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With all the lock-in and connectedness of Google owned systems, they cannot complain. And it's not Apple's fault that Google can't build long term successes in

by blunte 5y ago

With all the lock-in and connectedness of Google owned systems, they cannot complain. And it's not Apple's fault that Google can't build long term successes in most products it creates. That's a management/strategy problem. How many messaging systems has Google had over the years? Their shotgun approach works financially, but it means that only a few of their projects really stick (win). The rest just trundle along until they get discontinued. The hypocricy is tiresome. When there's a regulation that threatens them, they make a lot of noise about "free market", and "let the market decide". But when the market decides against them, they want some government intervention.

mizzao 5y ago
What is it about Google's culture that creates this shotgun approach of halfhearted abandoned products? I have my own theories but I'd love to hear others.
- blunte 5y ago
  Their culture used to promote 10 or 20% time side projects, many of which became full Google projects. That will certainly lead to some abortions. However, at some point there are executives deciding strategy, and almost by definition they are out of touch. From my observation, the most reliable strategy is to let a start-up with passion build something great that people want, and then buy that start-up. This is what companies older than Google have been doing for decades. (Google does it too, but they were more in-house-first in the past.)
dafoex 5y ago
I was thinking the same thing. I've seen Google Voice (audio), Hangouts (text, audio, and video), Allo (text), Duo (video), Meet (video), Chat (text), and Messages (text) all in quick succession. Which one of these do I pick to compete with iMessage, Google?
jjacob03 5y ago
And Apple should say Google search is too powerful.
- MagnumOpus 5y ago
  Google search doesn't have lock-in through network effects, nor is it hard to change search engines. (Well it might be hard on mobile Safari, but that is actually Apple's fault.) If Apple wanted to build a better search engine for their users and the users of Android, they could do so easily.
N1H1L 5y ago
The reason for their shotgun approach is because Google is still too academia adjacent. Which is why a cash blow-up like DeepMind that publishes a Nature or a Science paper is the perfect Google company. In academia, you get kudos for starting something, while there are zero incentives for maintaining something - same at Google with just a tiny bit less hyperbole.
- acdha 5y ago
  I wouldn't blame academia for that — this has looked exactly like the classic way companies founder once they get large enough that your ability to get rewarded is completely decoupled from actual business performance. Many businesses have the same dynamic you described where improving “someone else's” project doesn't help your career nearly as much as denigrating it and reinventing the wheel, hopefully round-ish. At a large company, you can coast like that playing politics for many years — in Google's case that's especially easy because Ad Words means they have little fear of running out of money and Gmail was big enough to ensure that any new messaging service which integrated with it would immediately “have” millions of users even if many of them had been trained not to use it by that point.
cheschire 5y ago
> When there's a regulation that threatens them, they make a lot of noise about "free market", and "let the market decide". But when the market decides against them, they want some government intervention. I'm pretty sure this is taught as a 200-level concept in business administration right?
- judge2020 5y ago
  > I'm pretty sure this is taught as a 200-level concept in business administration right? Only after you manage to recite "short-term profit over long-term success" 500 times in an hour.
  - contravariant 5y ago
    So pretty early in the curriculum then?
  - blunte 5y ago
    Bingo. Quarterly earnings per share rules all.
- nathanyz 5y ago
  Yep, they replaced the Business Ethics course with this one covering advanced business administration tactics as everyone said the ethics class was incredibly not useful in today's world. /s
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    Why the /s? it seems ethics courses aren't even useful for knowing how to lie in front of the public any more. Businesses run their grift in the open now. I've literally not once in the last twenty years heard anything smart about ethics from a modern business leader; though PG flirts with ethical tangents once in a while. Consider Peter Thiel. Musk. Bezos. These people think honesty is a weakness.
kelnos 5y ago
