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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

Google dumped an incredible amount of money into Allo's marketing at my (large state) university -- they plastered many buildings with full-length advertisements, filled all of the local businesses with pamphlets, and even drove students around campus in weird little (electric?) buggies[1].

Despite all that, I don't think I know anybody who installed (much less regularly used) Allo.

Edit: They also bought Snapchat filters that were geofenced to the campus.

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=allo+campus+car

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People can smell when a product isn't earnest. From the beginning, Allo smelled like a directive by a Google VP to "get messaging market share."

Not that I’m defending Allo, but I don’t know how useful your distinction is. What is an earnest product then?

Any product released by a company that has bills to pay is released to “get market share”.

I assumed GP meant that there's nothing in it for the user, only for the company.

Other examples include carrier-branded apps that come preinstalled on phones.

Exactly this.

In this context, an earnest product could be a messaging product that aimed to solve a problem with other existing products and had a coherent story explaining this.

Allo from the outside seemed to solve no problem other than "people are using messaging platforms that aren't ours".

I think they mean it was a “me too” product. “Everybody’s using their messaging app. That should be us! Let’s make a new messaging app and take over that market.”

As opposed to a really new and innovative product (e.g. the iPhone) or at least one that’s a notable improvement over existing similar ones (Gmail).

It’s a spectrum rather than a hard and fast distinction, of course.

Google was clearly not strategically invested in Allo; as it was one of at least five messaging products? Duo, Allo, Hangouts, SMS app, the carrier RCS BS. As a consumer, when i see that, I know Google isn't going to continue doing all of those in two to three years, but I don't know which one they're going to keep, and it's not worth my social capital to get enough of my friends onboard to try it.

An earnest product is one that succeeds after a year or two, and the non-earnest are the ones that fail, duh!

I live in Brazil and there were Allo ads on television, which was very unusual for a messaging app.

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