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How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

803 points by calcifer 9y ago

promopacket 9y ago
There is a running joke within Google that the best way to get promoted is to create another chat or video conferencing app. Is it really a joke at this point, though? Googler engineering leaders and teams engaging in the replacement of good chat tech with worse happens every year or two. All to demonstrate "cross-org impact" and climb the promo ladder. This is in fact the driving force behind many of the complaints mentioned in the article. A sad and systemic failure, indeed.
- cmrdporcupine 9y ago
  Yep, "demonstrating impact." There are apparently some moves afoot reforming the promo process to make this less common though. Here's hoping.
- slivym 9y ago
  It really makes you wonder why there is no one in the organisation saying "This is a fantastic new product, with truly innovative work. Why did you feel the need to create an internal competitor to it rather than help make it better" One of the most destructive issues I see from my time in management has been engineers who are more interested in re-writing what other people have already done. It seems amazing to me an organisation the size of Google hasn't identified the waste here.
petecox 9y ago
I used Pidgin once and it worked fine on Windows and Linux. So instead of one universal client, one requires Skype, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts/Allo/Duo. (I don't use iOS but Apple have their own, I guess) Thus if anyone wants to contact me, stay old school and use SMS or email! :)
PhantomGremlin 9y ago
I don't use Google Talk, so I don't know how accurate the article is. But if it's at all true, it should become an HBS case study in how to destroy a community and how not to write software.
Groxx 9y ago
For me, one of the worst parts of this transition is that as more people use hangouts, the experience becomes worse. The utter lack of control or signaling on it leads to tons of missed messages, threads that fall out of visibility, and general "did they see my message? do they even use this any more?" questions. All of which Google Talk managed just fine. And if you wanted more control, install a third party app, because it worked with them all. What did we gain for this?
- HiroshiSan 9y ago
  Not to mention you can't even delete messages on hangouts. One of the reasons I switched to telegram.
faitswulff 9y ago
My personal experience with Hangouts is that it would often hang and disconnect so that I would have to forcefully close the app. Then it wouldn't update the read receipts, or possibly worse, lie about who had seen what. I put all of this down to my having an old phone. Recently, however, I got a new phone. I was excited to have a usable Hangouts once again, as that's where many of my close friends are. Unfortunately, now I know that the problem is Hangouts, not my phone.
goalieca 9y ago
Hangouts also ha the worst video call quality of the bunch. It eats the battery extremely fast (vp9). There was a two year period where there was a feedback echo because the microphone wasn’t silenced, and then thrown to the side for a newer and less complete/just as buggy duo and allo. Let’s not forget the sms integration and then later deintegration. Jabber days were good.
Androider 9y ago
I constantly have obvious spam accounts trying to send me Hangouts messages. That there isn't simply an option to never allow anyone not already in my contacts to message me is crazy.
rident 9y ago
Google Talk was only ok when they had a jabber service. It wasn't much better than the other options besides that it tied delayed messaging (email) to instant messaging (jabber) through the same contact info. Then they killed off the jabber client to force users further into their software ecosystem. Then Hangouts came along and has to some degree replaced Talk with further ties into that ecosystem. Then they removed browser support for anything but Chrome in Hangouts, initially promising to re-extend support, yet today the docs have changed to just say you must install Chrome. The most recent eco-system tie-in that this article doesn't mention is Google Hangouts Meet. The corporate conference room version of Hangouts that has a different interface, custom Google hardware, and less memorable links (/xcf-fges-sce vs. /organization/meeting-name). Pixel has similar limitations when it comes to screen mirroring, only a Chromecast will do for the Pixel! Yet other android phones freely connect to Chromecast/Roku/Firestick/etc all because of a hidden menu setting that Google has disabled and set to 0 by default. You must root your phone to get around it. Great flagship right? All this points to a company that's so fucking worried that their tech is going to be outpaced by the little guy that they have to resort to handcuffing users to their wares. I've almost completely switched to Slack in the mean time.
- aianus 9y ago
  I use hangouts exclusively on Safari. It's actually frequently unusable with Chrome (nobody can hear me).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - rident 9y ago
    Meet though is exclusively Chrome. They have now cut Safari out of the picture as well... https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7317473 https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7317473
    - eridius 9y ago
      Wow, not even Firefox support? Hasn't Google heard of something called the open web?
djsumdog 9y ago
I transferred my American number to Google Voice before I left the country and have been able to hold onto that number for over a decade. Unfortunately, everything about Google Voice/Hangouts/Talk/Whatever-it-is now sucks. Trying to find someone is damn near impossible. I totally can attest to that. The removal of federated and regular XMPP was the wrong direction. I'm in the wonderfully weird situation of not having a Gmail account either. I deleted it and ran my own mail server back in 2012. I use DavDroid/Radicle for contacts, so in the web interface, any contacts after 2012 that are SMS are phone number only. I have to use my phone to see the names. I don't think it's even possible to find someone via gmail address anymore. Occasionally I'd find someone on Google Plus .. and have no freakin idea how the hell to send them a personal message (either in G+ or Hangouts). The whole Hangouts/G+/Gmail ecosystem is awful. If you don't have a gmail account, it's beyond unusable. I pretty much just use Hangouts for legacy chats. AIM/Yahoo/MSN all worked .. and now they're all gone (I think Yahoo is still there, but web only). Facebook was unreliable as shit and god awful until around 2013/2014. It took them that long to create someone their competitors had done better a decade ago.
- smt88 9y ago
  Voice/Hangouts has felt like an abandoned application for many years, even though it's potentially one of the best products Google has ever made. They really seem to stop at v1 for almost all of their products and have not the slightest idea how to monetize them.
  - inferiorhuman 9y ago
    > Voice/Hangouts has felt like an abandoned application for many years, even though it's potentially one of the best products Google has ever made. That's probably WHY Google Voice was one of the best products Google put out.
    - notwhereyouare 9y ago
      it was originally a company called grandcentral and eventually acquired by google. they basically left it as it for YEARS
KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
That's alright, the competitors are even worse. I used to use Skype on Linux. They stopped development on the Linux client a decade ago, but it kept working just fine. And then they released a new client and forced everyone to upgrade. The new client is so bad in terms of sound quality that I've been forced to switch to Hangouts.
- fencepost 9y ago
  You might be able to use Slack or Discord, though I don't believe either offer video options and the only real mention of voice that I saw for Slack was for calls. Still, Discord might actually be worth looking at - it's targeted at gamers, but it does at least small-group voice chat reasonably well in my experience.
  - kalleboo 9y ago
    Our company switched from Skype to Discord after the new Skype client came out and have been happy with it.
    - fencepost 9y ago
      If you haven't already, consider having at least some of your folks sign up for Nitro so Discord can stay viable.
  - jakebasile 9y ago
    Discord has 2+ person direct audio and video calls.
rocky1138 9y ago
This happened right about the time that Google abandoned the desktop as its primary target and started focusing entirely on mobile. Things just haven't been the same.
trothamel 9y ago
Instant messaging is an example of something that used to work, and now doesn't. It used to be that everyone was basically on AIM, which functioned as an open enough network. Status information worked pretty well - you could fairly easily tell if someone was online, and so people could respond. And now - we have dozens of clients, such that there's no way of knowing which subset your contacts use. With the prevalence of phones, it's hard to tell if someone is available or not, so you just send messages in the ether, and get surprised if anyone responds. And the worst part is, there's no obvious fix, since any new system will just add to the fragmentation.
- nikanj 9y ago
  It’s really hard to build a billion dollar platform business from just staying out of the way, so apps layer on the complexity. Plus there’s always the VC around the corner hoping to fund the next Whatsapp, so we get a proliferation of me too-apps.
- dmead 9y ago
  So don't make new systems.. help dismantle old ones?
- lobster_johnson 9y ago
  I don't think that's accurate. There were a bunch of silos in the past, too. People used to be on AIM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Jabber and IRC, and there were others. That's the reason chat apps like Adium and Trillian supporter multiple accounts. I had friends on all those networks, and nobody was on all of them. It was a mess back then, just as it is now, except now we have even more choices.
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    The difference was you'd fire up Pidgin and connect to all of those accounts simultaneously, at which point it really didn't matter which individual network any given contact was on. Now, in the smartphone era, there's nothing like that. There's a bunch of different completely siloed apps, and I can't talk to people all from one place.
Skunkleton 9y ago
There is at least one major attempt at addressing this fragmentation with a modern protocol, that being the Matrix protocol (matrix.org). Yeah, if it takes off then it will just be yet another bit of fragmentation, but at least it is designed in such a way that chats dont get siloed into a single echosystem.
- joshlemer 9y ago
  I have to say that, although I began to use Matrix for the open source / open protocol aspects, their flagship client Riot is actually much more fully featured than most other propriety products. For sure it is much more useful than Google Hangouts and I'd say about equal to Slack in terms of user experience and features.
  - Skunkleton 9y ago
    Riot is impressive, especially for something so new. Equally impressive is how trivial it is to create plugins to bridge to other protocols. For example: https://github.com/ImmanuelBaskaran/Hangouts-Bridge/blob/master/Hangouts%20Bridge.py https://github.com/ImmanuelBaskaran/Hangouts-Bridge/blob/mas...
oldcynic 9y ago
Instant messaging used to be so simple. You connected via adium or pidgin, and it just worked. You could hook it up to gtalk and msn. Even ICQ and AIM. Then msn wouldn't play nice any more, then gtalk. Now we've had a dozen renames and replacements, XMPP is long gone, and what's left is an almost unusable mess. Add to that the dozens of people I once had connected on Adium (from memory most on Google talk) are now strewn across loads of different chat apps. These days I'm texting more again! This really isn't the future I expected.
- scrooched_moose 9y ago
  That's been my experience as well. Facebook/Hangouts/WhatsApp/Allo/whatever might have amazing features but I truly don't care. SMS/iMessage (since it's seamlessly integrated) has completely taken over with my group of friends because of one defining feature - everyone has it. If you have a phone number, you can receive a text from me. A while back one member of our group got tired of the 8 person running group thread we have and suggested moving to something "better". The group unanimously shot it down because we don't want to download new apps, create new accounts, then inevitably have to migrate to the brand new flashy service in 3 months. For context, we're all late 20s/early 30s. Edit: Actually, I believe SMS is still superior because it works even without a data connection. We spend enough time camping, skiing, attending huge sporting events, etc. any of those other services would be a significant downgrade.
  - oldcynic 9y ago
    Certainly has a big plus - SMS will often get through when even voice can't. Data on the other hand! That's without getting into how badly some apps handle intermittent or no signal.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
    I suppose you live in a country where the telcos offer free SMS. In Spain they cost money, so almost no one uses SMS for personal messaging. All the SMSs I get are from companies.
    - 9y ago
b1daly 9y ago
It is remarkable how thoroughly Google has munged their communications platforms. Especially as an iPhone user, I am constantly befuddled trying to get a semblance of a well organized contact list between my google apps, never mind a correspondence between the iPhone native contact list. I have a google voice number, and generally I assume that messages get to me one way or another. The most recent baffled was finally understanding that there is no way to manage contacts from within the iOS Hangouts app. I’m actually not sure how that contact list is generated.
- ndespres 9y ago
  It isn't exactly clear how it's managed from the desktop either. Over the years they've really screwed the whole thing up. It's no longer clear whether someone is online, offline, online but hidden, or just lost in a contact list change reorganization. it also isn't clear whether someone is available to chat, or if the IM I send will be inconveniently received on their mobile phone, something I try to avoid doing when possible.
  - Pokepokalypse 9y ago
    yeah, yahoo did all this same stuff 20 years ago.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  It’s not just Google. Have you tried Skype for Business lately? Meetings are incomprehensible. Teams is supposed to fix everything... but my O365 tenant doesn’t have it yet.
  - bbatha 9y ago
    Teams is a joke. It’s an alpha level product at best. At worst it’s black hole on the user voice forums for features that were in IRC and a constant memory leak. The vscode team needs to teach the teams team how to properly write an electron app.
    - 9y ago
andrepd 9y ago
>So you have to use the Google Hangouts on a separate tab in the browser, or it gets juxtaposed to your Gmail, which will slow your lastest i5 laptop down and makes your fan whirr like crazy just to have one conversation. Fucks sake, this annoys me to no end. Here is a product that's clean, lean, and fast. 5 years of development later and you have a bloated, energy-chugging, slow and irritating piece of shit, with absolutely zero added functionally to show for it. God damn it.
- bronson 9y ago
  But Google+. Do you not realize the value of Google+??
  - pasbesoin 9y ago
    Yeah, generating lots more page views and clicks, because I can no longer effectively search for what I want and instead have to manually sort through a ton of poorly targeted and differentiated results.
  - superasn 9y ago
    I just realized that Google+ isn't dead yet. Guess someone at Google is still hopeful about its future? P.S. Also the amount of shit Google+ has fucked wrt to Google services in amazing. It also killed the "+" sign in Google's search results too.
    - MikusR 9y ago
      They have to keep Linus happy.
    - wyclif 9y ago
      Google+ is very far from being "dead", it's quite lively, though niche compared to Facebook.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    I suspect you wouldn't been downvoted so far if there was a sarcasm marker on this, of some sort.
pilom 9y ago
One of the things I love about Google Fi is that I'm still allowed to effectively use Google Talk and SMS still works in Hangouts on my phone. I can do all messaging from the hangouts app with people over SMS or if they use hangouts, the message can go over that. I can text and call with my real phone number through the Gmail interface. Unfortunately, those with Google Fi are the only ones still allowed to use it that way.