I don't disagree with you, but at the same time, who else is going to make this kind of noise? It's not like we can rely on the US DoJ to investigate these things and find solutions, despite all their noise about "policing big tech". I personally think the current situation with iMessage is garbage. Even if Apple doesn't care about Android users, they are hurting their own users: every time an iPhone user has to send a text to an Android user, they degrade the security and privacy of their own users. (It's telling to see where Apple draws the line: being anti-competitive around messaging is more important to them than their customers' privacy and security.) Even if Google had their shit together when it comes to messaging, there's always the "default install" problem: iMessage is on every iPhone, from the factory. That creates a barrier for any competitor to gain market share with an alternative messenger. Sure, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. have been pretty successful, but they're not the default install. (Remember when Microsoft got in trouble in the 90s for bundling IE, at the expense of Netscape?) As an Android user, all I really want is a secure way to communicate with others by default, without having to figure out which secure messaging app I have in common with each of my peers. Apple has made that impossible, and should be required to allow Google to integrate iMessage support into the stock Android Messages app. Or they should be required to support RCS (with E2E encryption compatible with Google's extension) on iPhones. I'll accept either option, though I'd probably prefer RCS rather than an Apple-proprietary protocol.
- ddek 5y ago
  I don’t see how you’re not suggesting yet another competing platform (insert xkcd here). SMS is the default, and iMessage is an elevation of SMS; in the same way FaceTime elevates it’s respective default (phone calls). If iMessage was cross platform, it’s just another messaging app. We have that. If you want secure cross platform messaging, use any of the other platforms built around that feature.
  - stale2002 5y ago
    > yet another competing platform People are advocating for the opposite. Make apple stop using their anti-competitive market to harm alternative messaging apps. > If iMessage was cross platform, it’s just another messaging app. No, it is just as good, and better if it is forced to be cross platform. You lose nothing, and everyone else gains, when anti-competitive markets are made to support alternatives. > If you want secure cross platform messaging Or, instead of that, we could use anti-trust law, against Apple to force them to be less anti-competitive, and allow other people to integrate with it. Problem solved.
readams 5y ago
Apple does an awful lot of this as well, working to make things harder for businesses supported by ads and easier for walled gardens.
- Retric 5y ago
  How many major walled guardians other than Apple are not supported by Adds?
kylehotchkiss 5y ago
> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years? About 20: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-of-instability-the-history-of-google-messaging-apps/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  > Google once had a functional competitor to iMessage called Google Hangouts. Circa 2015, Hangouts was a messaging powerhouse Is it still a powerhouse if no one uses it?
  - mjevans 5y ago
    Hangouts was killed; I was actively forced to migrate my SMS stuff back to Google Voice, and Google Duo is what replaced it for video chat. The 'internet chat' they introduced a different service called 'Chat' which runs in some consumer version of Google Workspaces. I also really hate XML based chat, but the OG standard failed because the federated clients had a poor required minimum standard for interoperability and other stacks E.G. Microsoft's whatever version of it ... I actually forget offhand but it was something anti-competitive that also broke how useful it was outside of their particular implementation.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      I did not use it and did not know anyone who did... glad to hear it did have some users after all.
    - pooper 5y ago
      > Google Duo is what replaced it for video chat We were also supposed to get chat with Google Allo but they practically killed it before launch. > Before launch, Google touted strong privacy in the app, with particular emphasis on messages stored "transiently and in non-identifiable form". However, at launch, privacy was significantly rolled back, with Google keeping logs of messages indefinitely (or until the user deletes messages) in an effort to improve the app's "smart reply" feature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Allo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Allo
msoad 5y ago
Yes, Google's most popular service Google Search has no open API if you are willing to pay for it. Why they don't open it up so others can integrate?
- Bilal_io 5y ago
  What? It's a cross platform website, you can access it from any browser and any device. It's not like it only works on Google devices, chrome browser or ChromeOS.
  - rswail 5y ago
    It doesn't have an open API which would mean I could build a service that searches google and then takes those results and merges my own information and present that to the user on a website.
twblalock 5y ago
> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years? I remember my Nexus 5 came with at least two Google messaging apps at the same time. The problem isn't just churn, it's lack of focus. I wonder how many different teams have been tasked with solving messaging, some at the same time, over the years.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  I still can't believe they had Hangouts doing IM, SMS/MMS via Google Voice, SMS/MMS locally, voice/video calls, groups, integration with previous Google Talk users, and integration into native Fi calling all from your choice of web page, browser extension, browser app, or mobile app... and decided the best way to move forward was to deprecate it and break it into half a dozen apps over 7 years to be left with only some features migrated into an enterprise slack clone that had to be fed back to normal users because all of the other one off apps failed. One of the apps they broke off, Allo, literally used phone numbers as IM identifiers but didn't support Google Voice integration and they simultaneously launched a second app, Duo, for video calls instead of just putting it in Allo. How could someone higher up not say "this is the dumbest thing ever, merge the teams or reassign one to something else"??? I was farther in the future of converged communication in 2015 than now.
  - icelancer 5y ago
    Really makes no sense. Google Hangouts was by far their best product for all the reasons you stated, and kept me on the Android platform + Google Voice. When they started to break it up, I went to iOS and ported my number. Can't be bothered to deal with all that shit.
    - Melatonic 5y ago
      Hangouts was just a terrible marketing name - it was originally Google Chat ( and it did SMS as well) and they should have just stuck with that. I mean hell - we are BACK to google chat again now
      - 5y ago
cblconfederate 5y ago
> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years? many, but also, Gmail
WheatM 5y ago
faizshah 5y ago
I mean I agree with you but the fact that iCloud does not provide a decent Api and OAuth makes it significantly worse in terms of lock in than Google.
- dwaite 5y ago
  The two companies have quite different world-views on the cloud. Apple tends to have user data encrypted in their cloud and to encourage more on-device processing. They are more likely to support data sharing between people via exchanged cryptographic keys than have access within their cloud. Unfortunately, user-initiated sharing delegated access out is not a flow OAuth really supports. Google's previous social network aspirations caused them to chain access to lots of data through user authorization to APIs. They use API access as one of the attractions to sites supporting "Sign in with Google". AFAIK even API which do not necessarily need any user delegated authorization (such as reading a publicly accessible google doc via API) still require a user authorization. Apple's APIs typically are not about delegated access to user data, but about access to user's application data (e.g. CloudKit app data access via REST api). Apple does have a OpenID Connect implementation for Sign In with Apple and have left the option open for it to also be used for OAuth delegated access. So far, there aren't any access token scopes or API publicly documented.
teawrecks 5y ago
Oh yeah, for sure there are ulterior motives, no doubt. But just because one kid complains that their sibling has been hogging the Nintendo all day doesn't mean they shouldn't stop hogging the Nintendo.
- dwaite 5y ago
  It also doesn't mean they are hogging the Nintendo. Messaging services are sticky and have network effect so there will typically be clear winners - within a particular geographic area or demographic. Other areas/demographics will have other winners. So perhaps a huge number of American teens use iMessage, while people 30+ use Facebook Messenger. Perhaps a huge number of people in China use WeChat, while Japanese people use Line. Google is really complaining that very few demographics, not even the masochists, are using Google's chat offerings anymore.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
I don’t even know what messaging service/app google uses NOW, and I use google and gmail every day
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Google Chat, it actually loads on the sidebar of gmail unless you disable it... though I can't blame you for never noticing/caring.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    We are going to need a full diagram to explain what the google chat app is. From what I remember it goes Google Talk Google Voice Google Wave Google Buzz Google Hangouts Allo / Duo Hangouts Meet / Hangouts Chat Google Meet / Google Chat
    - easrng 5y ago
      Currently there's +----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+ | | Audio Calls | Messaging | Video Calls | +----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+ | Consumer | Duo | Messages (SMS/RCS), | Duo | | | | Hangouts | | +----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+ | Business | Voice | Chat (Formerly | Meet | | | | Hangouts Chat), Voice | | +----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+ Business products are available for consumers too, but with limitations. (For example, consumers can't make bots for Chat.) Hangouts is almost gone, starting a video call just makes a Meet and sends the link as a message, the messaging still works but has been folded into Chat (They interop for now at least.) so there's no reason to keep Hangouts on anymore really. Meet is for larger meetings, Duo is mostly for one-on-one calls but has group support now too. Chat is basically a Slack clone. Messages is Google's SMS/MMS/RCS app for Android and it requires an Android phone with an active phone plan but it has a web interface for composing messages on your computer. Voice does phone calls, voicemail, and SMS and MMS with a number from Google, and is separate from Messages. I don't think Voice can do RCS which is odd considering how their pushing it on Android.
