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What interesting when seeing it all laid out like this is just how close El Goog has been to getting right on more than one occasion, only for some shiny new th

by ink_13 5y ago

What interesting when seeing it all laid out like this is just how close El Goog has been to getting right on more than one occasion, only for some shiny new thing to blunder on to the scene and fragment everything again. It seems pretty clear that if they had settled on one brand ID for messaging and just iterated and refined on that for the past 15 years, they'd be light years ahead of where they are now and, I daresay, the dominant player. Everyone I know was using Google Talk after AIM, MSN messenger, and ICQ died (except we all called it GChat) because we already had GMail accounts. They could have built on that instead of throwing it all away. Now everybody's on iMessage, SMS, or WhatsApp. Or, cast your mind back to the distant year of 2016. Hangouts was more than okay enough for most use cases (IIRC it even had SMS integration/fallback), and then Allo and Duo came along and Hangouts got canned. Allo was trash from the beginning (why did it exist at all?) and while Duo was (and continues to be!) great thanks to its adoption of QUIC, there was absolutely no reason for it to be a standalone app instead of a new feature in the Hangouts app.

lrem 5y ago
You know what's worst about this? That pretty much every single engineer in Google that I met was voicing the same opinions. I personally used the phrase "I truly believe that the new unsinkable strategy will lead to a titanic success" so many times...
etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
I really liked Hangouts with SMS inside of Gmail. With Google Fi you also had calls in there. Everything in Gmail! Of course it was too good to be true. Google taketh away. I can understand poor design choices from a engineering heavy org - but why do the products get technically worse (less featureful, less integrated) over time? I suspect there are too many cooks in the kitchen.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  It's new upper managers throwing out their predecessor's work to mark their territory with a fresh start. Messaging app users are not the customer so normal business rules of engagement do not apply.
  - etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
    But I was a paying customer of Google Fi, and these features were advertised to me before I signed up.
- naturalauction 5y ago
  You could do the same with Google Voice. Send and recieve calls and texts all inside of Gmail. I have no idea why Google got rid of this functionality.
- xnx 5y ago
  Having a single inbox like this is the one true way. There are so many forces fighting for their own proprietary messaging systems that I fear we're still years away from this happening again. Though it's popular to malign email, I'm very thankful that it's a distributed, open, standardized system, with decades of stability that allows me to message anyone.
Shank 5y ago
> Allo was trash from the beginning (why did it exist at all?) Allo, like Tez, which is now Google Pay, was targeting the Indian market considerably by way of using phone numbers for identity, instead of the Google Account infrastructure that already existed. The lure was that it was supposed to be easier to setup and already had a social graph. I believe Allo and Duo were supposed to be complementary and fight against WhatsApp dominance. Tez “won” only because they were giving out cash. Allo obviously never did that. But that’s why it wasn’t integrated into the rest of the ecosystem: it was a Google product but not tied to your account to try to fight against WhatsApp, et al., which left it on its own island, which didn’t work very well.
p4bl0 5y ago
Yes, when GTalk came out, I loved that I could chat with my friends and my mother right from my XMPP client without them having to install anything. They were online if they wanted when they had Gmail opened or if they used the GTalk app. At some point that was true for Facebook chat too. But then both companies decided that chat system interoperability was bad for their business (which I'm not sure is true).
