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How is it that Google create/rebrand/close so many music and chat services over the years. While Apple have a single message service (iMessage) and a single mus

• et1337 6y ago
  iTunes would like a word with you...
  • Godel_unicode 6y ago
    And ping. And FaceTime.
    • pwinnski 6y ago
      FaceTime is still very much a thing[0]. So there's iTunes (2001-2019, but arguably renamed to Apple Music, so not actually dead), and Ping (2010-2012), the latter of which had approximately three users. Like for like, Google Play Music (2011-2020) isn't quite as long-lasting, but more to the point, I'm not sure Apple has simultaneously maintained two competing services before ultimately canceling one. Then the GP commenter mentioned "chat services," which makes the position unassailable. Google seems to have launched and folder a dozen or two chat services over time[1]. 0 https://support.apple.com/guide/facetime/welcome/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/facetime/welcome/mac 1 no evidence cited
    • ewmiller 6y ago
      FaceTime is very much still a thing, I use it with my family all the time.
      • LudwigNagasena 6y ago
        Is it more convenient than WhatsApp?
        • PurpleFoxy 6y ago
          It’s not a Facebook service which is an instant plus
          • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
            No, just one for rich people (as a green bubbler, this upsets me quite a lot).
            • QuizzicalCarbon 6y ago
              The blue and green chat bubbles are the sender’s chat bubbles, not the receiver’s. So it’s the iPhone user with the colored bubbles, non-iPhone receives and iPhone receivers are white/gray.
              • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
                See? I definitely don't own an iPhone!
        • culturestate 6y ago
          You can make and receive FaceTime calls from any recent Apple device to any recent Apple device (e.g. Mac to iPhone) which is nice, but FaceTime’s real advantage is call quality. It’s noticeably more clear and seems to handle poor/unstable connections much better. I can FaceTime with people halfway around the world with more clarity than I can talk to someone on the same WiFi network using WhatsApp.
        • syspec 6y ago
          FaceTime is basically a verb at this point, and only growing more usable with Mac to phone conversations and 32 ppl simultaneous support
        • 6y ago
  • wil421 6y ago
    iTunes evolved into Apple Music because most people aren’t downloading MP3s or ripping their CDs anymore.
    • graeme 6y ago
      No it didn’t. Itunes music still exists as a separate service and you can still buy music there. Apple Music’s streaming service is a separate offering that has grown larger than iTunes.
      • ewmiller 6y ago
        What the person you’re replying to means, is that Apple Music was added on top of iTunes as a new service rather than iTunes being scrapped completely. If Google were to do the same thing, then google play music would still be around and not be getting killed in favor of youtube music.
        • graeme 6y ago
          That’s a fair point. Though in this case aren’t google play music and youtube music substantially similar services? Google’s reputation is that they will have 2-3 services with the same functionality. Whereas there are pretty legitimate business reasons you want want to make a streaming business distinct from a legacy content purchasing business.
    • Twisell 6y ago
      Also I just happened last week to rip in Apple Music some of my teenager years CD before packing and storing them. This is still an option. Likewise the playlists I created on the go on my iPod Nano in a 2008ish trip reliably got migrated from versions to versions up until now.
• kyrra 6y ago
  (Googler, opinions are my own) Agreed that it is annoying, but its interesting to look back at how we got here. Google Play Music (GPM) launched in 2011. To get music on here, I'm guessing that team had to sign contracts with the various publishers and record studios. The onboarding and licensing terms of those were likely entirely around this music streaming service. Then you have Youtube. It's been a video hub for anything, and other those 9 years since GPM launched, it has become a place where lots of people listen to music (watching music videos or the like). You have companies like Vevo that publish music content there. I'd guess Youtube has different contracts with those companies that have evolved over time about how music can be played. So over these past 9 years, 2 products that had little overlap, have started to overlap more and more. As youtube expanded, it started butting into GPM's world. That likely was odd for Google for contracts and licensing of that content. Youtube Music (YTM) likely allows them to do it all under one silo now. Plus, YTM lets you do background music or videos, which is not something you could ever really do with GPM.