SilasX 5y ago
>How many messaging systems has Google had over the years? As suggested by this crazy headline, a lot. “Google to simplify messaging strategy, will support only five messaging apps” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/google-promises-to-shut-down-two-of-its-seven-messaging-apps/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/google-promises-to-s...
s17n 5y ago
To be fair, Google was a champion of open standards for years and years, spending large amounts of time and money supporting them, before eventually capitulating to proprietary systems. Their enthusiasm for open standards is probably a major reason that they lost in messaging! The problem is that open standards just can't compete with closed ones when it comes to giving users what they want (for a nice discussion of this, see the classic https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/)
- blunte 5y ago
  Indeed they were open source proponents for a long time (and are far from that now), but the failure of their messaging platforms matches the failure of many, many of their other product (projects). They just do some periodic financial analysis and decide to cull the projects they don't see a big future in. True though that open standards are slower and harder to work with because they involve too many people and too much discussion. Apple is almost exactly the opposite example of this, and clearly their approach works quite well most of the time.
  - s17n 5y ago
    Products don't fail because Google cancels them, Google cancels them because they failed. There are of course lots of reasons that Google's messaging products have all failed, but I'm pretty sure that the use of open standards didn't help.
phs318u 5y ago
> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years? The article answers that: "Google's messaging history is one of constant product startups and shutdowns. Thanks to a lack of product focus or any kind of top-down mandate from Google's CEO, no division is really "in charge" of messaging. As a consequence, the company has released 13 half-hearted messaging products since iMessage launched in 2011." I'll hazard a guess that most of those products were left to wither and die due to an inability to significantly advance Google's "eyeballs monetisation" strategy.
- blunte 5y ago
  It was a rhetorical question :)
Mikeb85 5y ago
What lock-in? There is no lock-in for the consumer on Google products. If you have a Google device you can use whatever apps you want. If you use Google services you can use whatever apps or OS you want. The problem is that Google has been too open. They could have made a Google messenging app the default a decade ago and forced all SMS on Android to go through that. As it stands now, any messenging app can be the default on Android. Some OEMs roll their own, FB Messenger can be turned into default SMS app, etc...
JeremyNT 5y ago
A stopped clock is right twice a day, as they say. RCS isn't a replacement for Signal or iMessage, not really, but it's a hell of a lot better than the current least-common-denominator, cross-platform approach of SMS/MMS. Apple, with its desire for vendor lock-in, has every incentive to keep the "least-common-denominator" messaging standard as crappy as possible, to make iMessage's own experience between Apple users more compelling. They have no incentive to improve this and of course will drag their feet as long as possible. Whatever you think of Google, and whatever you think of Apple, I hope you can agree that the carriers dragging their feet on RCS does nobody any good. There's no reason that RCS cannot co-exist with iMessage on IOS, except that Apple wants you in its walled garden.
- blunte 5y ago
  I'm not a messaging historian, but according to Wikipedia RCS group was formed in 2007. Apple's iMessage was launched in 2011, which means it had been in development for some time. Especially being Apple, they would not pick an external pre-standard and run with it when they built their success on in-house design and control. It would also be a huge gamble to build around someone else's young standard. Do you remember phones in 2011? The Android-based phones were wildly different from each other (often flawed in unique ways). There were still popular Nokia based phones. Apple almost certainly did not target "lock in" as their priority when building their phone software. They targeted "stuff we can control which won't blow up in ways we cannot understand or prevent". (I do admit their focus shifted after Steve Jobs died, but that was later.) But also realize the carriers were in heavy competition for decades. I've worked with/for telecom companies off and on for a very long time, and the only coordination really happens when one big company buys another and has to try to integrate things.
  - nytesky 5y ago
    Well Apple did kind of bet the farm by only including USB in the candy colored iMacs. It was a relatively new standard that no one was using, they shipped with only USB Ports and were ridiculed for it.
lenkite 5y ago
"How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?" At rough count, around a dozen in ~15 years. https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo-hangouts-talk-messaging-mess-timeline https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...

