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I seem to remember just about 4 years ago when I logged into Google Voice and it said that Google Voice was moving into Google Hangouts. https://images.techhiv

I seem to remember just about 4 years ago when I logged into Google Voice and it said that Google Voice was moving into Google Hangouts. https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2014/09/google-voice-hangouts-100413765-large.jpg https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2014/09/google-vo... Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues?

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
I’ve been staying clear of Google Meets for this reason. Zero desire to trust them with something as critical as messaging.
- swiley 6y ago
  It's a shame webrtc uses it's own protocol. Otherwise there would probably be dozens of self hostable alternatives.
  - polynomial 6y ago
    webrtc uses its own protocol?
  - fidelramos 6y ago
    It's not dozens, but Jitsi is a very decent open-source self-hostable alternative to Google Meet or Zoom.
  - nikisweeting 6y ago
    WebRTC is an open standard, you can absolutely self-host a WebRTC video chat site, and there are many implementations available like Jitsi.
- polynomial 6y ago
  Google arguably had first mover advantage in the video space which was the promised land even before Covid blessed it. And yet by the time it hit this year, Zoom took the prize. I think this represents a much bigger fail on Google's part than I have seen being mentioned.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    Nobody expects Google to competently execute. Their failures aren’t newsworthy. Compare the effect on competitors’ stock prices when Amazon or Apple announce they’re moving into a market versus Google or Microsoft.
  - devindotcom 6y ago
    Skype had about a 10 year head start on this and amazingly it's like the one brand I don't hear mentioned at all when it comes to video chat
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Both Microsoft and Google dropped the ball bigtime by letting WhatsApp take the whole international messaging market. I remember how refreshingly easy to use Whatsapp was when it came out. It was such a pain to transfer contacts and images and whatnot before, and having to worry about international MMS/SMS charges. Then this tiny little app comes along and blows all the others away by simple requiring phone number verification.
    - mc32 6y ago
      Didn't they abandon that product for Teams, for enterprise users/customers?
    - Godel_unicode 6y ago
      Teams has on the order of 75 million daily active users, but it's the typical Microsoft story. Not widely talked about among startups, but totally ubiquitous in most companies.
- Tyr42 6y ago
  Google meet is used for all the meetings internally. I doubt it's going to go anywhere. What would we do, pay for zoom?
- snazz 6y ago
  Google Meet is a paid Google Workspace product. You can feel fairly comfortable about it compared to their consumer products.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > Google Meet is a paid Google Workspace product Nest was a paid, acquired, hardware product. If a product manager gets distracted, any Google product—apart from ads—will, if not fail, dramatically degrade. Google are a terrible company to bet anything important on.
1-6 6y ago
Autodesk is probably on par if not worse than Google when it comes to branding.
- beambot 6y ago
  Does Autodesk select product names that have close associations with major porn sites? Google has (i.e. YouTube Red).
  - refulgentis 6y ago
    "YouTube Red is closely associated with a porn site, redtube" is quite a take!
    - polynomial 6y ago
      It's a bush league blunder I don't think any really experienced branding team would make.
      - JadeNB 6y ago
        Let's just enjoy the beauty of "associating with a porn site is a bush league blunder."
    - dmart 6y ago
      I’m not sure it’s that crazy of a take. Those are, by far, the two most recognizable websites in the world with “tube” in the name. Naming a product in a way that calls to mind the other (for no real reason - the “Red” in YouTube Red doesn’t mean anything) is an obvious branding error.
    - Jasper_ 6y ago
      It's the reason they renamed it YouTube Premium after a year or two.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
dheera 6y ago
There's Google Voice, Google Hangouts, Google Hangouts Meet, Google Meet, Google Allo, Google Duo, Google Chat. You used to be able to dial from Gmail, and then there was Hangouts Dialer, and now Meet (or is it Hangouts Meet?) is apparently part of Gmail and the Meet app is gone but the Meet website is still there. I'm honestly confused.
- josephg 6y ago
  Don’t forget google voice, which may or may not be related to the hangouts dialer. I was never sure about that.
  - dheera 6y ago
    I used the Hangouts Dialer to dial "from" my Google Voice number, but what I'm confused about is how the Hangouts Dialer is related to Hangouts.
    - jdofaz 6y ago
      You could use it to make calls from hangouts even if you didn't have a google voice number
    - DebtDeflation 6y ago
      Circa 2014 or 2015 I used Hangouts Dialer with my Google Voice number over my hotel's wifi connection to make free calls when traveling internationally. Felt good man.
      - josephg 6y ago
        I used it for awhile when I had a US bank account and lived overseas. I needed a working US phone number to authorize transactions. I set up a google voice number just for that and it worked a treat.
wnevets 6y ago
>Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues? Have you seen the new Xbox names? Microsoft still loves to tack on Office on everything.
- rconti 6y ago
  Not software, but allow me to introduce you to Infiniti's (carmarker) recent product line revision where every model's name starts with "Q"
  - curlypaul924 6y ago
    The Q has an historical meaning for Infiniti.
    - rconti 6y ago
