning/great work for another.
Not sure I am following? Looking at top 10 apps for all smartphones they own five of the top ten. Then at websites it is a similar story.
Can you explain?
Thiel takes them to task in Zero to One. Worth reading just for that.
All these different music apps and messaging apps... What's going on at Google?
What a mess.
I guess someone should tell them about the paradox of choice, branch dilution and the fact that despite Google being big, they're not an entire market unto themselves.
Google: make 1 big, single, integrated service and when a startup supplants you in your selected market, just buy them for $15 billion.
I can only think of counter examples... everywhere google spreads too thin they lose market share to competitors. Messaging is the prime example.
Personally, I don't know of any other Google search projects, other than Google Search itself.
Except they are only doing the first part, putting out a lot products. At some point they have to kill off the other products and put the combined resources behind the one that wins. All I see is more products getting released.
They tried that with Google Plus. It didn't work so they tried to buy Twitter. That also didn't work, so we have the Google we have now.
And I guess, given the context, two similar comments can be tolerated. ;-)
Seriously though, YouTube is not a music service, or at least it looks like they don't want it to be, since the interface isn't really great for that case. It also kills phone battery if you use it that way, so YouTube music is an experience upgrade.
Based on the press release, it doesn't seem so. It's basically just added a "music only" option, but otherwise it seems to just be a curated section of Youtube that only involves musical content. The same experience you get with vanilla Youtube seems to be applicable.
And looking at the pricing, you still get all the battery pitfalls baked into Youtube unless you buy premium.
Honestly, it feels more like an attempt to curate Youtube rather than developing a music app. Right now the top video content competes with the published Music content and likely just creates a really weird imbalance in the algorithm toppers.
Personally, I think they could have just handled this with some better organization within Youtube, but here we are with a new app.
I have to disagree there, it's become my new de-facto music service on my desktop/tablet, at least since I failed to properly move my iTunes database and lost/unorganized large parts of my music collection.
The autoplay and mix playlist features are great for discovering new artists, even tho the algorithm can get a bit repetitive and after a while starts populating many lists with the same songs, having the music videos to many songs is also a great added bonus.
I'm no coder but that doesn't sound like something impossible to do.
P.S. Sometimes, people break out the humor for good reason. I mean, really?