RIP Google Hangouts, Google’s last, best chance to compete with iMessage
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
2. Why did they proceed to have half a dozen different messaging services?
3. Why didn't they relentlessly focus on feature parity with iMessage in the default Messages app on Android phones?
4. Why didn't they invest heavily in a single unified app that iOS users would be attracted to, just like they're attracted to Maps and Mail?
It's really baffling to me how such a smart company has managed to be so dumb.
The leaders never realyl understood that gchat was for professionals working in gmail, not teenagers in japan.
To go to Amazon, where one of my managers worked under him in Personalization and would later rave about him. It's interesting to read a balancing review now.
> Apparently Gchat was not growing while competitors with emojis and other features were.
So... add emojis and other features to Gchat, not create a new messaging app.
Seems like every time there was a hot new messaging app with a new paradigm/ feature-set, Google's reaction was to build another competitor and sunset its previous efforts, disappointing everyone internally and externally.
What’s that? Besides « thanks god it’s Friday »?
They've only ever made substantial profit from ads, YouTube (which they acquired), and possibly Workspace or Cloud. The last time I looked at their filings, they weren't transparent about which businesses are profitable.
This isn't a company that's had a coherent identity or strategy.
iMessage is important to Apple because it's an exclusive social network that only Apple devices can access.
Slack is important because it's a backbone of a business SaaS ecosystem.
But Hangouts was never going to have either of these functions.
Right now Apple iOS marketshare is increasing: it's reached 60% in the US and an amazing 87% among teenagers! (Who tend to "stick" with a platform even after they become adults.) And while there are many features that are driving the push towards iOS (it's not just messaging!) the dominance of iMessage is definitely one feature people [particularly younger ones] care very much about. And while fixing messaging might not be the only problem here, it's relatively "inexpensive" to run messaging correctly compared to the cost of fixing things after your OS market share crosses a tipping point.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/09/06/apple-cras...
and in any case, throwing out 20 services in a row to kill them is certain to damage your brand.
there was a time where google was synonimous with free and unavailable features (gmail, gmaps) and now google is that weird ever changing stream of A/B testing customer distracting devices. (youtube just flubbered their UI in the most spectacular manner btw)
So I just use WhatsApp.
Google's communication services are so complex and poorly defined I avoid them like the plague, always have. I just don't understand what app to use and how they all relate.
Doesn't matter, I always hit the wrong icon 50% of the time.
I bet they took the team from Microsoft responsible for ramming the Skype/Lync/Communicator/Skype4Business brands into the ground and brought them over. Remember when Groove used to be Sharepoint but now it's a music player from them?
Out of nowhere they started to update it again sometime in the latter part of last decade, it still has 2 panels in the configuration backend because they halfassed implementing the Material interface and didn't include all the features. Despite this I'm ride or die with it because there's nothing else on the market that gives you a fairly un-stealable number for free.
Oh and to continue the fragmentation, Google Voice for Workspace is a totally different product similar to Vonage Cloud. As has often been the case with their paid services for years, the free users generally get a better experience.
EDIT: I honestly think a big part of the reason this has stayed running is Bandwidth.com runs most of the show under the hood and that company knows what they're doing. Another Google service they ran was GOOG-411 when that existed.
Because they're different in ways that are not reconcilable into a single service. For example, considered just through an identity lens, you have:
Talk, which was a federated service with federated identity. Hangouts which was a centralized service with only Google accounts. And Allo which was centralized service using external identities (phone numbers). You can't do all of those, but need to choose one. And none of them is the obvious single correct choice.
(Hangouts and Chat are very similar though. But that was a completely transparent migration too.)
Or to put it another way: Why does Apple have both iMessage and Facetime? Because video + voice is different from text. Why does FB have both Messenger and WhatsApp? Because one uses FB accounts, the other uses phone numbers. Why has Microsoft made a dozen different messenger apps? Because what consumers wants is different from what corporations want.
I never knew that, and it was far from obvious from the marketing. Actually, was there any marketing?
I had no idea the hangout was all that. I never opened it because I thought it was another social gathering thing.
It’s a terrible name. It’s also more terrible Google was reluctant to retire old product names but I understand.
Retiring names and consolidating become extremely heated political conversation. I have so many battle scars from it.
You need a really strong leadership to call the shots on it. The current one probably isn’t doing it
Instead compete with WhatsApp and Meta.
I simply can't believe a company the size of Google can't make a good chat app. A simple chat app is literally one of the first apps you create as a beginning programmer.
Hangouts was good. Did what it needs to do and a tiny bit more.
Google Chat is a bad joke, with obvious glaring bugs that remain since the whole time I was forced onto it (years? feels like decades)... Have a look through the 1-star reviews on the Play store and get an idea of how many bugs Chat continues to have.
Continuous "updates", yet no user-visible differences at all?
I would think that a top 1% app developer with the resources that Google has available to them should be able to make a workable Hangouts-clone in maybe a few weeks? What is this crap?
> The result of all of this is that a staggering 87 percent of US teenagers have iPhones now, all because Google didn't view messaging as valuable.
That is, for 30 years it’s been one chat application after another that in incompatible with the rest. The idea that a Verizon customer can talk to an AT&T customer or that an Honor phone owner can talk to a Nokia phone owner is as foreign to ‘chat’ as the right clicker mentality is to blockheads.
If Europe hadn’t driven away the UK and spent it’s regulatory capital harassing us with cookie pop ups they could have done something significant…. Like require chat interoperability. If Google had seen interoperability as the key problem and made their own chat applications interoperable that would have been a beginning.
Unfortunately there is huge support for cookie popups in the tech industry and any criticism of cookie popups gets downvoted viciously because cookie popups silenced the no-modals advice you'd get from any UI professional and opened the floodgates to sites like Substack popping up dark pattern popups on every page, sometimes multiple popups, to ask for your email address so they can spam spam spam you forever.
Facebook/Meta is what most people use. Be it FB Messenger/WhatsApp/Insta etc.
Google have nothing in their own ecosystem people use.