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.