- rch 9y ago
  Sure but the web interface for hangouts ruins the whole experience. How search functionality can be ignored in a Google product is beyond me.
  - _asummers 9y ago
    You can search for label:chats in Gmail (extremely poor workaround) but this doesn't work in Inbox, forcing you to navigate back to Gmail to search chat history.
vadimberman 9y ago
Continuing the train of thought of the comments bemoaning the state of the instant messaging: can anyone recommend a simple instant messaging / voice call combo like the old-timey Skype?
- MRPockets 9y ago
  I use Wire[0] now. It offers IM, voice messages, voice & video calls, & a decent set of unobtrusive "silly" features (voice filters, ability to send drawings, etc). Finding people is generally easy but for some reason, it will sometimes not find someone when you type the entire username but will find him/her before you finish typing the username out. The best part is it works well on Android without GApps & seems to work much better than Skype in video calls on a slow connection. 0 - https://wire.com/en/download/ https://wire.com/en/download/
- jes5199 9y ago
  I've been using "telegram" with several friends, it seems to be okay, it's both desktop and mobile
anigbrowl 9y ago
Great piece. I used to use GT a lot, then it changed to Hangouts and I used it less, then people were saying 'it's better to use Ello for encrypted chat' and I thought 'why bother'? I've had this experience with quite a few Google products - they just keep getting larger and cheesier with no discernible user benefit. Everything just keeps getting bigger and worse, even search.
brohoolio 9y ago
I have a folder on my iPhone for all the various google chat apps, allo, duo, hangouts, meet and the list goes on and on. Not an application, but a whole folder filled with chat applications! All my friend have moved onto slack.
yeukhon 9y ago
Google Talk was like the “cool” version of AIM to me when I was using it between 2010 and 2013. I could access Talk from my browser or from a desktop client (Pidgin, and I believe there used to be an official Talk desktop client). For some like me, I didn’t mind to have my messages/conversations stored like an email (I am aware of some people’s privacy cocnerns). Even today I can go back to my Gmail and look up my conversations with friends and family. I own the conversation history, and I can export them at any given time! I can search them and sort them directly in Gmail. Now I use WhatsApp, Messenger, text messeage, and Wechat (for different groups of people), I don’t know any mechanism to export my conversations. For WhatsApp and Messenger, I know search is only available on their desktop client... and IRRC only text search (can’t do date/time search alone) is supported and is on per contact basis. No global search... Communication used to be, hmm, simple communication: no snap, no video, no crazy emojis and stickers :) Google, what happened? :< Orz Edit: The only thing still usable is the free phone call from and to U.S. I use it all the time since carrier signal is so unreliable and uneven (and subject to surrounding environment) so I just hop on Wifi to make calls, esp at work. PLEASE DON’T KILL IT .
- shliachtx 9y ago
  > For WhatsApp and Messenger, I know search is only available on their desktop client... and IRRC only text search (can’t do date/time search alone) is supported and is on per contact basis. No global search... WhatsApp has search across all conversations in the mobile app (on iOS just pull down on the main screen) and in individual chats (tap on the chat title and select search from the menu).
jayd16 9y ago
All these people bemoaning the loss of jabber. Xmpp is awful for mobile connections. There's a reason no one else is using it. Google tried the longest and they get the most flack for it.
- chii 9y ago
  > There's a reason no one else is using it. because they cannot own the client, and therefore, cannot completely collect the valuable part of the service - user data and activity data etc.
analogic 9y ago
lolgoogle
hitekker 9y ago
You know what's even worse? Google Voice. Terrible web-app, even worse iOS app. So many times where messages were duplicated, or frozen, or stale. As in requiring a reset of the app to fix. At least hangout was stable despite having equally poor UX.
markbnj 9y ago
Came hoping to read some insights about how the Gtalk debacle happened and why. Left disappointed.
m3kw9 9y ago
I thought talk and hangouts do the same things, google needs to do a better job in marketing
niftich 9y ago
There are several contributing factors to Google's disastrous history with messaging services, but a significant cause is Google being spooked by Facebook. In an earlier post of mine [2] (which includes an older revision of the timeline linked in [1]), I speculate that it was Facebook Chat that killed the mid-2000s chat networks of old like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and WLM, rather than Google Talk or any particular missteps of those incumbent chat networks. For example, I was surprised to learn that AIM was present in the iOS App Store at launch on 2008-07-11 -- of course, there were no push notifications at the time -- not until 2009-06. Facebook Chat went live 2008-04-06. Google didn't view them as a threat in messaging but a threat in social networking; they thought they had messaging in the bag with their 2008-09-23 release of Android 1.0, and their 2008-11-11 update to Google Talk which brought voice and video calling, and their 2009-03-11 acquisition of GrandCentral, which was soon rebranded an invite-only Google Voice. But Facebook kept growing and growing and it had an integrated chat on a website where people went to spend their time, instead of Gmail, where they went to manage email. To combat Facebook on social networking, Google launched Buzz with aggressive auto-opt-in on 2010-02-09. Unfortunately a few months later on 2010-05-20, Android finally got push notifications, which enabled third-party messaging apps to be viable on Android. This led to the rise of cross-platform messaging network apps like WhatsApp, whose success came back to hurt Google later. Buzz fizzled and attracted controversy for its aggressive piggybacking on Gmail, so Google tried again with Google Plus on 2011-06-28. That was a better effort, and it included the features "+Messenger", a text chat, and the video chat "+Hangouts". By this point Facebook had more than 700 million active users, and on 2011-08-09 they introduced a standalone app for just Facebook Chat, called 'Messenger'. On 2011-10-12, Apple released iOS 5, which came with iMessages. This significantly improved the iOS platform's story on messaging, putting further pressure on Google. Having put many of its eggs into the Google Plus basket, it needed a win, which it didn't get. On 2013-05-15, Google liberated Hangouts from Google Plus so that it could address messaging and social networking separately. Hangouts was being repositioned as the Android-default messaging app. This helped onboard new users, but on 2014-02-19 Facebook announced it was acquiring WhatsApp. At this point Google lost, and it began to flail about, sometimes reviving long-forgotten apps like Google Voice, sometimes deprecating integrations it had encouraged previously, and then making two more messaging apps. Sources (in detail at): [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518
iamgopal 9y ago
Google needs to streamline their communication product in to one that works across all platforms. And also need better product manager that understands that choices are bad. And not working choice doubly so.
martin1975 9y ago
I don't use Google Hangouts, Allo or whatever else they produced since GTalk. WhatsApp, Signal and Viber are the only ones I use and can reach most anyone worldwide. Google screwed the pooch on their IM strategy long time ago and there's no coming back. Kind of like screwing the Google Pixel 2 by removing the 3.5 mm aux jack.
- aluhut 9y ago
  I don't even know someone who used to use those products mentioned here. However, I'm still on IRC...so what do I know of this fancy new stuff.
jes5199 9y ago
I gave up on Talk / Hangouts a few years ago, when I kept getting into a state with it where someone would send me messages fine but my replies would be delayed for several hours. It was possibly the most frustrating computer-mediated interaction I've ever had - and I say that as a very cynical programmer! After a few weeks of it happening intermittently, I said to my handful of friends - "If you ever want to speak to me again, we have to find a different platform". Now we're on a combination of Telegram and Slack, and I'm happier. It's not as good as the world was in the AIM days, but, it gets the job done.
nitwit005 9y ago
As to the contact list being some random list of names, I've noticed companies seem to go through this sequence: 1) We get more engagement if people add more friends to the product! Repeatedly nudge them to add ALL their friends! 2) Wow, people have a ton of friends they aren't interested in. People don't seem to know how to manage their friends list. Let's automatically pick what to show them.
intellegacy 9y ago
you guys want to talk about frustration and pain from hangouts? pffff, try this: an important new client calls you on your google voice number, which routs to hangouts. You don't yet have their number as it isn't in your Google Contacts or your Phone Contacts. You answer, but are busy, or need to look up something for them, and you tell them you'll call them right back. You get the info you need and you look to your recent calls for the call THAT JUST CAME IN LITERALLY A MINUTE AGO. It's not there. Hangouts does not save incoming calls. (or at least it didn't a year ago) Why? Who the fuck knows??! Google Hangouts: We Don't Give A Shit.
- jackson1way 9y ago
  Exactly my experience. I was always wondering, if I'm just too stupid to figure out how to see recent calls. Glad I'm not alone.
- kilroy123 9y ago
  This is why I have my Google voice number forward to another platform.
pfarnsworth 9y ago
Google has the talent and the flexibility to make the very best instant message client that would be useful for everyone... but they fucked it up somehow. It means they really don't care, which shows in their product. My chats often get lost or delayed. I can't control my "contact" list, and there is no reason why I shouldn't be able to except they don't want to allow it. I see my friends who have died 3 years ago still on it, and I can't remove them unless I block them. If my contact is "Off the Record" they don't even show up in the list, which is infuriating. I would love to know the reason why they let Gmail and Gchat go. My killer app for the Mac is iMessage, mainly because it integrates my text messages and Gchat into a single client. It's so convenient throughout the day for me.
ciupicri 9y ago
The things that sucks most is the fact that everything is recorded and it can't be erased. Goodbye privacy.
zmmmmm 9y ago
Hangouts may be a disaster but even so it is still in my eyes the best messaging solution in that it is truly cross platform, most people have accounts (even if they don't know it, via google accounts), it supports at least some open protocols (remnants of XMPP still works) and does all the essential things (voice, video, text chat, presence, etc). I honestly think that Google's best move still would be to drop everything else and go back to Hangouts / Talk as the single solution. The problem is that the whole space is a nightmare where none of the players actually has the best interests of the users at heart.
eight_ender 9y ago
Our entire company ran on GTalk for a while, then Slack landed like the Spanish Flu and the IRC++ like features pushed every other medium out, except for some, email. Hangouts was used in meeting rooms for a while but it was so horrendously unreliable that we switched to GotoMeetings then Zoom. Zoom is less shit than the others but still fairly awful. Slack, imo, solved instant messaging in businesses completely, but conferencing is still a wild west of garbage solutions.
- tarjei 9y ago
  Try https://appear.in https://appear.in it has worked wonders for us wrt to conferencing.
- kwindla 9y ago
  Shameless plug, our startup makes a video-calling-in-Chrome application. Our goals are being super-reliable, simple, and free: https://daily.co https://daily.co
KirinDave 9y ago
Wow, I never once in my life just pinged a stranger on Hangouts and it seems to me like a incredibly obnoxious and rude thing to do. Nor did my i5 laptop flip out because of hangouts in Gmail. I'm not a big fan of Hangouts, but if it stopped someone from pestering strangers online? Good on it.
dnsva 9y ago
The following are postulations that I have not managed to refute since 2013. Google clearly knows what they have made. The theory that nobody cares to fix this is false. They have good engineers. Google was always tracking our location and scanning our emails. Few things happened simultaneously in 2014. Google tried to replace the messaging app with hangouts, blatantly stepping on privacy. Inadvertent signing ups for Google+ could occur. I switched to Cyanogenmod. Navigating new privacy settings would took so long. Then Google maps started suggesting where I intend to go. Not very creepy. It seems to me that Google intend to do the right thing, which is to declare publicly that our privacy is compromised, (e.g. Snowden) when we use Online centralized products. That is a good thing. I stopped trusting my ill-founded sense of privacy. I lived in Canada, perhaps the timing was different in the states.
surferbayarea 9y ago
How many product managers do they have? 50?
vijaybritto 9y ago
I have never agreed more to any single article ever than this in my life! How accurate! So true and the pain to leave GTalk still lingers in me to this day. I experienced my first love in that thing ffs!
dawkins 9y ago
I miss google talk but it was just chat. I use hangouts this days for chat, voice and screen sharing and it works well enough.
bitL 9y ago
A typical process at a big corp: Initial small enthusiastic team has a cool idea, works day and night, having a lot of fun on the project. They release it, it's cool, useful and everybody loves it. Then after a while original team members get bored or focus on other interests, move out of the team and new team members come in. Those team members aren't necessarily worse than the original ones, but have to maintain the project they didn't write. They need to show their usefulness, so they try to conjure new ideas that might not be useful at all, but hope they would be visible enough to grant them promotion within the company. They focus on some mistake/wart/non-refactored portion of code, make an essay or two to convince management that changes are needed, then slap on another feature they could be known for and proceed changing experience. Once they are done, management applauds them and customers either are lucky and have a blast with the new changes, or those changes were complete misses and started to ruin experience. This process repeats often until product is EOLed or just maintained for whatever reason.
- promopacket 9y ago
  Agree that it happens, and think this case is different. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16351137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16351137
  - tzahola 9y ago
    This case is no different, right?
djhworld 9y ago
People on here bemoan the loss of XMPP integration and federated access to these platforms, but do Facebook/Google/Microsoft really give that much of a shit about that? I suspect the % of their userbase who wants, let alone understands those features is very small
- monksy 9y ago
  Yes, the clients suck, and it's a pain to deal with so many different messaging apps.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Of course they don't give a shit. Because they understand the game - they're the ones putting things on the market, and users have zero choice (network effect means good marketing beats any feature set here).
mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
Same way they managed to screw up Google voice.
- analogic 9y ago
  Shhhh, don't give them the idea to cancel my voicemail transcribing app. Or does voice actually have other features?
secabeen 9y ago