      The Q45 was their first vehicle, in ~1989. As far as I can tell, their second car was the M30, followed by the J30. Those were different (size) classes, so, historically, they've always used different letters to designate different models. While the QX4 (SUV) came out in, what, the late 90s, and ALSO began with a Q, it's never been a historical convention to just name all of their vehicles with a Q. There were only 2 "Q" vehicles, and one was actually a "QX". I suppose you can call the Q superfluous, and then point to BMW if you want another company that just names cars by number, but at least there's a well-understood history and progression between the 3 series and the 5 series and the 7 series, but I have no idea what makes a Q60 (big number!) a sporty coupe that used to be a G35/G37 and now the QX30 is a small SUV-like-thing, that's, I guess, the size of older G35s but that means the Q60 somehow jumped 3 places in the tens column for no apparent reason.
- beamatronic 6y ago
  X Microsoft X1 Xbox One X 1 Office Edition
- hi5eyes 6y ago
  “while the Xbox Series S won't run the Xbox One X Enhanced versions of Xbox One and Xbox 360 games, it will still be a step above the Xbox One S“
refulgentis 6y ago
- That's from 2014, 6 years ago. - There's no branding change, Google Voice is Google Voice. - As an Android user the past 3 years, this is equivalent to Apple transitioning from iChat to iMessage, or when Apple appified/stickerified iMessage. - It is very strange to see people turning this into a 'product cancellation' - Hangouts was deprecated _4 years ago_, it has a _direct_ replacement, scheduling and providing notice to users as it winds down over _years_ is hardly the irresponsible willy-nilly cancelling the comments here are claiming, especially because this is an integration of another product that is, and always has, its own frontend
- m_t 6y ago
  > It is very strange to see people turning this into a 'product cancellation' - Hangouts was deprecated _4 years ago_ So, let me get this straight. 6 years ago, Google made the Google Voice user move to hangout, and 2 years later it was deprecated? It just seems worse.
  - refulgentis 6y ago
    6 years ago, you could turn on a feature that let you receive Google Voice calls and messages in Hangouts.
    - antonvs 6y ago
      There was a strong push to move from Voice to Hangouts. A couple of years ago the speculation was that Voice would be cancelled. See e.g. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3564825/google-voice.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3564825/google-voice.h... : > But then, well, Google...Googled. It let Voice languish for years, without any attention or updates, then awkwardly half-merged it into Hangouts and had it rot away unattended for years. And we all know how the whole Hangouts saga ended (or is still in the process of ending, I guess we should say). > A few years ago, though, something unexpected happened: Following years of neglect, Google suddenly brought Voice back to life. You can find discussion of it on HN, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19022660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19022660 : > Don't get me started. I think my Google Voice / Hangouts account will be deprecated soon, or has been, and will be eliminated, or maybe not. It's not clear. It never is. > Google voice has been all but deprecated at this point. The form for buying credits has been broken for a year, and calls calls to my google voice number no longer get forwarded to my phone / google hangouts. Perhaps if you didn't live through all this, you don't get why people find it annoying.
ricardo81 6y ago
Seems like if a product doesn't dominate a space, it's on shaky ground. At least search, youtube, maps, gmail have been relatively stable.
disown 6y ago
> Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues? This caught my eye. My initial reaction was to disagree that google was a software company and that it's more of a "tech/search/social media" company. Microsoft is a software company, not google. But the longer I think about it, the more it becomes apparent that google is a software company. It just provides its software as a service/subscription for your data.
jsight 6y ago
> Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues? Ha, I was thinking this the other day as I was looking at Google Wallet / Google Pay / Android Pay and all the various permutations it has been through. Play store hasn't been renamed in a while, though. I guess its next.
- SippinLean 6y ago
  Well, Play Music is already gone at least https://play.google.com/store/apps/theme/promotion_gpm_shutdown_ctp https://play.google.com/store/apps/theme/promotion_gpm_shutd... > The Music store on Google Play is no longer available. > To continue listening to your Play Music library, transfer your library to YouTube Music You can still Play Books though?
- phreack 6y ago
  Every once in a while I accidentally still call it Market. Somehow I found that to be such a great name that it stuck.
  - hyperdimension 6y ago
    It really was a good name. Take anyone off the street from the (recent-ish) past and ask them what a 'play store' is. At least the word 'Market' makes a little bit more sense. Who goes to the store to buy some extra 'play?'
ineedasername 6y ago
They really just don't seem to have a very well thought out strategy & roadmap for much of anything new/rebranded/merged. I have no idea what the decision making looks like for this internally, but my impression as an outsider is that there's a lot of short-term empire building. A new product manager/AVP/VP shows up and wants to gather power or just make their mark, so they rebrand or merge or kill a project to show they've done something. If something new is created, it immediately becomes subject to this dynamic. The only Google products I use that I feel I can rely on for daily use without fearing the rug getting pulled out are Gmail, Gcal, Search, and Docs. (And I don't know how they make money on Docs so I'm still nervous there) I'm not a PaaS users/decision maker so that doesn't apply to me, but if it did then I would still be very reluctant to invest there unless it was part of an easily migrated multi-cloud strategy. I though Music was safe and got burned on that with the YT migration, which is a much inferior player. Even basic things like shuffling a play list and having it endlessly play through it don't seem to work.. at some point it wanders off to some random suggested song I don't own and don't want to listen to. It will be years before I could feel comfortable making any other sort of Google service a daily driver for a given task, assuming they get their act together.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  People do pay for enterprise GSuite, so I wouldn't expect anything super crazy there.