by blunte 5y ago

mizzao 5y ago

What is it about Google's culture that creates this shotgun approach of halfhearted abandoned products? I have my own theories but I'd love to hear others.

blunte 5y ago
Their culture used to promote 10 or 20% time side projects, many of which became full Google projects. That will certainly lead to some abortions. However, at some point there are executives deciding strategy, and almost by definition they are out of touch. From my observation, the most reliable strategy is to let a start-up with passion build something great that people want, and then buy that start-up. This is what companies older than Google have been doing for decades. (Google does it too, but they were more in-house-first in the past.)

dafoex 5y ago

I was thinking the same thing. I've seen Google Voice (audio), Hangouts (text, audio, and video), Allo (text), Duo (video), Meet (video), Chat (text), and Messages (text) all in quick succession. Which one of these do I pick to compete with iMessage, Google?

jjacob03 5y ago

And Apple should say Google search is too powerful.

MagnumOpus 5y ago
Google search doesn't have lock-in through network effects, nor is it hard to change search engines. (Well it might be hard on mobile Safari, but that is actually Apple's fault.) If Apple wanted to build a better search engine for their users and the users of Android, they could do so easily.

N1H1L 5y ago

The reason for their shotgun approach is because Google is still too academia adjacent. Which is why a cash blow-up like DeepMind that publishes a Nature or a Science paper is the perfect Google company. In academia, you get kudos for starting something, while there are zero incentives for maintaining something - same at Google with just a tiny bit less hyperbole.

acdha 5y ago
I wouldn't blame academia for that — this has looked exactly like the classic way companies founder once they get large enough that your ability to get rewarded is completely decoupled from actual business performance. Many businesses have the same dynamic you described where improving “someone else's” project doesn't help your career nearly as much as denigrating it and reinventing the wheel, hopefully round-ish. At a large company, you can coast like that playing politics for many years — in Google's case that's especially easy because Ad Words means they have little fear of running out of money and Gmail was big enough to ensure that any new messaging service which integrated with it would immediately “have” millions of users even if many of them had been trained not to use it by that point.

cheschire 5y ago

> When there's a regulation that threatens them, they make a lot of noise about "free market", and "let the market decide". But when the market decides against them, they want some government intervention. I'm pretty sure this is taught as a 200-level concept in business administration right?

judge2020 5y ago
> I'm pretty sure this is taught as a 200-level concept in business administration right? Only after you manage to recite "short-term profit over long-term success" 500 times in an hour.
- contravariant 5y ago
  So pretty early in the curriculum then?
- blunte 5y ago
  Bingo. Quarterly earnings per share rules all.
nathanyz 5y ago
Yep, they replaced the Business Ethics course with this one covering advanced business administration tactics as everyone said the ethics class was incredibly not useful in today's world. /s
- mandmandam 5y ago
  Why the /s? it seems ethics courses aren't even useful for knowing how to lie in front of the public any more. Businesses run their grift in the open now. I've literally not once in the last twenty years heard anything smart about ethics from a modern business leader; though PG flirts with ethical tangents once in a while. Consider Peter Thiel. Musk. Bezos. These people think honesty is a weakness.