Fascinating. Within my social circles, we use Hangouts extensively. It still feels a lot like the original Talk for us. The Android app works, on desktop the Chrome extension is solid, I've never lost an important message, and the features he laments the loss of (busy status, XMPP support, off the record, contact blocking) just don't matter to us. I haven't had his experience with adding people (if I want to chat with someone, I input their @gmail.com address, done), message delivery is reliable, multi-media (photos, video) works fine, voice and video calling works, search is in the Gmail we already use, and group chats are easy and straightforward. My social circle is almost exclusively Android, which may help, although the few iPhone users do work, and a lot of chatting happens through the Chrome extension/gmail window, so there's that. I don't particularly want to chat through Facebook (Messenger is a busy, ugly mess, and the app is pretty heavyweight) and many of my contacts aren't on Whatsapp or WeChat. SMS often delays message sending and delivery in areas with spotty mobile coverage. Hangouts uses wifi first, which is ubiquitous in our homes and at work. It's really interesting to see the different perspective. I do worry about the future of Hangouts, it feels like it's just coasting now. Duo/Allo/Meet may be an okay replacement, if they migrate all of the data over and swap it in Gmail. I've played with their slack-competitor (Chat), and it's interesting. Still doesn't feel as good as slack, but it's been okay.
busterarm 9y ago
We used to have a relatively open internet based on developing, using an adhering to protocols and open standards. This is probably because everything was new and there was a lot of money on the table for everyone. We would joke about peoples' theories of the "Balkanization of the Internet" and mostly we would look at it from the wrong angle (nation states). Now we have an internet of walled gardens. Your data is precious and no longer yours.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > Now we have an internet of walled gardens. Your data is precious and no longer yours. And you can't do shit without agreeing to some ToS or EULA. At this point I'm actually waiting for someone to "innovate" a way to dynamically sign EULAs with the same API calls you'd use to get access tokens, just to add insult to injury...
  - techsupporter 9y ago
    > And you can't do shit without agreeing to some ToS or EULA. And it's guaranteed to have some damned binding arbitration clause[0], if it comes from a company based in the United States, so when[1] everything that company knows about you is "unintentionally" transmitted to every hacker and script kiddy with a modicum of PHP knowledge, you can't even band together and financially ruin the company. Not that you'd be able to get anything out of them, anyway, since 90% of them are so knee-deep in venture capital money that you'd be 9,392nd in line behind the likes Sequoia, Andreessen, Y Combinator, and Honest Achmend's Certificate Authority and Investing Company. I guess I'm getting old but, damn, I'm really starting to hate the corporate Internet. 0 - I loathe every single one of you who has ever posted on a Hacker News thread about how horrible binding arbitration clauses are and who are also founders/CEOs/operators of companies with binding arbitration clauses in your terms of service. This goes quadruple for companies that are B2C. I do not care if "everyone else is doing it" or your "lawyers recommended it." Grow a spine and delete the clause if it's so awful. Go first. Be bold. Half points for burying an opt-out that requires faxing a notarized statement to a phone number in Saint Pierre and Miquelon. That's better than nothing. 1 - It's not "if" anymore, it's when.
pixelpoet 9y ago
Just want to say thank you for writing this and bringing it to HN attention. Gtalk was absolutely amazing, and you could even send files to your friends just so, just drag it into the window! It's 2018 and this functionality is hardly available anywhere anymore.
- jhasse 9y ago
  Telegram's Desktop client has this functionality.
krisives 9y ago
Google Voice was similarly “updated” over time and is very good anymore
mastazi 9y ago
I use Google Hangouts from time to time, not my favourite IM app but some of the criticism in the article is inaccurate. I can definitely tell when someone is online (article says you can't), and I have been using the desktop app for a while (article says there is no desktop app). Note: the desktop app doesn't seem to be native (I think I got it from the Chrome store) however it's definitely a desktop app in the sense that you can run it without having a browser open.
- 4ad 9y ago
  Are you kidding me, you can't even click on hyperlinks in that "desktop" app. You have to copy-paste them manually in your browser. Edit: It seems the links do open, but they open silently in one of my minimized browser Windows. And of course it opens in chrome even though my default browser is Safari. Wonderful quality.
  - mastazi 9y ago
    I haven't stated anything that contradicts what you said
a-dub 9y ago
It's funny how this seems to happen to chat systems over and over. Google Talk, Skype for Business, ICQ... They start out pretty good, but then the simplicity gets abandoned by what appears to be really awful committee driven product design decisions until they basically become unusable. Maybe their inherent simplicity makes them the ultimate bike shed.
keypress 9y ago
Totally abandoned all chat applications after the demise of Gtalk and cross network communication breakdowns.
yason 9y ago
I haven't had much problems with Google Hangouts but on the other hand I'm a light user: I just wanted a real-time text chat and didn't suffer from most of the problems decribed in the article. Yes, the video chat was choppy but so was any other video call at the time; I still managed to talk to my wife over video on business trips so it wasn't unusable. I still like the Gmail chat that you can pop up into a separate window. It's fast and reliable. However, the issue with Hangouts is that I don't have people there anymore. I talk to 1-2 friends on Hangouts who refuse to use Facebook or Whatsapp. That's all nice but ten years ago I had a significant portion of my friends in Google Talk. They still have Gmail accounts but they chat elsewhere.
iforgotpassword 9y ago
I can only agree with that post. Sometimes I'm wondering though if this is just us techsavy people or the fact that I'm getting old and everything was better in the old days. Maybe the average person not working in tech prefers how this works today? Many times I'm already lost at the basic presentation of modern websites or apps. Big colorful landing pages that try to aggregate different data and events in an intelligent way but just seem like a jumbled mess to me, everything has to be dynamic and load additional data via ajax so that often times the back button doesn't work or at least makes sure the scroll position won't be restored properly... I could go on for hours. I guess I'm too old for that sort of nonsense any more.
shmerl 9y ago
It died when they killed XMPP federation (by refusing to support server to server encryption).
nvarsj 9y ago
What happened at Google? I remember when gmail was first released - such a great product. Hangouts destroyed the google talk experience and community. Someone should have gotten fired over it. Everyone seemed to use google talk before the plus/hangouts conversion. Such a massive lost opportunity. There are many other examples of half-baked and unmaintained software from G. For example, play music's web UI has many irritating bugs that never get fixed. I'm close to canceling my subscription. I'd be pretty hesitant about committing all in to any of Google's enterprise offerings, like GCE, based on my experience with their other products.
- epicide 9y ago
  Google makes money off of data. Essentially, they are a big ad company that does tech. Whatever that means to you, that's generally how they make money. The more of your data that they can have going through their services, the better. All of their "products"/tools (at least after a certain point) have this end in mind. If a product does not get them enough data[0], they either a) bastardize it until it does, or b) kill it. I'm sure this is not news to a lot of people, but it surprises me how often people forget that Google has no reason to care about the quality of their tools as long as enough people are using it. I'm not saying they don't make good tools, but that is why we see good tools get killed (Reader, Wave) or ruined (Hangouts, Voice). [0]: or they can't figure out a good way to get good ad data from it. EDIT: formatting.
- mistermann 9y ago
  Google just can't do UI's, I can't think of a UI put out by google that I don't dislike, if not completely hate. It's almost like there's someone super senior in the company who forces bad decisions on designers. The crowning achievement of absurdity is probably the YouTube app, it's not as bad as Skype, but given time they may get there.
  - hedora 9y ago
    Their initial search UI was great, though they ruined that too. I switched away years ago, and am increasingly baffled whenever I accidentally run a google search.
m-p-3 9y ago
Agreed with most of the points in the article. Google Talk was minimalistic, but that was the whole point of it. And it was in a point of time where Google actually tried to use an open protocol which was interoperable and extendable. I could use Google Talk in Pidgin along will all my other IM accounts within the same client, and I also could use some plugins like OTR to encrypt my conversation if I needed to. Now we're forced to use the Hangouts client which frankly isn't very good, and everyone else is also trying to lock everyone in their platform by putting interoperability on ice. XMPP is still a good protocol, but no one seems to care :(
nkoren 9y ago
The rationale for Google's behaviour has always been that it will help them achieve user lock-in. But disregarding both the technical and ethical merits of this strategy... is it actually working for them? Six years ago I spent very significant proportion of my time using Talk and Reader. In their absence, I have shifted to using FB Messenger (/WhatsApp/Telegram/etc.), with Facebook and Hacker News kinda substituting for Reader. I still use Gmail and Google Apps, but my daily time inside the Google ecosystem has probably decreased by about 2/3rds. If I'm their target audience, then this strategy is an unqualified failure. Obviously I'm not their target audience -- I'm an outlier in almost every respect -- but I've yet to see an analysis which suggested that Google has actually succeeded in capturing more eyeballs or generating more revenue via this strategy. In fact I haven't really seen any business analysis of this at all, other than blaming the business-types for making these decisions. Which is probably correct, but I'd still be very curious to see whether those decisions paid off, purely on their own terms.
- Shoothe 9y ago
  I can relate to this. Google's services became less and less useful over time. I even replaced Hangouts with self-hosted XMPP server while previously I thought custom would mean a lot of trouble. After a while test driving it I migrated entire family (Conversations.im on Android works great and we've got encrypted E2E chats). Now I'm thinking about hosting my own calendars (kind of easy) and email (scary).
  - delfinom 9y ago
    I've been finding Google Calendar incredibly buggy as of late as well as other services. It's like they don't care anymore.
    - stephengillie 9y ago
      Google can't organize the world's data if the world won't trust Google with the data in the first place.
kimi 9y ago
Google+ has been quite a bit of a disaster. They wanted to tie everything to it, and it ended dragging down everything else. Nowadays, for a quick chat, Jit.si seems to be the easiest thing - it just works, you send them a link and get online.
lkrubner 9y ago
When I talk to the 20 tech people who I respect most, what I notice is that everyone respects Google less now than 5 years ago. Is it a successful branding strategy that generates so much dislike? I'm especially curious because Google is famous for basing its decisions on "data". I have no idea how things work in Google, but I can say that every company I've worked at that supposedly valued "data" in meetings actually valued something darker. The use of "data" in meetings tends to be a passive aggressive negotiating tactic for a group of people who for cultural or emotional reasons don't think it is reasonable to express strong disagreement or actual anger. Instead of expressing strong emotion, people are taught to quote data -- they then cherry pick whatever statistics back up their beliefs. As far as I know, there has never been a company that said "We want the worst informed people to make the decisions" so in a sense all companies have always valued data. But they didn't make a fetish out of it. They simply expected people to be well informed, and to make intelligent arguments, based on what they know. That would have been true at General Motors in 1950. That much has probably been true at most companies for centuries. When management says that the company is going to be "data driven" they are implicitly asking for a particular type of interaction to happen in meetings, an elaborate dance where people hide their emotions and quote statistics. I can't cover all the nuances of company meetings in a comment on Hacker News, and of course I am not advocating that meetings should be abusive, but I do think it can be healthy to tell meeting participants that it is culturally acceptable to advocate strongly, and with emotion, for what they think the right policy is. Google seems like an example of how a "data driven" company can go off the rails. I'm not sure what their meetings are like, but I know that in interviews the management at Google talks about their focus on data, yet their brand image continues to decline. And of course, I'm on the record in believing there should be less group meetings and more one on one meetings, at every company that I've ever worked: http://simpleleadership.io/why-group-meetings-can-be-time-wasters-with-lawrence-krubner/ http://simpleleadership.io/why-group-meetings-can-be-time-wa...
- appleflaxen 9y ago
  Wow. That is a really apt critique of the culture you are describing. It sounds like you're basically saying that as with programming styles, wellness, activism, and everything else in the world: there is a basis of truth that underpins data-centric management, but you can easily make it into a cult. You put that idea together so succinctly - thank you.
CosmicShadow 9y ago
100% this article. Google Talk was awesome, especially as MSN got more and more bloated and then once they forced into Skype and everyone's contact list got screwed up or people fled, it was like, yes, a clean client for use with friends. Then it turned to garbage. I'll have someone call and 4 different devices start ringing except the one I'm on, and then the others will continue to ring forever. I called my friend back when it didn't work and we had like 2 different voice calls going at the same time together. He works at Google and has to use it, so that's the only reason I keep it, I don't even know how to use it it's so confusing now. Shower thoughts had me thinking just the other day how I wished we could have a new Pidgin like system. I have a hard time figuring out which friends use which platform and where I can get replies. I want to keep in touch with friends now that we all live in different places, but it's hard when everyone lives in a different chat app that you only have 2 contacts in. It was awesome when everyone just used one or two things. The fallback to shitty text messaging is the only guaranteed medium for almost all people on one platform.
HangoutIs 9y ago
Just yesterday I was talking on hangout and my Android tablet restarted multiple times. When it booted up I saw graphical artifacts during boot even before I opened the app.
johnmarcus 9y ago
Wtf are you talking about? I use it with almost everyone, inside and out of the org. Issues are usually local internet connection issues. And it's free, which is nice. There are pay for services I suppose are better, once others are set up with it. But I love Hangouts.
olfactory 9y ago
This is one more bit of evidence that Google is on the way down. When basic product management is too boring to take seriously, the company is just coasting along on past glories and hype. Yahoo was in that situation for years before it imploded.
carapace 9y ago
I worked at Google. An observation: The internal codebase should be structured like the yellow-pages of a phonebook[1] but instead it's structured like a flea market. Now, consider that in light of Conway's Law[2]... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonebook [2] http://melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html http://melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html
qbaqbaqba 9y ago
That's funny how a huge company may bring a technology to the mainstream and then kill it just like that. Jabber, RSS. Open protocols that treated their monopoly. What's next on the kill list? HTTP, email?
m0d0nne11 9y ago
And, as if to further illustrate the problem with dysfunctional WWW stuff, the ony way to comment on that article is via Disqus...