  - snazz 6y ago
    As a paying Google Workspace customer, I've found changes and improvements there to be well-thought-out and well-communicated. Google Cloud also has an entire deprecation policy, so I'm pretty comfortable relying on those services too.
- 8note 6y ago
  Why wouldn't they turn off the calendar? Docs seems ripe for being combined with drive
  - 6y ago
jftuga 6y ago
>Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues? AWS has entered the chat
corobo 6y ago
Google is an ad company keeping itself busy. Busywork doesn't communicate with other busywork it just sort of spawns and dies
- klipt 6y ago
  Yeah, someone in Hangouts probably got promoted for leading the integration of Voice, now years later someone in Voice plans to get promoted for undoing it.
harikb 6y ago
Part of it is their internal obsession for everything being a Chrome extension and all tied to gmail. Just make a freaking native app for something as important as making a call. For what is worth, I was a happy Grand central user from the very first days. I wouldn’t even call this “empire building” by people as a sibling comment is suggesting. It is the eternal desire for companies to integrate everything together. Sometimes shit shouldn’t be all integrated together. Single sign on and single profile is not all the panacea that people make it out to be. I am otherwise a Google fan boy in every sense and I hate what they did with Google Fi. I wanted to signup but I had to choose between giving up my Google Voice number or not having Fi. This is clearly because of this overzealous unification in a big company. Signup for the free Google voice? Sure we let you choose a number you like? Signup for paid Google Fi, sorry we can’t let you choose a number.
- telltruth 6y ago
  If Microsoft missed the train on search business then Google missed the train on OS business. During Vista days Microsoft was extra-ordinarily vulnerable, people desperately looking for alternatives and some guy at Google decided that the Chrome must be our religion. Overnight priesthood of Chrome had build massive temples that no one outside of Google was interested. They were putting stupid Chrome OS on powerful laptops where hardware didn't get utilized or super under-powered laptops which you always find a scenario you can't use. Imagine if they had taken BSD, put on a great usable UX, an app store, auto sync to cloud and wide range of drivers then a strong alternative to OSX would have been born which would have given run for money to Microsoft.
edouard-harris 6y ago
> Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues? Google's internal incentive structure strongly favors shipping — at least, it did back in the day, and I believe that's still true now to a great extent. Steve Yegge said it most concisely back in 2006 [1]: "At Google, projects launch because it's the least-energy state for the system." The problem is that when one dedicates so much optimization power to shipping, there's less left over for things like maintenance and support. That might not be a huge deal for any individual product, but in the aggregate it sets a higher bar for keeping an initiative running — which presents externally as an excessive proclivity for killing products. That perception, in turn, erodes user trust in the continuing existence of Google's portfolio of non-flagship products. And that leads to even fewer of those products clearing the bar for maintenance funding, because users are less willing to commit to using a product that may be discontinued. Google's shipping-first bias was probably a huge advantage for them in the early days. But sometimes a company outgrows aspects of its culture. [1] https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/ https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/
- telltruth 6y ago
  Part of the problem is also that lot of Google products are free. So there is no real way to measure bottom line impact when they mess with or kill things outright. Their current upper management is basically MBAs focused only on bottom line so birthing new free products and killing them is not something they care too much about. Birthing is driven by empire builders and killing is driven by Ruth Porat.
  - mike_d 6y ago
    Things at Google aren't killed because they do or don't make money. Sure people have budget meetings and fight over hardware allocations, but things die because no engineers want to work on them. You don't get promoted for doing your job and maintaining things, you get promoted for inventing and doing new stuff.
    - igetspam 6y ago
solinent 6y ago
The only products I use from Google originated somewhere else except Search and Gmail. Now I don't use Search or Gmail, either, Search started just giving me products to buy around the time they changed the algorithm, and I have lost trust in Gmail.
jrumbut 6y ago
About every year the chat system (whatever you want to call it) and the voice system (the one that makes phone calls) is going away or being decommissioned or merged or something, and yet in about 8 years of usage I can't tell you what's actually changed. Some new features, the icon, what it's next to? If they were actually going away I'm not sure how they could communicate that to me in a way I would believe at this point.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

