Analysis – Why Google is now a better competitor to Slack, WhatsApp and Zoom? | Hacker News Reader

Analysis – Why Google is now a better competitor to Slack, WhatsApp and Zoom?

cnc.substack.com

17 pointsagaase1920 comments

At this point, google can have all the features it wants, and their products can be as amazing as anything, but I'm personally wary. If they established a couple billion dollar endowment for their products to make sure it can't get cancelled or created some sort of binding legal contract saying they wouldn't dump it and cause chaos for everyone using it, that would be more meaningful. I can count on slack and zoom to fight to keep their services alive since that's their entire business. Facebook seems to have treated WhatsApp and Instagram reasonably well so far. But I'm not in the mood to go through the hassle of setting up yet another google chat service, convincing friends to join (allo's gonna be great! This smart reply thing is so cool!) only to end up seeing it cancelled so quickly.

Fair enough. I think, when it comes to messaging alone, Google has a steep climb to make for sure. But I also think that they are trying to progress towards their goal of ambient computing. They are trying to make sure they control as many touch points as possible which enables them to better integrate the software & hardware together to achieve things like voice assistant interaction (e.g hey Google, send a message), AI integration (e.g smart replies) and seamlessly using different Google products (quickly create a doc in messages or chat). This is a long term vision though; companies may happen over time which are better than Google at this.

Aren't they at the same time better than any other cloud provider to deliver messaging with Firebase?

The reputational baggage Google carries from decades of failed/killed social/chat products is too big for anyone to take anything they release seriously.

The only real question is will they kill Meet or Duo first?

Like WhatsApp/Facebook and Zoom don’t have more reputations baggage?

They always added whatever new stuff mostly to the single product, unlike Google.

Not like Google. Google make some really neat stuff that people start using only to have it killed for no reason - especially chat apps.

Can anyone tell me why large corps do this ? Compete with every new product or buy companies instead of sticking to the core product. I like Slack and all but if Slack started implementing Google Docs I would be surprised.

Two things, ecosystem and diversification. For an ecosystem, build a suite of products that all work together so you solve a complete set of problems and lock customers in. Anyone can easily switch to a new video call provider, but it's far harder to do that when that provider is linked to your email and your calendar and so on. And diversification is just that - dont put all your eggs in one basket. Grow the business. AWS is immensely profitable and has nothing to do with buying books online, but amazon is a stronger business because of it. And if you just stick to your core product, you'll find yourself going the way of blockbuster or Kodak.

And for the slack point - Really? I would be surprised if they didn't. Collaboration is pretty much the core of slack and they already let you share documents, making it possible to edit them seems like an obvious next step.

That makes sense. But why diversity needlessly ? Isn't google's core search suffering ? Red Bull / Coke don't diversify but they are not exactly ecosystems either.

You say that, but Coca Cola apparently owns more than 500 brands globally

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands

Coca cola is really diversified. Just because they're all drinks doesn't mean that they haven't diversified across sectors of the refreshment industry - it depends on how you define a core product. Google sees themselves as "organizing the worlds' information" which is a core that lets them do pretty much whatever they want. I don't know if they've done anything as offbrand as Coca Cola purchasing Columbia Pictures, which was a thing they actually did for some reason. And a counterpoint to red bull and coke is pretty much every other consumer packaged good company out there, like P&G or Pepsi, who are also the companies that might find themselves aquiring red bull once the founders move on.

And in terms of diversifying needlessly - obviously, nobody doing the diversifying thinks its needless. Everyone is convinced that it's positive NPV, lowers overall risk, allows them to unlock "synergies," etc etc etc. There's been a swing away from that as conglomerates like GE are dismantling, but especially if you get financial analysists involved, it's nto hard to come up with a model that shows diversifying will lower your risk.

And also, in case this isnt obvious, the most important thing here is more money equals good. If your bonus is based on hitting a sales target, why not acquire a company to boost division revenues and meet that target? And if you can make money (or think you can make money) by entering a new business area, why wouldn't you? Google doesn't see search as suffering or think their moonshots are the reason for that, otherwise they'd be redirecting investment towards saving their cash cow. They might be wrong, but they think this will make more money.

You are right. This thinking is finance thinking as opposed to product thinking. It seems corporations are acting as hedge funds once they hit this stage of quasi monopoly / oligopoly.

In reality it's just squashing the competition and increasing sales numbers. It's just a quirk of the law that it seems legal. I literally can't think of one silicon valley acquisition that actually ended in synergy.

They probably literally brought in hedge fund people to be their CFO. And it's not hard to hire McKinsey to make a slide deck backing up your strategy to acquire a company for whatever reason.

Interestingly, actual hedge funds tend to not like companies that act like hedge funds. They want companies that are focused on one area since they think they're better at diversifying their portfolios than the management at these portfolio companies. They'd rather have fine grained control over what markets/products/industries/regions they have exposure to, and you cant do that with these messy conglomerates. That's why fiscal discipline being imposed at Google looked like separating business units and providing insights into the individual business units of the company, so even if investors in alphabet can't control what alphabet diversifies into, they can at least understand and evaluate it.

That's probably it, the CFO. I've mostly been sold on Jeremy Corbyn's ideas on worker cooperatives. I like open source based economies, they seem to encourage innovation and are fairly similar.

The concept of hedge fund is completely fine as well. Messy conglomerates though! Ughh it's like a code refactor gone wrong 90% of the time. I guess I like my naive capitalism of build a product, sell, make money and keep everyone happy.

I'm for ecosystems but not for closed ones.

Slack already has an ecosystem with their plugins and integration with other apps [1]: if they were to build documents as well, then they would be competing with documents app that are already integrated with Slack (see [2]).

I also wouldn't think it'd be a good documents app. Most companies don't have the resources or focus to build two _good_ products. As a counterpoint to Amazon, look at Dropbox and their Paper app. And then look at their stock price: the engineering resources put into Paper would've better been spent improving their core product.

[1] https://slack.com/apps

[2] https://slack.com/apps/search?q=notes

Often its agency issues. Managers are usually paid in proportion to the size of the thing they manage. So if you have a core product that returns more money than you can reasonably invest back into it, what do you do? You write up a plan about how much synergy you'll unlock by buying/building XYZ and go off empire-building.

Slack implementing a Slack-themed, Slack-UI-consistent document product would totally make sense to me. It’s nice to have fewer platforms — it can be annoying to have specs hosted here, have technical docs hosted there, communicate here for email, communicate this other place for quick messages.. fragmentation is annoying.

I think Google Meet will probably continue to gain traction and might eventually kill Zoom.

* integration with Google calendar, private Google accounts and GSuite

* no problems handling large numbers of participants

“Analysis” of half a page.

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