803 points by calcifer 9y ago

There is a running joke within Google that the best way to get promoted is to create another chat or video conferencing app. Is it really a joke at this point, though? Googler engineering leaders and teams engaging in the replacement of good chat tech with worse happens every year or two. All to demonstrate "cross-org impact" and climb the promo ladder. This is in fact the driving force behind many of the complaints mentioned in the article. A sad and systemic failure, indeed.

cmrdporcupine 9y ago
Yep, "demonstrating impact." There are apparently some moves afoot reforming the promo process to make this less common though. Here's hoping.
slivym 9y ago
It really makes you wonder why there is no one in the organisation saying "This is a fantastic new product, with truly innovative work. Why did you feel the need to create an internal competitor to it rather than help make it better" One of the most destructive issues I see from my time in management has been engineers who are more interested in re-writing what other people have already done. It seems amazing to me an organisation the size of Google hasn't identified the waste here.

petecox 9y ago

I used Pidgin once and it worked fine on Windows and Linux. So instead of one universal client, one requires Skype, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts/Allo/Duo. (I don't use iOS but Apple have their own, I guess) Thus if anyone wants to contact me, stay old school and use SMS or email! :)

PhantomGremlin 9y ago

I don't use Google Talk, so I don't know how accurate the article is. But if it's at all true, it should become an HBS case study in how to destroy a community and how not to write software.

