Google Talk, Chat, Meet, Duo, Messages, Hangouts.... I'm sure Im missing some. It's like they don't have any idea where they want to go and need to make a whole new service every time they have an idea, instead of just adding a feature to their existing service.
I'm sure literally thousands of Google employees have gotten promoted on the strength of their work on building out yet another new chat platform. That's why they keep doing this; it has nothing to do with any sort of broad corporate strategy. It's individuals optimizing for their own success instead of for some vague notion of corporate success.
Who said those other (local shopping sites, social networks or balloonshots) aren't green lit just as often, and discarded just as fast when they get bored, from Google? E.g. social networks: Remember Orkut? Wave? Plus?
Pure speculation (other than the part about their software becoming worse) so would be interested in the insider's take here. That said it's a pattern I've seen in other places. It's crazy that with so many people of this caliber they're basically spinning their wheels in many areas. Some progress in a few areas, like cloud.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...
"Google to simplify messaging strategy, will support only five messaging apps"
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/google-promises-to-s...
What IS a failure is the thrash within that whole set of products. Adoption of new users via network effect is the activation energy and every flipflop halves their potential new market.
If they had simply stayed on, say, hangouts and kept improving it, they would keep all those users they lost.
If they had put an even remotely competent person (who cares about more than just getting promoted) in charge and they could have been a leading player the space by just keeping things clear enough to follow.
ba dum tssss.
Additionally I realised you can also send messages in Google Photos app using shared albums.
Maybe we ought to ask which Google app isn't a messaging app
It happens because of their internal promotion culture. You get a promotion much faster if you make something new than if you improve something old.
A good company has both kinds of developers, ideally more of the improve type than the build new type.
Google’s management failure is that the optimize for the “build new” engineer and actually punish the “improve” engineer by stalling their career.
Apple tends to do this well. Messages feels like one continuous evolution from the basic SMS app on the first iPhone. When iChat moved to Messages a couple features were lost, but the important ones are back now. It was a new name, but it felt more like a unification between iOS and macOS vs just thinking a new app would help them get more users.
If someone went from a v1 iPhone to an iPhone 13, the new one would have dramatically more features and capabilities, yet it will still feel familiar. There is a lot of value in that. Engineers can "build new" within an existing framework if the foundation is solid.
When the "build new" dev make something new it's up to management to decide if it should be a feature of the existing service or if it's foundational enough to require a whole new app. That choice to build new should not be taken lightly, as migrating millions of users is not a trivial task and they will lose people along the way.
Google Wave was the perfect example of that. Wave would have been amazing if it was integrated into Gmail. Like Apple did with iMessage, if a Gmail user emailed another Gmail user (or group of users) it would turn into a Wave and get a bunch of extra features. This would have provided value, instantly given it millions of users, and encouraged current users to get their friends and co-workers on Gmail to use Waves. Instead, they made it it's own invite-only service (trying to recreate the Gmail magic) and it was a failure due to lack of users.
This is a horrible strategy and they are going to continue shooting themselves in the foot if they don't pivot.
I wouldn’t mind it if they kept features or something. Some coherent process, features, etc.
But it is a half baked deal every time with old / obvious features missing.
They operate like a mini no name start up and as far as I’m concerned I don’t think of it that way / if it has the name Google I expect some level of polish…maybe respect the users who get dragged from app to app…
For the record:
- v1 - "Gchat" - simple chat added to Gmail
- v2 - "Google Talk" - 2005 - general chat service created out of "Gchat" enabling people to use it outside Gmail
- v3 - "Google Hangouts" - 2013 - integrate video chat from G+ into Talk
- v4 - "Google Meet/Chat" - 2017 - split Hangouts into video (Meet) and messaging (Chat)
Google is not an advertising company, but a provider of space for advertising.
Its not like they assemble billboards
More than 80% of Alphabet's revenue comes from their ad business[0]. It used to be up around 97%[1].
Yes, they have a bunch of complex algorithms and way to track, but it's all in the name of selling those ads. If they can target the ads, they can charge more. If they can give exact metrics on the impact of the ads, they can charge more. They bought YouTube to gather data and sell ads. They released Android to gather data to sell ads. They released Chrome to gather data and sell ads. They bought Nest and released routers to gather data and sell ads. Everything they do is being done to further prop up their ad business.
Google is the modern billboard company. Without the ad business they wouldn't exist, at least not to the extent they do today. How they sell ads is irrelevant, they are still an advertising company first.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-money-a...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/oct/25/advertising-go...
In that timeline I laid out, wherever your message was, even going back to 2005 unnamed Gmail feature, it's still there.
They use the marketing name without knowing what is behind. And to be fair, as of today, I’m not even sure non tech people even know how the current mainstream Google chat is named. The only time I used Google chat (maybe it was hangouts) was to reach my coworkers when slack was down.
Not to mention that Meet existed before it was called Meet, and was confusingly also called Hangouts at that point but had no interop with consumer Hangouts.
(Thank goodness they haven't done same to maps and docs).
I have lost respect for them. I have gone from an enthusiastic Search and chrome and gmail user… I got into the invite only beta in the first six months! … to basically only caring when Google do things that affect the non-stuff I actually care about.
I beg to disagree: I find AWS's UI the most confusing--I am showered with services I don't use & don't know what they do (Beanstalk? I have no idea what that is). I find that if I stick with VPC and EC2 I'm safe, but even then they throw some curve balls at you: for example, VPC is all about networking & IP addresses unless you're talking about Elastic IPs, in which case you need to go to EC2.
Azure's interface is okay, but the sliding menus-thing throws me off.
Google's is the cleanest UI IMHO. Not too many services, intelligently grouped.
Although I've used AWS the longest & am used to its idiosyncrasies, I'm under no illusion that its UI well laid out.