They pivoted to Hangouts to boost Google+ when they were chasing Facebook. This is also why they killed Google Reader. So much collateral damage with nothing to show for it.
The worst of both worlds.
Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone can trust them.
It really only seems like a matter of time until they have stabbed every single one of their customers in the back.
...and at least consumers in that are not the customers, but the product...
It remains to be seen whether a non-profit entity can be trusted with such a position.
Over time, more and more functionality became linked to Google Play Services, which was not open source. The logical result of this was that OEMs simply went with the Google-approved proprietary flavour of Android.
but how come it's not reviving now that the biggest gorilla is gone?
There's some inherent commercial unfeasibility to RSS i think, which google uncovered by having a free client.
I mean, don't we still have that? I know that my RSS feed is still too content-free to keep up with (even after culling a double-digit number of hefty ones.)
And now we have even more RSS aggregators (Feedbin, The Old Reader, etc.) than we had before!
You don't get them with wholemeal bread.
The real frustration is that websites only put short extracts of their content into the RSS feed to force you to go and... look at their ads, I guess? But I'd imagine the number of folks using RSS feed readers who don't also use ad-blockers is vanishingly small.
I don't know how the RSS feed is configured if you set up a blogspot or wordpress blog now, let alone the newer blogging platforms or tools like Hugo.
Yes. I think if Google wants to keep its dominant position, they need to rethink how they do management.
What I said in the parent post about Google Talk could also apply to other product lines. They often release good things, like Nexus tablets or the Pixel C, only to kill them shortly afterwards. As a consumer, I don't take most of their offerings seriously because they are so short-lived and confusing. Why shall I put my money on something that might be killed or phased out soon?
From what I've heard from some insiders, other Alphabet branches seem to have equivalent management issues. It's sad because they have a significant amount of resources and they could be delivering tons of value to the society.
With the internet they had a success with IE but saw companies developing their services with new non Visual*/.Net languages and running them on Linux and MySQL.
With mobile they lost on all the line.
And the latest: TensorFlow -> TensorFlow 2 -> JAX{Haiku, Flax}. This one is especially egregious because it's foundational for Google's own technology.
I still wonder what they were smoking. If you want users on your platform, not banning them randomly seems a good start.
But I also sometimes wonder if someone inside Google and MS are actively sabotaging or if it is possible that all this self harm has been inflicted unintentionally.
But I think it is more common and makes more sense too to put it the other way around:
Any sufficiently advanced stupidity/incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
I.e. if a politician puts a first aid kit on some wounded person in the wrong way, it is not malice, but if a doctor can't do it properly, it is.
How Mozilla treats us Firefox lusers is malice. E.g. silently enabling spying via updates, pushing disruptive UI changes, or what not.
But the big question is if there is an agreement or "understanding" or something that Google only pays as long as Firefox doesn't become a threat, i.e.:
- don't fix the plugin ecosystem
- don't fix theming
- don't get too far ahead technically (i.e. a good reason to get rid of the servo team)
- don't claim too much authority (i.e. get rid of MDN)
Of course this is wild speculation and mostly in jest.
Google Wave had that same kind of feel but it was never give the time to develop and grow. I don't know if it would have been as important as something like the laser, but it sure did feel like something that would change the world. But that's just me.