Groxx 9y ago

For me, one of the worst parts of this transition is that as more people use hangouts, the experience becomes worse. The utter lack of control or signaling on it leads to tons of missed messages, threads that fall out of visibility, and general "did they see my message? do they even use this any more?" questions. All of which Google Talk managed just fine. And if you wanted more control, install a third party app, because it worked with them all. What did we gain for this?

HiroshiSan 9y ago
Not to mention you can't even delete messages on hangouts. One of the reasons I switched to telegram.

faitswulff 9y ago

My personal experience with Hangouts is that it would often hang and disconnect so that I would have to forcefully close the app. Then it wouldn't update the read receipts, or possibly worse, lie about who had seen what. I put all of this down to my having an old phone. Recently, however, I got a new phone. I was excited to have a usable Hangouts once again, as that's where many of my close friends are. Unfortunately, now I know that the problem is Hangouts, not my phone.

goalieca 9y ago

Hangouts also ha the worst video call quality of the bunch. It eats the battery extremely fast (vp9). There was a two year period where there was a feedback echo because the microphone wasn’t silenced, and then thrown to the side for a newer and less complete/just as buggy duo and allo. Let’s not forget the sms integration and then later deintegration. Jabber days were good.

Androider 9y ago

I constantly have obvious spam accounts trying to send me Hangouts messages. That there isn't simply an option to never allow anyone not already in my contacts to message me is crazy.

rident 9y ago

Google Talk was only ok when they had a jabber service. It wasn't much better than the other options besides that it tied delayed messaging (email) to instant messaging (jabber) through the same contact info. Then they killed off the jabber client to force users further into their software ecosystem. Then Hangouts came along and has to some degree replaced Talk with further ties into that ecosystem. Then they removed browser support for anything but Chrome in Hangouts, initially promising to re-extend support, yet today the docs have changed to just say you must install Chrome. The most recent eco-system tie-in that this article doesn't mention is Google Hangouts Meet. The corporate conference room version of Hangouts that has a different interface, custom Google hardware, and less memorable links (/xcf-fges-sce vs. /organization/meeting-name). Pixel has similar limitations when it comes to screen mirroring, only a Chromecast will do for the Pixel! Yet other android phones freely connect to Chromecast/Roku/Firestick/etc all because of a hidden menu setting that Google has disabled and set to 0 by default. You must root your phone to get around it. Great flagship right? All this points to a company that's so fucking worried that their tech is going to be outpaced by the little guy that they have to resort to handcuffing users to their wares. I've almost completely switched to Slack in the mean time.

aianus 9y ago
I use hangouts exclusively on Safari. It's actually frequently unusable with Chrome (nobody can hear me).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rident 9y ago
  Meet though is exclusively Chrome. They have now cut Safari out of the picture as well... https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7317473 https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7317473
  - eridius 9y ago
    Wow, not even Firefox support? Hasn't Google heard of something called the open web?

djsumdog 9y ago

I transferred my American number to Google Voice before I left the country and have been able to hold onto that number for over a decade. Unfortunately, everything about Google Voice/Hangouts/Talk/Whatever-it-is now sucks. Trying to find someone is damn near impossible. I totally can attest to that. The removal of federated and regular XMPP was the wrong direction. I'm in the wonderfully weird situation of not having a Gmail account either. I deleted it and ran my own mail server back in 2012. I use DavDroid/Radicle for contacts, so in the web interface, any contacts after 2012 that are SMS are phone number only. I have to use my phone to see the names. I don't think it's even possible to find someone via gmail address anymore. Occasionally I'd find someone on Google Plus .. and have no freakin idea how the hell to send them a personal message (either in G+ or Hangouts). The whole Hangouts/G+/Gmail ecosystem is awful. If you don't have a gmail account, it's beyond unusable. I pretty much just use Hangouts for legacy chats. AIM/Yahoo/MSN all worked .. and now they're all gone (I think Yahoo is still there, but web only). Facebook was unreliable as shit and god awful until around 2013/2014. It took them that long to create someone their competitors had done better a decade ago.

smt88 9y ago
Voice/Hangouts has felt like an abandoned application for many years, even though it's potentially one of the best products Google has ever made. They really seem to stop at v1 for almost all of their products and have not the slightest idea how to monetize them.
- inferiorhuman 9y ago
  > Voice/Hangouts has felt like an abandoned application for many years, even though it's potentially one of the best products Google has ever made. That's probably WHY Google Voice was one of the best products Google put out.
  - notwhereyouare 9y ago
    it was originally a company called grandcentral and eventually acquired by google. they basically left it as it for YEARS

KKKKkkkk1 9y ago

That's alright, the competitors are even worse. I used to use Skype on Linux. They stopped development on the Linux client a decade ago, but it kept working just fine. And then they released a new client and forced everyone to upgrade. The new client is so bad in terms of sound quality that I've been forced to switch to Hangouts.

fencepost 9y ago
You might be able to use Slack or Discord, though I don't believe either offer video options and the only real mention of voice that I saw for Slack was for calls. Still, Discord might actually be worth looking at - it's targeted at gamers, but it does at least small-group voice chat reasonably well in my experience.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  Our company switched from Skype to Discord after the new Skype client came out and have been happy with it.
  - fencepost 9y ago
    If you haven't already, consider having at least some of your folks sign up for Nitro so Discord can stay viable.
- jakebasile 9y ago
  Discord has 2+ person direct audio and video calls.

rocky1138 9y ago

This happened right about the time that Google abandoned the desktop as its primary target and started focusing entirely on mobile. Things just haven't been the same.

trothamel 9y ago

Instant messaging is an example of something that used to work, and now doesn't. It used to be that everyone was basically on AIM, which functioned as an open enough network. Status information worked pretty well - you could fairly easily tell if someone was online, and so people could respond. And now - we have dozens of clients, such that there's no way of knowing which subset your contacts use. With the prevalence of phones, it's hard to tell if someone is available or not, so you just send messages in the ether, and get surprised if anyone responds. And the worst part is, there's no obvious fix, since any new system will just add to the fragmentation.

nikanj 9y ago
It’s really hard to build a billion dollar platform business from just staying out of the way, so apps layer on the complexity. Plus there’s always the VC around the corner hoping to fund the next Whatsapp, so we get a proliferation of me too-apps.
dmead 9y ago
So don't make new systems.. help dismantle old ones?
lobster_johnson 9y ago
I don't think that's accurate. There were a bunch of silos in the past, too. People used to be on AIM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Jabber and IRC, and there were others. That's the reason chat apps like Adium and Trillian supporter multiple accounts. I had friends on all those networks, and nobody was on all of them. It was a mess back then, just as it is now, except now we have even more choices.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  The difference was you'd fire up Pidgin and connect to all of those accounts simultaneously, at which point it really didn't matter which individual network any given contact was on. Now, in the smartphone era, there's nothing like that. There's a bunch of different completely siloed apps, and I can't talk to people all from one place.

Skunkleton 9y ago

There is at least one major attempt at addressing this fragmentation with a modern protocol, that being the Matrix protocol (matrix.org). Yeah, if it takes off then it will just be yet another bit of fragmentation, but at least it is designed in such a way that chats dont get siloed into a single echosystem.

joshlemer 9y ago
I have to say that, although I began to use Matrix for the open source / open protocol aspects, their flagship client Riot is actually much more fully featured than most other propriety products. For sure it is much more useful than Google Hangouts and I'd say about equal to Slack in terms of user experience and features.
- Skunkleton 9y ago
  Riot is impressive, especially for something so new. Equally impressive is how trivial it is to create plugins to bridge to other protocols. For example: https://github.com/ImmanuelBaskaran/Hangouts-Bridge/blob/master/Hangouts%20Bridge.py https://github.com/ImmanuelBaskaran/Hangouts-Bridge/blob/mas...

oldcynic 9y ago

Instant messaging used to be so simple. You connected via adium or pidgin, and it just worked. You could hook it up to gtalk and msn. Even ICQ and AIM. Then msn wouldn't play nice any more, then gtalk. Now we've had a dozen renames and replacements, XMPP is long gone, and what's left is an almost unusable mess. Add to that the dozens of people I once had connected on Adium (from memory most on Google talk) are now strewn across loads of different chat apps. These days I'm texting more again! This really isn't the future I expected.