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  Yes, that brief XMPP interop era was a Golden Age that wasn't appreciated enough when it happened and is mostly something to mourn today that we collectively let it slip through our grasps. Issues with XMPP support were big reasons I stopped using Google's messaging apps altogether. (It didn't help that at the time I was using GSuite as primary XMPP, because I wanted my primary Jabber ID on a domain I controlled, and communicating with Gmail primary users I recall seemed through a weird internal federation boundary that had its own strange federation issues even before Google started shutting down outside federation.)
pieno 5y ago
I feel like they keep falling for the centralisation/decentralisation pendulum trap, which goes like this: 1. Teams in the organisation create some good products that solve specific discrete requirements, such as an email client, a document editor, text chat, audio calls, video calls, video conferencing, etc. This usually goes along with marketing slogans like “x, reinvented” etc 2. Someone comes up with this great vision of a single unified interface in which all those discrete apps are integrated. The marketing here usually includes terms like “seamless”, “enterprise” etc. 3. Some other people notice that the discrete products have become so tightly integrated that they are missing out on users that do not want to sign up for the integrated enterprise experience, but who just want the discrete product feature. Usually competitors will have stepped into that void created in step 2 and it’s easy to convince management that they’re leaving money on the table for competitors. Just extracting some features into a stand-alone product is sold internally as a quick-win (it never is). 4. Go back to step 2
candiodari 5y ago
> It seems pretty clear that if they had settled on one brand ID for messaging and just iterated and refined on that for the past 15 years, they'd be light years ahead of where they are now and... I don't get why people keep making this point. I would say that no, the opposite is true: what you say starts out true, but the shifts are what killed everything. There was one good effort built on the "Google social graph" (ie. GTalk) that provided great service. It really increased the usefulness of gmail. Everything else decreased it's usefulness. Then direction from above came, with Hangouts and Google Plus, their facebook competitor ... and destroyed one market at a time. Some market they didn't judge important. (probably not in the correct order) * Business/startup market (XMPP bots/integrations, there were companies using even GTalk as a way-before-slack business chatroom) * Voice/video market got dropped (first time round: the integration with the PBX network) * Google Fi integration got dropped * GSuite integration got dropped * XMPP market (obviously the techies fell under this) * Voice/video got dropped (second time round: direct voice/video chat in Hangouts), in order to get critical mass for Allo/Duo, to support "only phone number" accounts * Everything BUT Gsuite integration got dropped, in order to get critical mass for "GChat" * Voice/video got mostly reinstated when the path for Allo/Duo became clear * Voice/video got killed AGAIN in favor of "Google Meet" meetings, I believe first by limiting number of participants, then just dropping every form of video I mean, even now I feel like people are showing INCREDIBLE loyalty to Gmail/GChat and Google is attempting to pull the rug somewhat from under them, in order to support their now enterprise initiatives. And yet the one feature every enterprise has been screaming for to make gmail usable for business, shared inboxes and maybe some form of basic CRM is still not there (are people still having business-wide google accounts they hang out the password for in next to the door just so 5 people can respond to info@company ?). I feel like Gmail's trajectory has roughly been this: 0 -> EXCELLENT product (in maybe 1 year total) -> today (14 years of focus shifting, abandoning one userbase per year) ... I think the solution is to focus on Gmail as an email product with perhaps chat integration, but nothing more. THAT was what was needed. GTalk/Hangouts was always the chat app for more serious people. Google kept trying again and again to make it the app for whatever Google's focus was in $year, never did a good job, but abandoned part of the userbase with every focus shift.

