While this fosters new ideas and opportunities, that conversion into long-term direction and execution can be pretty rough.
Consider Google+ also. They had plenty of reference points for that. It was just not very good.
Google tends to abandon development on new projects way too quickly, before they're ready for mass appeal. They probably expect it to explode like Gmail did. But I think they forget they lost a lot of promotors like us when they abandoned the don't be evil thing.
At the time I recommended Gmail to everyone, now I try to get people away from Google :)
"We couldn't figure out how to market it" was from an interview straight from the people who made it: The companies they pitched to responded with things like "why would we need this, we have email".
The first part of it is not true (but the second part is true, in that you can access chats from Gmail as well).
I just checked, and Google Chat exists as a separate app on iOS, Android, and web (chat.google.com). Even though the web version redirects to a gmail url (mail.google.com/chat), it is still a separate web version, not embedded into gmail. The only thing it shares with gmail is its subdomain, the page itself has zero mention of gmail or any gmail-related functionality.
I used to have this app installed, then one day it started telling me I had to use the GMail app for chat instead.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they were rolling the out the migration to accounts incrementally, or they've reversed course. But I deleted the google chat app because it wouldn't let me use google chat.
This is true today, but 3-4 years ago Spaces was actually a completely separate product that was so bad that most Googlers didn't even know it existed.
I have never met a single person, including on the Spaces team, that used Spaces for anything. Ever.
A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...
How do they keep failing over and over, in the same way, when these failures are a well-known embarrassment?
You'd think the CEO would either just ban development of new messaging apps or pick a winner and give it the same kind of care and feeding as GMail.
Killing a chat product that has always been a net loss for the company might not appear to be a failure.
Doing that once, yeah, doing that over and over, no so much.
At this point the smartest thing to do it just kill them all and definitively say: "No more, this is the end of Google chat apps."
What do you mean? It's always good move to kill a product that loses money for the company.
Why do they start so many new products that are losers? That's a different question. Possibly the incentives for starting new products are poorly calibrated, which is the common narrative. But possibly they aren't and they are quite happy to make a mountain of shit, including doing almost the same thing over and over, for the small chance of a diamond. That's entirely consistent with the rest of the start-up industry.
> What do you mean? It's always good move to kill a product that loses money for the company.
Look at the Ars Technica article I was responding to. Google has failed at chat apps repeatedly for a long time, to the point where it's an embarrassment AND they've created a self-reinforcing vicious cycle of failure. The smart decision for users is to avoid any Google chat app like the plague, because it will inevitably be killed, which means those apps will also fail for lack of users.
A business doesn't have infinite tries to get something right. Eventually they burn up all their credibility. They should kill them all, and stop developing new ones, completely exiting the space.
The question is what their strategy is. Obviously they know this too. The idea that nerds on HN know what is best for the company's brand or reputation is dubious at best. Google is (allegedly) one of the most valuable brands in the world, and more trustworthy than Microsoft or Apple or Amazon (https://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-tiktok-least-trusted-...).
Sure us supernerds will guffaw and chortle into our neckbeards to one another and deride Google for killing lots of things, but how much does that actually hurt their bottom line or brand value?
Google.
Angular 2010-2021? Seriously? Angular was simply superseeded after 11 years by better technology, and same goes for a lot of other projects and services on that site.
I’m not a Google fanboy and I know about the few instances where they screwed over users by turning stuff off but cmon now.
* create stealth startup to compete
* wait???
* pounce on userbase when Google crashes and burns
* profit