kelnos 5y ago

I don't disagree with you, but at the same time, who else is going to make this kind of noise? It's not like we can rely on the US DoJ to investigate these things and find solutions, despite all their noise about "policing big tech". I personally think the current situation with iMessage is garbage. Even if Apple doesn't care about Android users, they are hurting their own users: every time an iPhone user has to send a text to an Android user, they degrade the security and privacy of their own users. (It's telling to see where Apple draws the line: being anti-competitive around messaging is more important to them than their customers' privacy and security.) Even if Google had their shit together when it comes to messaging, there's always the "default install" problem: iMessage is on every iPhone, from the factory. That creates a barrier for any competitor to gain market share with an alternative messenger. Sure, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. have been pretty successful, but they're not the default install. (Remember when Microsoft got in trouble in the 90s for bundling IE, at the expense of Netscape?) As an Android user, all I really want is a secure way to communicate with others by default, without having to figure out which secure messaging app I have in common with each of my peers. Apple has made that impossible, and should be required to allow Google to integrate iMessage support into the stock Android Messages app. Or they should be required to support RCS (with E2E encryption compatible with Google's extension) on iPhones. I'll accept either option, though I'd probably prefer RCS rather than an Apple-proprietary protocol.

ddek 5y ago
I don’t see how you’re not suggesting yet another competing platform (insert xkcd here). SMS is the default, and iMessage is an elevation of SMS; in the same way FaceTime elevates it’s respective default (phone calls). If iMessage was cross platform, it’s just another messaging app. We have that. If you want secure cross platform messaging, use any of the other platforms built around that feature.
- stale2002 5y ago
  > yet another competing platform People are advocating for the opposite. Make apple stop using their anti-competitive market to harm alternative messaging apps. > If iMessage was cross platform, it’s just another messaging app. No, it is just as good, and better if it is forced to be cross platform. You lose nothing, and everyone else gains, when anti-competitive markets are made to support alternatives. > If you want secure cross platform messaging Or, instead of that, we could use anti-trust law, against Apple to force them to be less anti-competitive, and allow other people to integrate with it. Problem solved.

readams 5y ago

Apple does an awful lot of this as well, working to make things harder for businesses supported by ads and easier for walled gardens.

Retric 5y ago
How many major walled guardians other than Apple are not supported by Adds?

kylehotchkiss 5y ago

> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years? About 20: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-of-instability-the-history-of-google-messaging-apps/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
> Google once had a functional competitor to iMessage called Google Hangouts. Circa 2015, Hangouts was a messaging powerhouse Is it still a powerhouse if no one uses it?
- mjevans 5y ago
  Hangouts was killed; I was actively forced to migrate my SMS stuff back to Google Voice, and Google Duo is what replaced it for video chat. The 'internet chat' they introduced a different service called 'Chat' which runs in some consumer version of Google Workspaces. I also really hate XML based chat, but the OG standard failed because the federated clients had a poor required minimum standard for interoperability and other stacks E.G. Microsoft's whatever version of it ... I actually forget offhand but it was something anti-competitive that also broke how useful it was outside of their particular implementation.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    I did not use it and did not know anyone who did... glad to hear it did have some users after all.
  - pooper 5y ago
    > Google Duo is what replaced it for video chat We were also supposed to get chat with Google Allo but they practically killed it before launch. > Before launch, Google touted strong privacy in the app, with particular emphasis on messages stored "transiently and in non-identifiable form". However, at launch, privacy was significantly rolled back, with Google keeping logs of messages indefinitely (or until the user deletes messages) in an effort to improve the app's "smart reply" feature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Allo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Allo

msoad 5y ago

Yes, Google's most popular service Google Search has no open API if you are willing to pay for it. Why they don't open it up so others can integrate?

Bilal_io 5y ago
What? It's a cross platform website, you can access it from any browser and any device. It's not like it only works on Google devices, chrome browser or ChromeOS.
- rswail 5y ago
  It doesn't have an open API which would mean I could build a service that searches google and then takes those results and merges my own information and present that to the user on a website.

twblalock 5y ago

> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years? I remember my Nexus 5 came with at least two Google messaging apps at the same time. The problem isn't just churn, it's lack of focus. I wonder how many different teams have been tasked with solving messaging, some at the same time, over the years.