scrooched_moose 9y ago
That's been my experience as well. Facebook/Hangouts/WhatsApp/Allo/whatever might have amazing features but I truly don't care. SMS/iMessage (since it's seamlessly integrated) has completely taken over with my group of friends because of one defining feature - everyone has it. If you have a phone number, you can receive a text from me. A while back one member of our group got tired of the 8 person running group thread we have and suggested moving to something "better". The group unanimously shot it down because we don't want to download new apps, create new accounts, then inevitably have to migrate to the brand new flashy service in 3 months. For context, we're all late 20s/early 30s. Edit: Actually, I believe SMS is still superior because it works even without a data connection. We spend enough time camping, skiing, attending huge sporting events, etc. any of those other services would be a significant downgrade.
- oldcynic 9y ago
  Certainly has a big plus - SMS will often get through when even voice can't. Data on the other hand! That's without getting into how badly some apps handle intermittent or no signal.
- Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
  I suppose you live in a country where the telcos offer free SMS. In Spain they cost money, so almost no one uses SMS for personal messaging. All the SMSs I get are from companies.
  - 9y ago

b1daly 9y ago

It is remarkable how thoroughly Google has munged their communications platforms. Especially as an iPhone user, I am constantly befuddled trying to get a semblance of a well organized contact list between my google apps, never mind a correspondence between the iPhone native contact list. I have a google voice number, and generally I assume that messages get to me one way or another. The most recent baffled was finally understanding that there is no way to manage contacts from within the iOS Hangouts app. I’m actually not sure how that contact list is generated.

ndespres 9y ago
It isn't exactly clear how it's managed from the desktop either. Over the years they've really screwed the whole thing up. It's no longer clear whether someone is online, offline, online but hidden, or just lost in a contact list change reorganization. it also isn't clear whether someone is available to chat, or if the IM I send will be inconveniently received on their mobile phone, something I try to avoid doing when possible.
- Pokepokalypse 9y ago
  yeah, yahoo did all this same stuff 20 years ago.
Spooky23 9y ago
It’s not just Google. Have you tried Skype for Business lately? Meetings are incomprehensible. Teams is supposed to fix everything... but my O365 tenant doesn’t have it yet.
- bbatha 9y ago
  Teams is a joke. It’s an alpha level product at best. At worst it’s black hole on the user voice forums for features that were in IRC and a constant memory leak. The vscode team needs to teach the teams team how to properly write an electron app.
  - 9y ago

andrepd 9y ago

>So you have to use the Google Hangouts on a separate tab in the browser, or it gets juxtaposed to your Gmail, which will slow your lastest i5 laptop down and makes your fan whirr like crazy just to have one conversation. Fucks sake, this annoys me to no end. Here is a product that's clean, lean, and fast. 5 years of development later and you have a bloated, energy-chugging, slow and irritating piece of shit, with absolutely zero added functionally to show for it. God damn it.

bronson 9y ago
But Google+. Do you not realize the value of Google+??
- pasbesoin 9y ago
  Yeah, generating lots more page views and clicks, because I can no longer effectively search for what I want and instead have to manually sort through a ton of poorly targeted and differentiated results.
- superasn 9y ago
  I just realized that Google+ isn't dead yet. Guess someone at Google is still hopeful about its future? P.S. Also the amount of shit Google+ has fucked wrt to Google services in amazing. It also killed the "+" sign in Google's search results too.
  - MikusR 9y ago
    They have to keep Linus happy.
  - wyclif 9y ago
    Google+ is very far from being "dead", it's quite lively, though niche compared to Facebook.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  I suspect you wouldn't been downvoted so far if there was a sarcasm marker on this, of some sort.

pilom 9y ago

One of the things I love about Google Fi is that I'm still allowed to effectively use Google Talk and SMS still works in Hangouts on my phone. I can do all messaging from the hangouts app with people over SMS or if they use hangouts, the message can go over that. I can text and call with my real phone number through the Gmail interface. Unfortunately, those with Google Fi are the only ones still allowed to use it that way.

rch 9y ago
Sure but the web interface for hangouts ruins the whole experience. How search functionality can be ignored in a Google product is beyond me.
- _asummers 9y ago
  You can search for label:chats in Gmail (extremely poor workaround) but this doesn't work in Inbox, forcing you to navigate back to Gmail to search chat history.

vadimberman 9y ago

Continuing the train of thought of the comments bemoaning the state of the instant messaging: can anyone recommend a simple instant messaging / voice call combo like the old-timey Skype?

MRPockets 9y ago
I use Wire[0] now. It offers IM, voice messages, voice & video calls, & a decent set of unobtrusive "silly" features (voice filters, ability to send drawings, etc). Finding people is generally easy but for some reason, it will sometimes not find someone when you type the entire username but will find him/her before you finish typing the username out. The best part is it works well on Android without GApps & seems to work much better than Skype in video calls on a slow connection. 0 - https://wire.com/en/download/ https://wire.com/en/download/
jes5199 9y ago
I've been using "telegram" with several friends, it seems to be okay, it's both desktop and mobile

anigbrowl 9y ago

Great piece. I used to use GT a lot, then it changed to Hangouts and I used it less, then people were saying 'it's better to use Ello for encrypted chat' and I thought 'why bother'? I've had this experience with quite a few Google products - they just keep getting larger and cheesier with no discernible user benefit. Everything just keeps getting bigger and worse, even search.

brohoolio 9y ago

I have a folder on my iPhone for all the various google chat apps, allo, duo, hangouts, meet and the list goes on and on. Not an application, but a whole folder filled with chat applications! All my friend have moved onto slack.

yeukhon 9y ago

Google Talk was like the “cool” version of AIM to me when I was using it between 2010 and 2013. I could access Talk from my browser or from a desktop client (Pidgin, and I believe there used to be an official Talk desktop client). For some like me, I didn’t mind to have my messages/conversations stored like an email (I am aware of some people’s privacy cocnerns). Even today I can go back to my Gmail and look up my conversations with friends and family. I own the conversation history, and I can export them at any given time! I can search them and sort them directly in Gmail. Now I use WhatsApp, Messenger, text messeage, and Wechat (for different groups of people), I don’t know any mechanism to export my conversations. For WhatsApp and Messenger, I know search is only available on their desktop client... and IRRC only text search (can’t do date/time search alone) is supported and is on per contact basis. No global search... Communication used to be, hmm, simple communication: no snap, no video, no crazy emojis and stickers :) Google, what happened? :< Orz Edit: The only thing still usable is the free phone call from and to U.S. I use it all the time since carrier signal is so unreliable and uneven (and subject to surrounding environment) so I just hop on Wifi to make calls, esp at work. PLEASE DON’T KILL IT .

shliachtx 9y ago
> For WhatsApp and Messenger, I know search is only available on their desktop client... and IRRC only text search (can’t do date/time search alone) is supported and is on per contact basis. No global search... WhatsApp has search across all conversations in the mobile app (on iOS just pull down on the main screen) and in individual chats (tap on the chat title and select search from the menu).

jayd16 9y ago

All these people bemoaning the loss of jabber. Xmpp is awful for mobile connections. There's a reason no one else is using it. Google tried the longest and they get the most flack for it.

chii 9y ago
> There's a reason no one else is using it. because they cannot own the client, and therefore, cannot completely collect the valuable part of the service - user data and activity data etc.

analogic 9y ago

lolgoogle

hitekker 9y ago

You know what's even worse? Google Voice. Terrible web-app, even worse iOS app. So many times where messages were duplicated, or frozen, or stale. As in requiring a reset of the app to fix. At least hangout was stable despite having equally poor UX.

markbnj 9y ago

Came hoping to read some insights about how the Gtalk debacle happened and why. Left disappointed.

m3kw9 9y ago

I thought talk and hangouts do the same things, google needs to do a better job in marketing

niftich 9y ago

There are several contributing factors to Google's disastrous history with messaging services, but a significant cause is Google being spooked by Facebook. In an earlier post of mine [2] (which includes an older revision of the timeline linked in [1]), I speculate that it was Facebook Chat that killed the mid-2000s chat networks of old like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and WLM, rather than Google Talk or any particular missteps of those incumbent chat networks. For example, I was surprised to learn that AIM was present in the iOS App Store at launch on 2008-07-11 -- of course, there were no push notifications at the time -- not until 2009-06. Facebook Chat went live 2008-04-06. Google didn't view them as a threat in messaging but a threat in social networking; they thought they had messaging in the bag with their 2008-09-23 release of Android 1.0, and their 2008-11-11 update to Google Talk which brought voice and video calling, and their 2009-03-11 acquisition of GrandCentral, which was soon rebranded an invite-only Google Voice. But Facebook kept growing and growing and it had an integrated chat on a website where people went to spend their time, instead of Gmail, where they went to manage email. To combat Facebook on social networking, Google launched Buzz with aggressive auto-opt-in on 2010-02-09. Unfortunately a few months later on 2010-05-20, Android finally got push notifications, which enabled third-party messaging apps to be viable on Android. This led to the rise of cross-platform messaging network apps like WhatsApp, whose success came back to hurt Google later. Buzz fizzled and attracted controversy for its aggressive piggybacking on Gmail, so Google tried again with Google Plus on 2011-06-28. That was a better effort, and it included the features "+Messenger", a text chat, and the video chat "+Hangouts". By this point Facebook had more than 700 million active users, and on 2011-08-09 they introduced a standalone app for just Facebook Chat, called 'Messenger'. On 2011-10-12, Apple released iOS 5, which came with iMessages. This significantly improved the iOS platform's story on messaging, putting further pressure on Google. Having put many of its eggs into the Google Plus basket, it needed a win, which it didn't get. On 2013-05-15, Google liberated Hangouts from Google Plus so that it could address messaging and social networking separately. Hangouts was being repositioned as the Android-default messaging app. This helped onboard new users, but on 2014-02-19 Facebook announced it was acquiring WhatsApp. At this point Google lost, and it began to flail about, sometimes reviving long-forgotten apps like Google Voice, sometimes deprecating integrations it had encouraged previously, and then making two more messaging apps. Sources (in detail at): [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518

iamgopal 9y ago

Google needs to streamline their communication product in to one that works across all platforms. And also need better product manager that understands that choices are bad. And not working choice doubly so.

martin1975 9y ago

I don't use Google Hangouts, Allo or whatever else they produced since GTalk. WhatsApp, Signal and Viber are the only ones I use and can reach most anyone worldwide. Google screwed the pooch on their IM strategy long time ago and there's no coming back. Kind of like screwing the Google Pixel 2 by removing the 3.5 mm aux jack.

aluhut 9y ago
I don't even know someone who used to use those products mentioned here. However, I'm still on IRC...so what do I know of this fancy new stuff.