by ink_13 5y ago

lrem 5y ago

You know what's worst about this? That pretty much every single engineer in Google that I met was voicing the same opinions. I personally used the phrase "I truly believe that the new unsinkable strategy will lead to a titanic success" so many times...

etaioinshrdlu 5y ago

I really liked Hangouts with SMS inside of Gmail. With Google Fi you also had calls in there. Everything in Gmail! Of course it was too good to be true. Google taketh away. I can understand poor design choices from a engineering heavy org - but why do the products get technically worse (less featureful, less integrated) over time? I suspect there are too many cooks in the kitchen.

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
It's new upper managers throwing out their predecessor's work to mark their territory with a fresh start. Messaging app users are not the customer so normal business rules of engagement do not apply.
- etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
  But I was a paying customer of Google Fi, and these features were advertised to me before I signed up.
naturalauction 5y ago
You could do the same with Google Voice. Send and recieve calls and texts all inside of Gmail. I have no idea why Google got rid of this functionality.
xnx 5y ago
Having a single inbox like this is the one true way. There are so many forces fighting for their own proprietary messaging systems that I fear we're still years away from this happening again. Though it's popular to malign email, I'm very thankful that it's a distributed, open, standardized system, with decades of stability that allows me to message anyone.

Shank 5y ago

> Allo was trash from the beginning (why did it exist at all?) Allo, like Tez, which is now Google Pay, was targeting the Indian market considerably by way of using phone numbers for identity, instead of the Google Account infrastructure that already existed. The lure was that it was supposed to be easier to setup and already had a social graph. I believe Allo and Duo were supposed to be complementary and fight against WhatsApp dominance. Tez “won” only because they were giving out cash. Allo obviously never did that. But that’s why it wasn’t integrated into the rest of the ecosystem: it was a Google product but not tied to your account to try to fight against WhatsApp, et al., which left it on its own island, which didn’t work very well.

p4bl0 5y ago

Yes, when GTalk came out, I loved that I could chat with my friends and my mother right from my XMPP client without them having to install anything. They were online if they wanted when they had Gmail opened or if they used the GTalk app. At some point that was true for Facebook chat too. But then both companies decided that chat system interoperability was bad for their business (which I'm not sure is true).

WorldMaker 5y ago
Yes, that brief XMPP interop era was a Golden Age that wasn't appreciated enough when it happened and is mostly something to mourn today that we collectively let it slip through our grasps. Issues with XMPP support were big reasons I stopped using Google's messaging apps altogether. (It didn't help that at the time I was using GSuite as primary XMPP, because I wanted my primary Jabber ID on a domain I controlled, and communicating with Gmail primary users I recall seemed through a weird internal federation boundary that had its own strange federation issues even before Google started shutting down outside federation.)

pieno 5y ago

I feel like they keep falling for the centralisation/decentralisation pendulum trap, which goes like this: 1. Teams in the organisation create some good products that solve specific discrete requirements, such as an email client, a document editor, text chat, audio calls, video calls, video conferencing, etc. This usually goes along with marketing slogans like “x, reinvented” etc 2. Someone comes up with this great vision of a single unified interface in which all those discrete apps are integrated. The marketing here usually includes terms like “seamless”, “enterprise” etc. 3. Some other people notice that the discrete products have become so tightly integrated that they are missing out on users that do not want to sign up for the integrated enterprise experience, but who just want the discrete product feature. Usually competitors will have stepped into that void created in step 2 and it’s easy to convince management that they’re leaving money on the table for competitors. Just extracting some features into a stand-alone product is sold internally as a quick-win (it never is). 4. Go back to step 2

candiodari 5y ago

> It seems pretty clear that if they had settled on one brand ID for messaging and just iterated and refined on that for the past 15 years, they'd be light years ahead of where they are now and... I don't get why people keep making this point. I would say that no, the opposite is true: what you say starts out true, but the shifts are what killed everything. There was one good effort built on the "Google social graph" (ie. GTalk) that provided great service. It really increased the usefulness of gmail. Everything else decreased it's usefulness. Then direction from above came, with Hangouts and Google Plus, their facebook competitor ... and destroyed one market at a time. Some market they didn't judge important. (probably not in the correct order) * Business/startup market (XMPP bots/integrations, there were companies using even GTalk as a way-before-slack business chatroom) * Voice/video market got dropped (first time round: the integration with the PBX network) * Google Fi integration got dropped * GSuite integration got dropped * XMPP market (obviously the techies fell under this) * Voice/video got dropped (second time round: direct voice/video chat in Hangouts), in order to get critical mass for Allo/Duo, to support "only phone number" accounts * Everything BUT Gsuite integration got dropped, in order to get critical mass for "GChat" * Voice/video got mostly reinstated when the path for Allo/Duo became clear * Voice/video got killed AGAIN in favor of "Google Meet" meetings, I believe first by limiting number of participants, then just dropping every form of video I mean, even now I feel like people are showing INCREDIBLE loyalty to Gmail/GChat and Google is attempting to pull the rug somewhat from under them, in order to support their now enterprise initiatives. And yet the one feature every enterprise has been screaming for to make gmail usable for business, shared inboxes and maybe some form of basic CRM is still not there (are people still having business-wide google accounts they hang out the password for in next to the door just so 5 people can respond to info@company ?). I feel like Gmail's trajectory has roughly been this: 0 -> EXCELLENT product (in maybe 1 year total) -> today (14 years of focus shifting, abandoning one userbase per year) ... I think the solution is to focus on Gmail as an email product with perhaps chat integration, but nothing more. THAT was what was needed. GTalk/Hangouts was always the chat app for more serious people. Google kept trying again and again to make it the app for whatever Google's focus was in $year, never did a good job, but abandoned part of the userbase with every focus shift.