I’ve been staying clear of Google Meets for this reason. Zero desire to trust them with something as critical as messaging.

swiley 6y ago
It's a shame webrtc uses it's own protocol. Otherwise there would probably be dozens of self hostable alternatives.
- polynomial 6y ago
  webrtc uses its own protocol?
- fidelramos 6y ago
  It's not dozens, but Jitsi is a very decent open-source self-hostable alternative to Google Meet or Zoom.
- nikisweeting 6y ago
  WebRTC is an open standard, you can absolutely self-host a WebRTC video chat site, and there are many implementations available like Jitsi.
polynomial 6y ago
Google arguably had first mover advantage in the video space which was the promised land even before Covid blessed it. And yet by the time it hit this year, Zoom took the prize. I think this represents a much bigger fail on Google's part than I have seen being mentioned.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  Nobody expects Google to competently execute. Their failures aren’t newsworthy. Compare the effect on competitors’ stock prices when Amazon or Apple announce they’re moving into a market versus Google or Microsoft.
- devindotcom 6y ago
  Skype had about a 10 year head start on this and amazingly it's like the one brand I don't hear mentioned at all when it comes to video chat
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Both Microsoft and Google dropped the ball bigtime by letting WhatsApp take the whole international messaging market. I remember how refreshingly easy to use Whatsapp was when it came out. It was such a pain to transfer contacts and images and whatnot before, and having to worry about international MMS/SMS charges. Then this tiny little app comes along and blows all the others away by simple requiring phone number verification.
  - mc32 6y ago
    Didn't they abandon that product for Teams, for enterprise users/customers?
  - Godel_unicode 6y ago
    Teams has on the order of 75 million daily active users, but it's the typical Microsoft story. Not widely talked about among startups, but totally ubiquitous in most companies.
Tyr42 6y ago
Google meet is used for all the meetings internally. I doubt it's going to go anywhere. What would we do, pay for zoom?
snazz 6y ago
Google Meet is a paid Google Workspace product. You can feel fairly comfortable about it compared to their consumer products.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > Google Meet is a paid Google Workspace product Nest was a paid, acquired, hardware product. If a product manager gets distracted, any Google product—apart from ads—will, if not fail, dramatically degrade. Google are a terrible company to bet anything important on.