zamadatix 5y ago
I still can't believe they had Hangouts doing IM, SMS/MMS via Google Voice, SMS/MMS locally, voice/video calls, groups, integration with previous Google Talk users, and integration into native Fi calling all from your choice of web page, browser extension, browser app, or mobile app... and decided the best way to move forward was to deprecate it and break it into half a dozen apps over 7 years to be left with only some features migrated into an enterprise slack clone that had to be fed back to normal users because all of the other one off apps failed. One of the apps they broke off, Allo, literally used phone numbers as IM identifiers but didn't support Google Voice integration and they simultaneously launched a second app, Duo, for video calls instead of just putting it in Allo. How could someone higher up not say "this is the dumbest thing ever, merge the teams or reassign one to something else"??? I was farther in the future of converged communication in 2015 than now.
- icelancer 5y ago
  Really makes no sense. Google Hangouts was by far their best product for all the reasons you stated, and kept me on the Android platform + Google Voice. When they started to break it up, I went to iOS and ported my number. Can't be bothered to deal with all that shit.
  - Melatonic 5y ago
    Hangouts was just a terrible marketing name - it was originally Google Chat ( and it did SMS as well) and they should have just stuck with that. I mean hell - we are BACK to google chat again now
    - 5y ago

cblconfederate 5y ago

> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years? many, but also, Gmail

WheatM 5y ago

faizshah 5y ago

I mean I agree with you but the fact that iCloud does not provide a decent Api and OAuth makes it significantly worse in terms of lock in than Google.

dwaite 5y ago
The two companies have quite different world-views on the cloud. Apple tends to have user data encrypted in their cloud and to encourage more on-device processing. They are more likely to support data sharing between people via exchanged cryptographic keys than have access within their cloud. Unfortunately, user-initiated sharing delegated access out is not a flow OAuth really supports. Google's previous social network aspirations caused them to chain access to lots of data through user authorization to APIs. They use API access as one of the attractions to sites supporting "Sign in with Google". AFAIK even API which do not necessarily need any user delegated authorization (such as reading a publicly accessible google doc via API) still require a user authorization. Apple's APIs typically are not about delegated access to user data, but about access to user's application data (e.g. CloudKit app data access via REST api). Apple does have a OpenID Connect implementation for Sign In with Apple and have left the option open for it to also be used for OAuth delegated access. So far, there aren't any access token scopes or API publicly documented.

teawrecks 5y ago

Oh yeah, for sure there are ulterior motives, no doubt. But just because one kid complains that their sibling has been hogging the Nintendo all day doesn't mean they shouldn't stop hogging the Nintendo.

dwaite 5y ago
It also doesn't mean they are hogging the Nintendo. Messaging services are sticky and have network effect so there will typically be clear winners - within a particular geographic area or demographic. Other areas/demographics will have other winners. So perhaps a huge number of American teens use iMessage, while people 30+ use Facebook Messenger. Perhaps a huge number of people in China use WeChat, while Japanese people use Line. Google is really complaining that very few demographics, not even the masochists, are using Google's chat offerings anymore.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

I don’t even know what messaging service/app google uses NOW, and I use google and gmail every day

zamadatix 5y ago
Google Chat, it actually loads on the sidebar of gmail unless you disable it... though I can't blame you for never noticing/caring.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  We are going to need a full diagram to explain what the google chat app is. From what I remember it goes Google Talk Google Voice Google Wave Google Buzz Google Hangouts Allo / Duo Hangouts Meet / Hangouts Chat Google Meet / Google Chat
  - easrng 5y ago
    Currently there's +----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+ | | Audio Calls | Messaging | Video Calls | +----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+ | Consumer | Duo | Messages (SMS/RCS), | Duo | | | | Hangouts | | +----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+ | Business | Voice | Chat (Formerly | Meet | | | | Hangouts Chat), Voice | | +----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+ Business products are available for consumers too, but with limitations. (For example, consumers can't make bots for Chat.) Hangouts is almost gone, starting a video call just makes a Meet and sends the link as a message, the messaging still works but has been folded into Chat (They interop for now at least.) so there's no reason to keep Hangouts on anymore really. Meet is for larger meetings, Duo is mostly for one-on-one calls but has group support now too. Chat is basically a Slack clone. Messages is Google's SMS/MMS/RCS app for Android and it requires an Android phone with an active phone plan but it has a web interface for composing messages on your computer. Voice does phone calls, voicemail, and SMS and MMS with a number from Google, and is separate from Messages. I don't think Voice can do RCS which is odd considering how their pushing it on Android.

