Hacker News Reader

Comment by metildaa | Hacker News Reader

Didn't Google just recently rewrite the infrastructure that supports Hangouts? IIRC that caused many Google Voice integrations to break, as they ripped out what was left of their siloed XMPP stack.

Why invest all this labor, only to announce shutdown of Hangouts a few months later?

View on HN

Because people at google need promotions and launches are one of the few good ways to get them.

Or maybe they are too busy protesting[0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][..] instead of focusing on product ;-)

Interestingly, before 2017, very few (no?) public news of them employees walking out or protesting publicly @ Google. It's almost like Sergey going to the airport to protest opened the floodgates[6]. The Times They Are a-Changin' (or no good deed goes unpunished...).

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/27/read-google-employees-open-l... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/11/01/google-em... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/technology/google-employe... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-... [4] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/30/google-employees-protest-tru... [5] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/07/542020041... [6] https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/28/14428262/google-sergey-br... [7] https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/google-employees-s... [8] https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/01/sopa-blackou... [..] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/10/12/whoops-g...

Google's been killing their products left, right, and centre long before this whole thing. Absolutely no link.

I hate when people just downvote posts that don't align with their politics.

This wasn't downvoted because of a lack of political alignment; it was downvoted because there's absolutely no link.

The post implies a causal link, but there isn't even a correlational one; Google has been shuttering its own projects only a couple of years after launch for years, long before the current round of employee protests.

That’s usually the case for any big corporation.

I think Google is at a place where it feels they have too many cooks. Just focus on the core things like Apple.

I'm thoroughly convinced one of the strategies of large tech companies is to suck all the air out of the room when it comes to engineer talent.

I've seen the inside of these corporations - most of the stuff people work on is way below their pay grade (even if it still technically needs to get done) yet they still have a ridiculously rigorous interview process and somehow manage to hire like crazy with salaries and benefits way better than a startup can offer. It just doesn't make sense unless the goal is to deprive potential up and coming competitors of talent.

I don't think that strategy is very effective though. The supply of developers is quite elastic in the long term and it just drives competitors to increase their engineering efficiency.

Also to pay more than they would normally.

Sry what?

Google has enough very good products which shows what Google is doing.

Yes they have some issues with wave, talk, hangout and duo but also have gmail, search, drive, etc.

Apple not always gets it right and Google also.

The problem is, they haven't even launched anything to replace Hangouts!

Think they will? anyway, what really worries me right now is what's going to happen with all those stored hangout conversations, will those still be accessible? will users be allowed to download them? or everything is getting deleted?

https://twitter.com/happyinwater/status/1068861340800958466

Apparently they'll be migrated to Hangouts Chat.

My Project Fi calling/texting from computer features are in limbo, though.

The new Google Chat for G Suites is actually not even chat. Each chatroom is a collection of Google Wave style cards that jump over each other as activity happens in different ones. The experience is so bad I wrote a blog post about it here. https://technex.us/2018/11/google_chat_is_the_worst_desktop_...

We used it as a backup one day when our normal chat service went down. I closed it within 5 minutes and I didn’t even hit your issues which are way worse. What a shit show.

Uggh. Yeah. We've been required to use it at work, if we want real-time chat. We were using Slack before, but it was taken off the authorization list. I made a long list of things that was wrong with it while we were with it. The notifications are the worst so far. Constant notification spam for every single message. I disabled everything ... and it still sent them. I had to turn them off in iOS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com