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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody knows why Google and Microsoft constantly shuffle their communication apps? Both had the opportunity to be the king but instead they seems to choose to throw away their fortunes? I still remember the times when we used Gtalk as much as MSN messenger and both of those simply disappeared slowly when mobile started dominating and those simply sit tight and did nothing. Then there were numerous replacements and alternatives by both of Google and MS but for some reason they all felt neglected and later shut down. Microsoft bought Skype only to make it worse and shut it down. Considered to buy Discord at some point eventually to abandon the bid. Any insights?

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I bet you can track those changes internally by looking at which VP/Director "won" an internal political struggle and wrangled the project away from others. As a result a new team takes it over and kills the old one.

Well what you're really seeing is the result of failed enshittification. Google (and Meta, and ...) built/bought these apps to start an enshittification cycle, and with communication apps it keeps failing, or at least not live up to search or social. So there's a constant fight about how to improve this, a fight which then turns into reorgs and chair dances. Then they fail again, and we do it again. And again.

There's actual competition.

Competition because, let's be honest, nation states are pushing their own internet apps where they are pushing propaganda (We're winning, Zelensky bad), instead of having "BUY THIS CRAP" every second post. And they often actually put some effort into it ("Zelensky bad, because of complicated historical/economic/... argument that we'll describe in 10 posts, 2 pages each, that you'll probably learn something from" [1][2][3] or "China is a great place to live. Don't mind all the people leaving, even leaving to fight for Putin because that's an actual improvement over China's rural cities' conditions or the many fuckups (how many times have all the fish in the Yantze suddenly died this year? I think we're already at double digits). China is the future!", because, like most governments, both the Russian and Chinese government are full of old, educated people)

Not that the propaganda isn't getting worse too. Just look at rt.com's frontpage today vs 10 years ago.

And they actually sound a lot less cringy than Musk does.

[1] https://www.rt.com/russia/618284-what-russian-generals-are-r... [2] https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/618333-joseph-brodsky-nobel-e... [3] https://www.rt.com/business/616820-uae-ai-company-expanding-...

> how many times have all the fish in the Yantze suddenly died this year? I think we're already at double digits

Surely this is a misunderstanding. How do “all the fish” in a given river die once, let alone over ten times in a single year? Where did you get that information?

That's a river that has upstream connections to other rivers and it's connected to the sea. Fish get replaced when they get eradicated by pollution, as regularly happens. Not that there's many left.

Its basically a symptom of them being huge corporations with people in-fighting for top jobs. It seems one route is to create a new mesagging app, the one that “changes everything now”.

These apps are pretty low hanging fruit and not as involved as one like google maps or ms excel, which cannot be easily replaced.

So person X releases the new app, gets promoted, leaves it behind and of course the “next guy” also wants to leave a mark and therefore creates his own.

Its basically a similar reason why a new JS framework gets released every month.

It's on the CEO then for allowing that to happen

Staffing changes. People have to justify their jobs. People get hired to create a product, then get shuffled around then nobody cares so the product dies.

Every time there's a leadership shuffle you'll notice products get left behind and eventually retired.

This was especially true in the early-ish days of Google. https://killedbygoogle.com/

This is partly why I take issue with the “iMessage green bubbles are anti-competitive” attitude.

Google and Microsoft mishandled chat so badly they basically handed Apple and WhatsApp the crown in the consumer space.

Those seem like two unrelated issues.

> Apple and WhatsApp

Does Meet/Teams even compete with iMessage? They seem to be in competition with FaceTime.

Regardless, Apple still shows green bubbles for WhatsApp users and still offers no way to integrate with the e2ee scheme (and therefore reach blue-bubble status) despite WhatsApp also implementing e2ee. The anti-competitive argument is sound regardless of how shit Google Meet is.

Apple doesn’t show green (or any) bubbles for WhatsApp users because WhatsApp is not interoperable with SMS or iMessage

I think Meet replaced Duo which replaced Hangouts; the latter of which was a good competitor to iMessage. I’m not even sure of the history of all their chat apps anymore because they always have multiple alive at the same time competing with each other. All I know is that they have had chat apps that were pretty good but Google could never stick to just one.

Where did Allo fit in? :)

Can't both be true?

> Does anybody knows why Google and Microsoft constantly shuffle their communication apps?

They do this to give you an incentive to look for alternatives which you can run yourself. Jitsi Meet for video conferences, XMPP + WebRTC for video calling, something like Nextcloud Talk (i.e. Spreed) for both, etc.

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