  • ewmiller 6y ago
    Contracts seem like a very weird motivation for this. Why completely overhaul the user experience by getting rid of an entire application for consuming music and trying to shoehorn it into another, instead of just keeping two separate entities with separate licenses? Even if the motivation makes some sense, the user experience is worse and I have very little faith that Google will maintain YTM long enough that I should invest in using it. The way Google does things means that in five years it will probably be on its way out in favor of the next rebrand that will get some product manager a promotion. Spotify, meanwhile, is still kicking after 10 or so years with no signs of slowing down or forcing users into a completely different app. i’ll stick with that, personally.
  • xeromal 6y ago
    What do you mean by background? Like play in the background?
    • ewmiller 6y ago
      I assume so. Spotify has a feature somewhat like this, but I keep it turned off because I find it annoying and distracting. It’s a bit silly to try to justify a huge move like this based on such a trivial feature, in my opinion.
• gambler 6y ago
  Apple is a hardware/design company. Google is ad tech company. They have fundamentally different motivations.
  • deadmutex 6y ago
    This is a vast oversimplification, and doesn't really answer OP's question.
• temp667 6y ago
  I am a personal gsuite user, and migrated multiple companies to gsuite over 10 years now (?). That means I tried to force everyone on to hangouts / chat / meet / duo / allo / etc etc. It's not just a turn off in a personal space. It's at the point I have given up on trying to get folks to standardize on google's products. Google just did a slack competitor, but to click the screen share button (very common in slack to want to talk and screen share to collab) you are forced over in to meet land, which forces you out of your chat and defaults to video (not wanted). It's just such a total mess its totally incredible.
  • snielson 6y ago
    Ha, I remember my days trying to get friends and family to use Google services only to have them shutdown. No more. I tell them to stay far, far away from anything Google.
• makecheck 6y ago
  Apple has had iTunes, and for a time a music “social network” Ping. The original messaging tool was called iChat before it was iMessage. Apple has also had multiple Internet services that were more or less the same (iTools, .Mac, iCloud). Even Contacts used to be called Address Book, and Wallet used to be called Passbook. Google still does worse but renaming things is pretty common.
  • wetpaws 6y ago
    Apple being bad does not automatically make Google good
  • graeme 6y ago
    That’s not quite right. Messages on iPhone was always messages. Mac’s version was called ichat and was separate. Apple then cancelled it and merged it into messages. Messages itself never had a name change and was always larger than ichat. Likewise, the itunes music store still exists! It is a place where you can buy and download music. It’s not the same service as Apple Music, which is a streaming music service.
    • filoleg 6y ago
      >Likewise, the itunes music store still exists! It is a place where you can buy and download music. It’s not the same service as Apple Music, which is a streaming music service. That's actually an interesting point that I've never considered before, even though I was aware of it. iTunes has always been kept separate from Apple Music, with no evident plans to merge those in sight, while Google Play Music was used for both streaming and purchasing music. I don't think it ultimately affected the demise of GPM, but it is still an interesting topic to ponder.
      • jkaplowitz 6y ago
        iTunes, other than the iTunes Store, is indeed gone now and merged into Apple Music: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210200 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210200 But as that article briefly mentions, the iTunes Store continues to exist and can be reached from the Apple Music app. I suspect this will change in a future macOS release, though I don't work for Apple and have no inside info.
• kps 6y ago
  > While Apple have a single message service (iMessage) Only recently. Before iMessage, Apple had iChat. iMessage used to interoperate, but no longer does.