jes5199 9y ago

I gave up on Talk / Hangouts a few years ago, when I kept getting into a state with it where someone would send me messages fine but my replies would be delayed for several hours. It was possibly the most frustrating computer-mediated interaction I've ever had - and I say that as a very cynical programmer! After a few weeks of it happening intermittently, I said to my handful of friends - "If you ever want to speak to me again, we have to find a different platform". Now we're on a combination of Telegram and Slack, and I'm happier. It's not as good as the world was in the AIM days, but, it gets the job done.

nitwit005 9y ago

As to the contact list being some random list of names, I've noticed companies seem to go through this sequence: 1) We get more engagement if people add more friends to the product! Repeatedly nudge them to add ALL their friends! 2) Wow, people have a ton of friends they aren't interested in. People don't seem to know how to manage their friends list. Let's automatically pick what to show them.

intellegacy 9y ago

you guys want to talk about frustration and pain from hangouts? pffff, try this: an important new client calls you on your google voice number, which routs to hangouts. You don't yet have their number as it isn't in your Google Contacts or your Phone Contacts. You answer, but are busy, or need to look up something for them, and you tell them you'll call them right back. You get the info you need and you look to your recent calls for the call THAT JUST CAME IN LITERALLY A MINUTE AGO. It's not there. Hangouts does not save incoming calls. (or at least it didn't a year ago) Why? Who the fuck knows??! Google Hangouts: We Don't Give A Shit.

jackson1way 9y ago
Exactly my experience. I was always wondering, if I'm just too stupid to figure out how to see recent calls. Glad I'm not alone.
kilroy123 9y ago
This is why I have my Google voice number forward to another platform.

pfarnsworth 9y ago

Google has the talent and the flexibility to make the very best instant message client that would be useful for everyone... but they fucked it up somehow. It means they really don't care, which shows in their product. My chats often get lost or delayed. I can't control my "contact" list, and there is no reason why I shouldn't be able to except they don't want to allow it. I see my friends who have died 3 years ago still on it, and I can't remove them unless I block them. If my contact is "Off the Record" they don't even show up in the list, which is infuriating. I would love to know the reason why they let Gmail and Gchat go. My killer app for the Mac is iMessage, mainly because it integrates my text messages and Gchat into a single client. It's so convenient throughout the day for me.

ciupicri 9y ago

The things that sucks most is the fact that everything is recorded and it can't be erased. Goodbye privacy.

zmmmmm 9y ago

Hangouts may be a disaster but even so it is still in my eyes the best messaging solution in that it is truly cross platform, most people have accounts (even if they don't know it, via google accounts), it supports at least some open protocols (remnants of XMPP still works) and does all the essential things (voice, video, text chat, presence, etc). I honestly think that Google's best move still would be to drop everything else and go back to Hangouts / Talk as the single solution. The problem is that the whole space is a nightmare where none of the players actually has the best interests of the users at heart.

eight_ender 9y ago

Our entire company ran on GTalk for a while, then Slack landed like the Spanish Flu and the IRC++ like features pushed every other medium out, except for some, email. Hangouts was used in meeting rooms for a while but it was so horrendously unreliable that we switched to GotoMeetings then Zoom. Zoom is less shit than the others but still fairly awful. Slack, imo, solved instant messaging in businesses completely, but conferencing is still a wild west of garbage solutions.

tarjei 9y ago
Try https://appear.in https://appear.in it has worked wonders for us wrt to conferencing.
kwindla 9y ago
Shameless plug, our startup makes a video-calling-in-Chrome application. Our goals are being super-reliable, simple, and free: https://daily.co https://daily.co

KirinDave 9y ago

Wow, I never once in my life just pinged a stranger on Hangouts and it seems to me like a incredibly obnoxious and rude thing to do. Nor did my i5 laptop flip out because of hangouts in Gmail. I'm not a big fan of Hangouts, but if it stopped someone from pestering strangers online? Good on it.

dnsva 9y ago

The following are postulations that I have not managed to refute since 2013. Google clearly knows what they have made. The theory that nobody cares to fix this is false. They have good engineers. Google was always tracking our location and scanning our emails. Few things happened simultaneously in 2014. Google tried to replace the messaging app with hangouts, blatantly stepping on privacy. Inadvertent signing ups for Google+ could occur. I switched to Cyanogenmod. Navigating new privacy settings would took so long. Then Google maps started suggesting where I intend to go. Not very creepy. It seems to me that Google intend to do the right thing, which is to declare publicly that our privacy is compromised, (e.g. Snowden) when we use Online centralized products. That is a good thing. I stopped trusting my ill-founded sense of privacy. I lived in Canada, perhaps the timing was different in the states.

surferbayarea 9y ago

How many product managers do they have? 50?

vijaybritto 9y ago

I have never agreed more to any single article ever than this in my life! How accurate! So true and the pain to leave GTalk still lingers in me to this day. I experienced my first love in that thing ffs!

dawkins 9y ago

I miss google talk but it was just chat. I use hangouts this days for chat, voice and screen sharing and it works well enough.

bitL 9y ago

A typical process at a big corp: Initial small enthusiastic team has a cool idea, works day and night, having a lot of fun on the project. They release it, it's cool, useful and everybody loves it. Then after a while original team members get bored or focus on other interests, move out of the team and new team members come in. Those team members aren't necessarily worse than the original ones, but have to maintain the project they didn't write. They need to show their usefulness, so they try to conjure new ideas that might not be useful at all, but hope they would be visible enough to grant them promotion within the company. They focus on some mistake/wart/non-refactored portion of code, make an essay or two to convince management that changes are needed, then slap on another feature they could be known for and proceed changing experience. Once they are done, management applauds them and customers either are lucky and have a blast with the new changes, or those changes were complete misses and started to ruin experience. This process repeats often until product is EOLed or just maintained for whatever reason.

promopacket 9y ago
Agree that it happens, and think this case is different. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16351137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16351137
- tzahola 9y ago
  This case is no different, right?

djhworld 9y ago

People on here bemoan the loss of XMPP integration and federated access to these platforms, but do Facebook/Google/Microsoft really give that much of a shit about that? I suspect the % of their userbase who wants, let alone understands those features is very small

monksy 9y ago
Yes, the clients suck, and it's a pain to deal with so many different messaging apps.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
Of course they don't give a shit. Because they understand the game - they're the ones putting things on the market, and users have zero choice (network effect means good marketing beats any feature set here).

mrhappyunhappy 9y ago

Same way they managed to screw up Google voice.

analogic 9y ago
Shhhh, don't give them the idea to cancel my voicemail transcribing app. Or does voice actually have other features?

secabeen 9y ago

Fascinating. Within my social circles, we use Hangouts extensively. It still feels a lot like the original Talk for us. The Android app works, on desktop the Chrome extension is solid, I've never lost an important message, and the features he laments the loss of (busy status, XMPP support, off the record, contact blocking) just don't matter to us. I haven't had his experience with adding people (if I want to chat with someone, I input their @gmail.com address, done), message delivery is reliable, multi-media (photos, video) works fine, voice and video calling works, search is in the Gmail we already use, and group chats are easy and straightforward. My social circle is almost exclusively Android, which may help, although the few iPhone users do work, and a lot of chatting happens through the Chrome extension/gmail window, so there's that. I don't particularly want to chat through Facebook (Messenger is a busy, ugly mess, and the app is pretty heavyweight) and many of my contacts aren't on Whatsapp or WeChat. SMS often delays message sending and delivery in areas with spotty mobile coverage. Hangouts uses wifi first, which is ubiquitous in our homes and at work. It's really interesting to see the different perspective. I do worry about the future of Hangouts, it feels like it's just coasting now. Duo/Allo/Meet may be an okay replacement, if they migrate all of the data over and swap it in Gmail. I've played with their slack-competitor (Chat), and it's interesting. Still doesn't feel as good as slack, but it's been okay.

busterarm 9y ago

We used to have a relatively open internet based on developing, using an adhering to protocols and open standards. This is probably because everything was new and there was a lot of money on the table for everyone. We would joke about peoples' theories of the "Balkanization of the Internet" and mostly we would look at it from the wrong angle (nation states). Now we have an internet of walled gardens. Your data is precious and no longer yours.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
> Now we have an internet of walled gardens. Your data is precious and no longer yours. And you can't do shit without agreeing to some ToS or EULA. At this point I'm actually waiting for someone to "innovate" a way to dynamically sign EULAs with the same API calls you'd use to get access tokens, just to add insult to injury...
- techsupporter 9y ago
  > And you can't do shit without agreeing to some ToS or EULA. And it's guaranteed to have some damned binding arbitration clause[0], if it comes from a company based in the United States, so when[1] everything that company knows about you is "unintentionally" transmitted to every hacker and script kiddy with a modicum of PHP knowledge, you can't even band together and financially ruin the company. Not that you'd be able to get anything out of them, anyway, since 90% of them are so knee-deep in venture capital money that you'd be 9,392nd in line behind the likes Sequoia, Andreessen, Y Combinator, and Honest Achmend's Certificate Authority and Investing Company. I guess I'm getting old but, damn, I'm really starting to hate the corporate Internet. 0 - I loathe every single one of you who has ever posted on a Hacker News thread about how horrible binding arbitration clauses are and who are also founders/CEOs/operators of companies with binding arbitration clauses in your terms of service. This goes quadruple for companies that are B2C. I do not care if "everyone else is doing it" or your "lawyers recommended it." Grow a spine and delete the clause if it's so awful. Go first. Be bold. Half points for burying an opt-out that requires faxing a notarized statement to a phone number in Saint Pierre and Miquelon. That's better than nothing. 1 - It's not "if" anymore, it's when.

pixelpoet 9y ago

Just want to say thank you for writing this and bringing it to HN attention. Gtalk was absolutely amazing, and you could even send files to your friends just so, just drag it into the window! It's 2018 and this functionality is hardly available anywhere anymore.

jhasse 9y ago
Telegram's Desktop client has this functionality.

krisives 9y ago

Google Voice was similarly “updated” over time and is very good anymore

mastazi 9y ago

I use Google Hangouts from time to time, not my favourite IM app but some of the criticism in the article is inaccurate. I can definitely tell when someone is online (article says you can't), and I have been using the desktop app for a while (article says there is no desktop app). Note: the desktop app doesn't seem to be native (I think I got it from the Chrome store) however it's definitely a desktop app in the sense that you can run it without having a browser open.