1-6 6y ago

Autodesk is probably on par if not worse than Google when it comes to branding.

beambot 6y ago
Does Autodesk select product names that have close associations with major porn sites? Google has (i.e. YouTube Red).
- refulgentis 6y ago
  "YouTube Red is closely associated with a porn site, redtube" is quite a take!
  - polynomial 6y ago
    It's a bush league blunder I don't think any really experienced branding team would make.
    - JadeNB 6y ago
      Let's just enjoy the beauty of "associating with a porn site is a bush league blunder."
  - dmart 6y ago
    I’m not sure it’s that crazy of a take. Those are, by far, the two most recognizable websites in the world with “tube” in the name. Naming a product in a way that calls to mind the other (for no real reason - the “Red” in YouTube Red doesn’t mean anything) is an obvious branding error.
  - Jasper_ 6y ago
    It's the reason they renamed it YouTube Premium after a year or two.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

dheera 6y ago

There's Google Voice, Google Hangouts, Google Hangouts Meet, Google Meet, Google Allo, Google Duo, Google Chat. You used to be able to dial from Gmail, and then there was Hangouts Dialer, and now Meet (or is it Hangouts Meet?) is apparently part of Gmail and the Meet app is gone but the Meet website is still there. I'm honestly confused.

josephg 6y ago
Don’t forget google voice, which may or may not be related to the hangouts dialer. I was never sure about that.
- dheera 6y ago
  I used the Hangouts Dialer to dial "from" my Google Voice number, but what I'm confused about is how the Hangouts Dialer is related to Hangouts.
  - jdofaz 6y ago
    You could use it to make calls from hangouts even if you didn't have a google voice number
  - DebtDeflation 6y ago
    Circa 2014 or 2015 I used Hangouts Dialer with my Google Voice number over my hotel's wifi connection to make free calls when traveling internationally. Felt good man.
    - josephg 6y ago
      I used it for awhile when I had a US bank account and lived overseas. I needed a working US phone number to authorize transactions. I set up a google voice number just for that and it worked a treat.

wnevets 6y ago

>Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues? Have you seen the new Xbox names? Microsoft still loves to tack on Office on everything.

rconti 6y ago
Not software, but allow me to introduce you to Infiniti's (carmarker) recent product line revision where every model's name starts with "Q"
- curlypaul924 6y ago
  The Q has an historical meaning for Infiniti.
  - rconti 6y ago
    The Q45 was their first vehicle, in ~1989. As far as I can tell, their second car was the M30, followed by the J30. Those were different (size) classes, so, historically, they've always used different letters to designate different models. While the QX4 (SUV) came out in, what, the late 90s, and ALSO began with a Q, it's never been a historical convention to just name all of their vehicles with a Q. There were only 2 "Q" vehicles, and one was actually a "QX". I suppose you can call the Q superfluous, and then point to BMW if you want another company that just names cars by number, but at least there's a well-understood history and progression between the 3 series and the 5 series and the 7 series, but I have no idea what makes a Q60 (big number!) a sporty coupe that used to be a G35/G37 and now the QX30 is a small SUV-like-thing, that's, I guess, the size of older G35s but that means the Q60 somehow jumped 3 places in the tens column for no apparent reason.
beamatronic 6y ago
X Microsoft X1 Xbox One X 1 Office Edition
hi5eyes 6y ago
“while the Xbox Series S won't run the Xbox One X Enhanced versions of Xbox One and Xbox 360 games, it will still be a step above the Xbox One S“

refulgentis 6y ago

- That's from 2014, 6 years ago. - There's no branding change, Google Voice is Google Voice. - As an Android user the past 3 years, this is equivalent to Apple transitioning from iChat to iMessage, or when Apple appified/stickerified iMessage. - It is very strange to see people turning this into a 'product cancellation' - Hangouts was deprecated _4 years ago_, it has a _direct_ replacement, scheduling and providing notice to users as it winds down over _years_ is hardly the irresponsible willy-nilly cancelling the comments here are claiming, especially because this is an integration of another product that is, and always has, its own frontend