• danaris 6y ago
  In previous stories on here about Google's tendency to start stuff, shut it down arbitrarily, and compete with itself pointlessly, I recall seeing comments purporting to be from longtime Googlers saying that the reason this happens is at least in part due to Google's incentive structure. They reward people for creating "new" things, whether they're the same as something they've already got or not, and allocate very few resources for existing products that aren't already the company's bread and butter—getting put on something like Hangouts or Voice was considered to be almost a punishment detail, based on some of the comments I read, and could torpedo your chance at any kind of promotion.
  • nautilus12 6y ago
    Google play music wasn't really started at Google it was mostly acquired from Songza
    • noisem4ker 6y ago
      The Songza acquisition happened in 2014. Google Play Music goes back to 2011. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza#History
      • nautilus12 6y ago
        Yes but big bulk of google plays features were stolen from it and they did their big marketing PR push using their stuff
• ssambros 6y ago
  > How is it that Google create/rebrand/close so many music and chat services over the years. It's not a rebrand. It's a rewrite. People need them promos. In many cases, however, rewrites are actually warranted. As underlying infra gets replaced it becomes very expensive to run and maintain legacy services.
  • ehsankia 6y ago
    Rewrites are warranted, but rebranded every time you rewrite is not. Being able to replace core components while keeping the same brand and feature set is what takes real effort. Throwing everything out and making a completely different app with is imo a bit lazy and bad for the user. If you truly must change things, gradual piece by piece changes is far prefered than complete 100% replacements like GPM -> YTM. If they had slowly migrated GPM behind the scene to use Youtube over the years, and then after 2-3 years, just changed the name, I'm sure users would've been far less alienated.
    • runawaybottle 6y ago
      I don’t think Google set up a predictable product iteration unveiling structure. One day I expect to see the PlayStation 6 for example, and one day I expect to see an update to the MacBook, and so on. One day, do I expect to see an unveiling of a new Gmail UI? None of it is predictable because it feels like they do some serious a/b tests and just silently roll stuff out. They lack a structured presentation timeline. Currently users have no predictable expectations. When that’s the case, just rename stuff, rebrand stuff, get rid of stuff, who the fuck cares. We didn’t promise the user updates, or even iterations, we simply promised them a one time product. That’s the only thing that I can think of behind all of this. The simpler answer could just be their product team is not the best of the best for a company that works pretty hard at getting the best.
      • ehsankia 6y ago
        Your two examples at the top are both hardware, those work very differently. Websites used to do massive updates, but many have learned that it just leads to a lot of angry users. Slowly updating one component at a time works much better in my experience, and it's far less change for the user to adapt to at once.
• sg47 6y ago
  I have a Pixel phone and pay for Google Play Music since I have a large collection that I have uploaded. It's been extremely disappointing. I have tried switching to Youtube Music but the interface sucks. I'm tempted to switch over to the iPhone since I'm already unhappy with Google in other areas (showing news articles repeatedly for health issues that I searched for one time, not allowing me to turn off gmail for a Google account on Pixel, etc). Google has become extremely user-hostile of late.
  • markmark 6y ago
    I've been on Android since the first Android phones and also pay for GPM. I'm moving to Apple. I'm sick of Google's approach to user services.
• LudwigNagasena 6y ago
  I think the main difference is that Google welcomes intrapreneurship while Apple does a more top-down approach.
• 01100011 6y ago
  > As a consumer I have no idea what’s going on with some areas of Google’s products. You are their product. They sell advertisers access to you. Everything else is a sideshow and they will eventually get bored with it and let it rot. Google has had a lot of good ideas over the years. They let devs create amazing things with the constant flow of ad dollars. But then those cool things don't make as much money as selling ads, and the devs want to move on to create a new thing, so the 300lb idiot baby that is Google wanders off and squats on something else. I also have to wonder if Google is stuck in the doldrums of being a mid-life startup. Their initial team of rockstars have probably all retired to roll around in their millions. A whole new crop of money and status seeking folks have taken their place. Wall Street is expecting growth every quarter. There is constant pressure to refocus on revenue producers and grow the stock. They seem far detached from their initial roots under Sergey and Larry.