4ad 9y ago
Are you kidding me, you can't even click on hyperlinks in that "desktop" app. You have to copy-paste them manually in your browser. Edit: It seems the links do open, but they open silently in one of my minimized browser Windows. And of course it opens in chrome even though my default browser is Safari. Wonderful quality.
- mastazi 9y ago
  I haven't stated anything that contradicts what you said

a-dub 9y ago

It's funny how this seems to happen to chat systems over and over. Google Talk, Skype for Business, ICQ... They start out pretty good, but then the simplicity gets abandoned by what appears to be really awful committee driven product design decisions until they basically become unusable. Maybe their inherent simplicity makes them the ultimate bike shed.

keypress 9y ago

Totally abandoned all chat applications after the demise of Gtalk and cross network communication breakdowns.

yason 9y ago

I haven't had much problems with Google Hangouts but on the other hand I'm a light user: I just wanted a real-time text chat and didn't suffer from most of the problems decribed in the article. Yes, the video chat was choppy but so was any other video call at the time; I still managed to talk to my wife over video on business trips so it wasn't unusable. I still like the Gmail chat that you can pop up into a separate window. It's fast and reliable. However, the issue with Hangouts is that I don't have people there anymore. I talk to 1-2 friends on Hangouts who refuse to use Facebook or Whatsapp. That's all nice but ten years ago I had a significant portion of my friends in Google Talk. They still have Gmail accounts but they chat elsewhere.

iforgotpassword 9y ago

I can only agree with that post. Sometimes I'm wondering though if this is just us techsavy people or the fact that I'm getting old and everything was better in the old days. Maybe the average person not working in tech prefers how this works today? Many times I'm already lost at the basic presentation of modern websites or apps. Big colorful landing pages that try to aggregate different data and events in an intelligent way but just seem like a jumbled mess to me, everything has to be dynamic and load additional data via ajax so that often times the back button doesn't work or at least makes sure the scroll position won't be restored properly... I could go on for hours. I guess I'm too old for that sort of nonsense any more.

shmerl 9y ago

It died when they killed XMPP federation (by refusing to support server to server encryption).

nvarsj 9y ago

What happened at Google? I remember when gmail was first released - such a great product. Hangouts destroyed the google talk experience and community. Someone should have gotten fired over it. Everyone seemed to use google talk before the plus/hangouts conversion. Such a massive lost opportunity. There are many other examples of half-baked and unmaintained software from G. For example, play music's web UI has many irritating bugs that never get fixed. I'm close to canceling my subscription. I'd be pretty hesitant about committing all in to any of Google's enterprise offerings, like GCE, based on my experience with their other products.

epicide 9y ago
Google makes money off of data. Essentially, they are a big ad company that does tech. Whatever that means to you, that's generally how they make money. The more of your data that they can have going through their services, the better. All of their "products"/tools (at least after a certain point) have this end in mind. If a product does not get them enough data[0], they either a) bastardize it until it does, or b) kill it. I'm sure this is not news to a lot of people, but it surprises me how often people forget that Google has no reason to care about the quality of their tools as long as enough people are using it. I'm not saying they don't make good tools, but that is why we see good tools get killed (Reader, Wave) or ruined (Hangouts, Voice). [0]: or they can't figure out a good way to get good ad data from it. EDIT: formatting.
mistermann 9y ago
Google just can't do UI's, I can't think of a UI put out by google that I don't dislike, if not completely hate. It's almost like there's someone super senior in the company who forces bad decisions on designers. The crowning achievement of absurdity is probably the YouTube app, it's not as bad as Skype, but given time they may get there.
- hedora 9y ago
  Their initial search UI was great, though they ruined that too. I switched away years ago, and am increasingly baffled whenever I accidentally run a google search.

m-p-3 9y ago

Agreed with most of the points in the article. Google Talk was minimalistic, but that was the whole point of it. And it was in a point of time where Google actually tried to use an open protocol which was interoperable and extendable. I could use Google Talk in Pidgin along will all my other IM accounts within the same client, and I also could use some plugins like OTR to encrypt my conversation if I needed to. Now we're forced to use the Hangouts client which frankly isn't very good, and everyone else is also trying to lock everyone in their platform by putting interoperability on ice. XMPP is still a good protocol, but no one seems to care :(

nkoren 9y ago

The rationale for Google's behaviour has always been that it will help them achieve user lock-in. But disregarding both the technical and ethical merits of this strategy... is it actually working for them? Six years ago I spent very significant proportion of my time using Talk and Reader. In their absence, I have shifted to using FB Messenger (/WhatsApp/Telegram/etc.), with Facebook and Hacker News kinda substituting for Reader. I still use Gmail and Google Apps, but my daily time inside the Google ecosystem has probably decreased by about 2/3rds. If I'm their target audience, then this strategy is an unqualified failure. Obviously I'm not their target audience -- I'm an outlier in almost every respect -- but I've yet to see an analysis which suggested that Google has actually succeeded in capturing more eyeballs or generating more revenue via this strategy. In fact I haven't really seen any business analysis of this at all, other than blaming the business-types for making these decisions. Which is probably correct, but I'd still be very curious to see whether those decisions paid off, purely on their own terms.

Shoothe 9y ago
I can relate to this. Google's services became less and less useful over time. I even replaced Hangouts with self-hosted XMPP server while previously I thought custom would mean a lot of trouble. After a while test driving it I migrated entire family (Conversations.im on Android works great and we've got encrypted E2E chats). Now I'm thinking about hosting my own calendars (kind of easy) and email (scary).
- delfinom 9y ago
  I've been finding Google Calendar incredibly buggy as of late as well as other services. It's like they don't care anymore.
  - stephengillie 9y ago
    Google can't organize the world's data if the world won't trust Google with the data in the first place.

kimi 9y ago

Google+ has been quite a bit of a disaster. They wanted to tie everything to it, and it ended dragging down everything else. Nowadays, for a quick chat, Jit.si seems to be the easiest thing - it just works, you send them a link and get online.

lkrubner 9y ago

When I talk to the 20 tech people who I respect most, what I notice is that everyone respects Google less now than 5 years ago. Is it a successful branding strategy that generates so much dislike? I'm especially curious because Google is famous for basing its decisions on "data". I have no idea how things work in Google, but I can say that every company I've worked at that supposedly valued "data" in meetings actually valued something darker. The use of "data" in meetings tends to be a passive aggressive negotiating tactic for a group of people who for cultural or emotional reasons don't think it is reasonable to express strong disagreement or actual anger. Instead of expressing strong emotion, people are taught to quote data -- they then cherry pick whatever statistics back up their beliefs. As far as I know, there has never been a company that said "We want the worst informed people to make the decisions" so in a sense all companies have always valued data. But they didn't make a fetish out of it. They simply expected people to be well informed, and to make intelligent arguments, based on what they know. That would have been true at General Motors in 1950. That much has probably been true at most companies for centuries. When management says that the company is going to be "data driven" they are implicitly asking for a particular type of interaction to happen in meetings, an elaborate dance where people hide their emotions and quote statistics. I can't cover all the nuances of company meetings in a comment on Hacker News, and of course I am not advocating that meetings should be abusive, but I do think it can be healthy to tell meeting participants that it is culturally acceptable to advocate strongly, and with emotion, for what they think the right policy is. Google seems like an example of how a "data driven" company can go off the rails. I'm not sure what their meetings are like, but I know that in interviews the management at Google talks about their focus on data, yet their brand image continues to decline. And of course, I'm on the record in believing there should be less group meetings and more one on one meetings, at every company that I've ever worked: http://simpleleadership.io/why-group-meetings-can-be-time-wasters-with-lawrence-krubner/ http://simpleleadership.io/why-group-meetings-can-be-time-wa...

appleflaxen 9y ago
Wow. That is a really apt critique of the culture you are describing. It sounds like you're basically saying that as with programming styles, wellness, activism, and everything else in the world: there is a basis of truth that underpins data-centric management, but you can easily make it into a cult. You put that idea together so succinctly - thank you.

CosmicShadow 9y ago

100% this article. Google Talk was awesome, especially as MSN got more and more bloated and then once they forced into Skype and everyone's contact list got screwed up or people fled, it was like, yes, a clean client for use with friends. Then it turned to garbage. I'll have someone call and 4 different devices start ringing except the one I'm on, and then the others will continue to ring forever. I called my friend back when it didn't work and we had like 2 different voice calls going at the same time together. He works at Google and has to use it, so that's the only reason I keep it, I don't even know how to use it it's so confusing now. Shower thoughts had me thinking just the other day how I wished we could have a new Pidgin like system. I have a hard time figuring out which friends use which platform and where I can get replies. I want to keep in touch with friends now that we all live in different places, but it's hard when everyone lives in a different chat app that you only have 2 contacts in. It was awesome when everyone just used one or two things. The fallback to shitty text messaging is the only guaranteed medium for almost all people on one platform.

HangoutIs 9y ago

Just yesterday I was talking on hangout and my Android tablet restarted multiple times. When it booted up I saw graphical artifacts during boot even before I opened the app.

johnmarcus 9y ago

Wtf are you talking about? I use it with almost everyone, inside and out of the org. Issues are usually local internet connection issues. And it's free, which is nice. There are pay for services I suppose are better, once others are set up with it. But I love Hangouts.

olfactory 9y ago

This is one more bit of evidence that Google is on the way down. When basic product management is too boring to take seriously, the company is just coasting along on past glories and hype. Yahoo was in that situation for years before it imploded.

carapace 9y ago

I worked at Google. An observation: The internal codebase should be structured like the yellow-pages of a phonebook[1] but instead it's structured like a flea market. Now, consider that in light of Conway's Law[2]... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonebook [2] http://melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html http://melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html

qbaqbaqba 9y ago

That's funny how a huge company may bring a technology to the mainstream and then kill it just like that. Jabber, RSS. Open protocols that treated their monopoly. What's next on the kill list? HTTP, email?

m0d0nne11 9y ago

And, as if to further illustrate the problem with dysfunctional WWW stuff, the ony way to comment on that article is via Disqus...