SilasX 5y ago

>How many messaging systems has Google had over the years? As suggested by this crazy headline, a lot. “Google to simplify messaging strategy, will support only five messaging apps” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/google-promises-to-shut-down-two-of-its-seven-messaging-apps/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/google-promises-to-s...

s17n 5y ago

To be fair, Google was a champion of open standards for years and years, spending large amounts of time and money supporting them, before eventually capitulating to proprietary systems. Their enthusiasm for open standards is probably a major reason that they lost in messaging! The problem is that open standards just can't compete with closed ones when it comes to giving users what they want (for a nice discussion of this, see the classic https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/)

blunte 5y ago
Indeed they were open source proponents for a long time (and are far from that now), but the failure of their messaging platforms matches the failure of many, many of their other product (projects). They just do some periodic financial analysis and decide to cull the projects they don't see a big future in. True though that open standards are slower and harder to work with because they involve too many people and too much discussion. Apple is almost exactly the opposite example of this, and clearly their approach works quite well most of the time.
- s17n 5y ago
  Products don't fail because Google cancels them, Google cancels them because they failed. There are of course lots of reasons that Google's messaging products have all failed, but I'm pretty sure that the use of open standards didn't help.

phs318u 5y ago

> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years? The article answers that: "Google's messaging history is one of constant product startups and shutdowns. Thanks to a lack of product focus or any kind of top-down mandate from Google's CEO, no division is really "in charge" of messaging. As a consequence, the company has released 13 half-hearted messaging products since iMessage launched in 2011." I'll hazard a guess that most of those products were left to wither and die due to an inability to significantly advance Google's "eyeballs monetisation" strategy.

blunte 5y ago
It was a rhetorical question :)

Mikeb85 5y ago

What lock-in? There is no lock-in for the consumer on Google products. If you have a Google device you can use whatever apps you want. If you use Google services you can use whatever apps or OS you want. The problem is that Google has been too open. They could have made a Google messenging app the default a decade ago and forced all SMS on Android to go through that. As it stands now, any messenging app can be the default on Android. Some OEMs roll their own, FB Messenger can be turned into default SMS app, etc...

JeremyNT 5y ago

A stopped clock is right twice a day, as they say. RCS isn't a replacement for Signal or iMessage, not really, but it's a hell of a lot better than the current least-common-denominator, cross-platform approach of SMS/MMS. Apple, with its desire for vendor lock-in, has every incentive to keep the "least-common-denominator" messaging standard as crappy as possible, to make iMessage's own experience between Apple users more compelling. They have no incentive to improve this and of course will drag their feet as long as possible. Whatever you think of Google, and whatever you think of Apple, I hope you can agree that the carriers dragging their feet on RCS does nobody any good. There's no reason that RCS cannot co-exist with iMessage on IOS, except that Apple wants you in its walled garden.

blunte 5y ago
I'm not a messaging historian, but according to Wikipedia RCS group was formed in 2007. Apple's iMessage was launched in 2011, which means it had been in development for some time. Especially being Apple, they would not pick an external pre-standard and run with it when they built their success on in-house design and control. It would also be a huge gamble to build around someone else's young standard. Do you remember phones in 2011? The Android-based phones were wildly different from each other (often flawed in unique ways). There were still popular Nokia based phones. Apple almost certainly did not target "lock in" as their priority when building their phone software. They targeted "stuff we can control which won't blow up in ways we cannot understand or prevent". (I do admit their focus shifted after Steve Jobs died, but that was later.) But also realize the carriers were in heavy competition for decades. I've worked with/for telecom companies off and on for a very long time, and the only coordination really happens when one big company buys another and has to try to integrate things.
- nytesky 5y ago
  Well Apple did kind of bet the farm by only including USB in the candy colored iMacs. It was a relatively new standard that no one was using, they shipped with only USB Ports and were ridiculed for it.

lenkite 5y ago

"How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?" At rough count, around a dozen in ~15 years. https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo-hangouts-talk-messaging-mess-timeline https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...