Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubatuga | Hacker News Reader

Seriously what the fuck is google doing?

Throwing shit at wall until something sticks?

Example: Google Talk, Messages, Hangouts, Allo

I think it's worse than that. It does stick. They actually hate it when it sticks, because that is when it becomes a career sink. That is, too important to the business for people to leave it behind but not important enough that maintaining it is promotion worthy. I strongly suspect that the reason so many products get shut down is not to do with financials or the product's actual usage and adoption, but because the there's a valley of death in which association with these products during this phase of their lifecycle is a negative career move within Google. So most likely really good engineers flee these products because they might become successful more than because they are failures / failing.

I still miss Google Chat. I spent at least a hundred hours using that, then they changed it to Google Talk and I used it maybe three more hours. Trash fire.

I miss both of those because they supported XMPP, but they dropped that as soon as they started gaining market share.

Wasn't chat just an extension of Google Talk into the gmail web client?

Gchat worked both in the browser and years after I started using it in browser as an app. Google Talk was a forced downgrade of a working app to an app that used way more data to not work for most practical purposes. I am ignorant of the technical details but Gchat worked and that was the first and last time I’ve spent more than ten minutes on a google chat platform.

They had a massive base of users in everyone who had a gmail account, many of whom used Gchat and they threw it away. It’s like if Apple managed to so badly screw up iMessage that it disappeared from use.

Yeah I think you have the history somewhat backwards. Gtalk was the original app and then it got integrated into Gmail as well. The abandonment of Gtalk and related bits is definitely one of those weird and seemingly inexplicable user-hating moves.

Who else remembers Google Wave?

Wave was at least trying to be innovative, even if the execution was fatally flawed. Allo just never had any reason to exist.

I fully agree with you. It was a product I actually used and enjoyed, then suddenly... puff

Now there's also "Meet". And "Duo". Or how about that time when they tried to merge SMS into Hangouts? What a trainwreck.

Google Talk was simply too good to exist. :(

https://i.imgur.com/U6X92u8.png

So light it was floating over the wall

Only promoting people who launch new products, so they end up with a ton of useless new products.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com