m_t 6y ago
> It is very strange to see people turning this into a 'product cancellation' - Hangouts was deprecated _4 years ago_ So, let me get this straight. 6 years ago, Google made the Google Voice user move to hangout, and 2 years later it was deprecated? It just seems worse.
- refulgentis 6y ago
  6 years ago, you could turn on a feature that let you receive Google Voice calls and messages in Hangouts.
  - antonvs 6y ago
    There was a strong push to move from Voice to Hangouts. A couple of years ago the speculation was that Voice would be cancelled. See e.g. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3564825/google-voice.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3564825/google-voice.h... : > But then, well, Google...Googled. It let Voice languish for years, without any attention or updates, then awkwardly half-merged it into Hangouts and had it rot away unattended for years. And we all know how the whole Hangouts saga ended (or is still in the process of ending, I guess we should say). > A few years ago, though, something unexpected happened: Following years of neglect, Google suddenly brought Voice back to life. You can find discussion of it on HN, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19022660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19022660 : > Don't get me started. I think my Google Voice / Hangouts account will be deprecated soon, or has been, and will be eliminated, or maybe not. It's not clear. It never is. > Google voice has been all but deprecated at this point. The form for buying credits has been broken for a year, and calls calls to my google voice number no longer get forwarded to my phone / google hangouts. Perhaps if you didn't live through all this, you don't get why people find it annoying.

ricardo81 6y ago

Seems like if a product doesn't dominate a space, it's on shaky ground. At least search, youtube, maps, gmail have been relatively stable.

disown 6y ago

> Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues? This caught my eye. My initial reaction was to disagree that google was a software company and that it's more of a "tech/search/social media" company. Microsoft is a software company, not google. But the longer I think about it, the more it becomes apparent that google is a software company. It just provides its software as a service/subscription for your data.

jsight 6y ago

> Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues? Ha, I was thinking this the other day as I was looking at Google Wallet / Google Pay / Android Pay and all the various permutations it has been through. Play store hasn't been renamed in a while, though. I guess its next.

SippinLean 6y ago
Well, Play Music is already gone at least https://play.google.com/store/apps/theme/promotion_gpm_shutdown_ctp https://play.google.com/store/apps/theme/promotion_gpm_shutd... > The Music store on Google Play is no longer available. > To continue listening to your Play Music library, transfer your library to YouTube Music You can still Play Books though?
phreack 6y ago
Every once in a while I accidentally still call it Market. Somehow I found that to be such a great name that it stuck.
- hyperdimension 6y ago
  It really was a good name. Take anyone off the street from the (recent-ish) past and ask them what a 'play store' is. At least the word 'Market' makes a little bit more sense. Who goes to the store to buy some extra 'play?'

ineedasername 6y ago

They really just don't seem to have a very well thought out strategy & roadmap for much of anything new/rebranded/merged. I have no idea what the decision making looks like for this internally, but my impression as an outsider is that there's a lot of short-term empire building. A new product manager/AVP/VP shows up and wants to gather power or just make their mark, so they rebrand or merge or kill a project to show they've done something. If something new is created, it immediately becomes subject to this dynamic. The only Google products I use that I feel I can rely on for daily use without fearing the rug getting pulled out are Gmail, Gcal, Search, and Docs. (And I don't know how they make money on Docs so I'm still nervous there) I'm not a PaaS users/decision maker so that doesn't apply to me, but if it did then I would still be very reluctant to invest there unless it was part of an easily migrated multi-cloud strategy. I though Music was safe and got burned on that with the YT migration, which is a much inferior player. Even basic things like shuffling a play list and having it endlessly play through it don't seem to work.. at some point it wanders off to some random suggested song I don't own and don't want to listen to. It will be years before I could feel comfortable making any other sort of Google service a daily driver for a given task, assuming they get their act together.

bobthepanda 6y ago
People do pay for enterprise GSuite, so I wouldn't expect anything super crazy there.
- snazz 6y ago
  As a paying Google Workspace customer, I've found changes and improvements there to be well-thought-out and well-communicated. Google Cloud also has an entire deprecation policy, so I'm pretty comfortable relying on those services too.
8note 6y ago
Why wouldn't they turn off the calendar? Docs seems ripe for being combined with drive
- 6y ago

jftuga 6y ago

>Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues? AWS has entered the chat

corobo 6y ago

Google is an ad company keeping itself busy. Busywork doesn't communicate with other busywork it just sort of spawns and dies

klipt 6y ago
Yeah, someone in Hangouts probably got promoted for leading the integration of Voice, now years later someone in Voice plans to get promoted for undoing it.

harikb 6y ago

Part of it is their internal obsession for everything being a Chrome extension and all tied to gmail. Just make a freaking native app for something as important as making a call. For what is worth, I was a happy Grand central user from the very first days. I wouldn’t even call this “empire building” by people as a sibling comment is suggesting. It is the eternal desire for companies to integrate everything together. Sometimes shit shouldn’t be all integrated together. Single sign on and single profile is not all the panacea that people make it out to be. I am otherwise a Google fan boy in every sense and I hate what they did with Google Fi. I wanted to signup but I had to choose between giving up my Google Voice number or not having Fi. This is clearly because of this overzealous unification in a big company. Signup for the free Google voice? Sure we let you choose a number you like? Signup for paid Google Fi, sorry we can’t let you choose a number.

telltruth 6y ago
If Microsoft missed the train on search business then Google missed the train on OS business. During Vista days Microsoft was extra-ordinarily vulnerable, people desperately looking for alternatives and some guy at Google decided that the Chrome must be our religion. Overnight priesthood of Chrome had build massive temples that no one outside of Google was interested. They were putting stupid Chrome OS on powerful laptops where hardware didn't get utilized or super under-powered laptops which you always find a scenario you can't use. Imagine if they had taken BSD, put on a great usable UX, an app store, auto sync to cloud and wide range of drivers then a strong alternative to OSX would have been born which would have given run for money to Microsoft.

edouard-harris 6y ago

> Why does it feel like no other software company has these sort of branding issues? Google's internal incentive structure strongly favors shipping — at least, it did back in the day, and I believe that's still true now to a great extent. Steve Yegge said it most concisely back in 2006 [1]: "At Google, projects launch because it's the least-energy state for the system." The problem is that when one dedicates so much optimization power to shipping, there's less left over for things like maintenance and support. That might not be a huge deal for any individual product, but in the aggregate it sets a higher bar for keeping an initiative running — which presents externally as an excessive proclivity for killing products. That perception, in turn, erodes user trust in the continuing existence of Google's portfolio of non-flagship products. And that leads to even fewer of those products clearing the bar for maintenance funding, because users are less willing to commit to using a product that may be discontinued. Google's shipping-first bias was probably a huge advantage for them in the early days. But sometimes a company outgrows aspects of its culture. [1] https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/ https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/

telltruth 6y ago
Part of the problem is also that lot of Google products are free. So there is no real way to measure bottom line impact when they mess with or kill things outright. Their current upper management is basically MBAs focused only on bottom line so birthing new free products and killing them is not something they care too much about. Birthing is driven by empire builders and killing is driven by Ruth Porat.
- mike_d 6y ago
  Things at Google aren't killed because they do or don't make money. Sure people have budget meetings and fight over hardware allocations, but things die because no engineers want to work on them. You don't get promoted for doing your job and maintaining things, you get promoted for inventing and doing new stuff.
  - igetspam 6y ago

solinent 6y ago

The only products I use from Google originated somewhere else except Search and Gmail. Now I don't use Search or Gmail, either, Search started just giving me products to buy around the time they changed the algorithm, and I have lost trust in Gmail.

jrumbut 6y ago

About every year the chat system (whatever you want to call it) and the voice system (the one that makes phone calls) is going away or being decommissioned or merged or something, and yet in about 8 years of usage I can't tell you what's actually changed. Some new features, the icon, what it's next to? If they were actually going away I'm not sure how they could communicate that to me in a way I would believe at this point.