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As a Google employee, the profusion of chat apps is caused by: * a genuine interest in trying new things and trying to see if they'd stick, without the baggage

by pradn 4y ago

As a Google employee, the profusion of chat apps is caused by: * a genuine interest in trying new things and trying to see if they'd stick, without the baggage of established UX & customers - Allo/Duo are like this. I don't think people give the company enough credit for this. * leadership downplaying the cost to the Google brand of shutting things down all the time. When brought up internally, execs shrug saying that we must be willing to try and see if things stick. This makes sense, but why are people particularly mad at Google for doing this? It must be for a good reason, not merely a meme. * org silos. The org behind Google Docs / Chat has a different reason for a chat app (chat as a checkbox for enterprise office suite sales) than the one behind Google Maps (you can chat with restaurants or whatnot) * a lack of a good "design dictator", meaning our chat apps, as with other apps, falter for lack of great UX and don't gain traction. The biggest example I can think of is how Google Chat has a loading spinner for the emoji picker - this simple thing should be lightning quick, but it took a year for someone to even prioritize it. * faulty marketing / branding. Taking the simple, beloved "GChat", which was the dominant chat app between AIM and FB Messenger, and wringing it though "Hangouts" and "Allo/Duo" and "Chat" - that's no fun for users. I think the lesson here is that people want a simple, hyper-fast app that gets out of their way and slowly adds nice things on top. I'd say the apps that are most fun and fast to use are Messenger and iMessage. (I have plenty of problems with both - unremovable stories on Messenger, lack of archiving chats and general slowness on iMessage). All these are my opinions.

KerrAvon 4y ago
> leadership downplaying the cost to the Google brand of shutting things down all the time. When brought up internally, execs shrug saying that we must be willing to try and see if things stick. This makes sense, but why are people particularly mad at Google for doing this? It must be for a good reason, not merely a meme. Because it doesn't actually make sense. * Google has an audience. I suspect everything Google does is a good enough idea for a small subset of people -- or solves a problem for a lot of people but isn't profitable, like Google Reader -- and because it's Google doing it, a lot of people hear about it and use it. So the shutdown of Google's random ideas affects more people than the shutdown of some random startup. * Google just kills the products completely instead of spinning them off or selling them to interested parties as earlier incarnations of Silicon Valley tech companies would have done. A company not bloated from search advertising revenue would have happily sold something like Google Reader for some money instead of just killing it.
hot_gril 4y ago
When I joined Google, I realized it was the same on the inside as the outside. There's a lack of direction. It's not just chat apps, and it permeates the entire company including Sundar. Maybe it's just too easy to lose focus when nearly all your income comes from one product and none of the others matter.
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
Most of the problems with product @ today's Google come from "shipping the org chart." You touched on this in your third point. This was one of the major factors that led to me walking away from there after a decade. That, and it's just a slow boring place to work most of the time. One spends the bulk of one's time basically seeking permission to do the thing that needs to be done -- by this I mean: get in the right MDB groups, get the right sign off on design docs, be sure to be in the right team, be sure to have gotten the right people on your code reviews, made sure there's visibility to the right stakeholders -- and hope to god the thing you're working on isn't sexy enough that somebody better connected won't just steal it from you when you're halfway through it anyways. Or just take credit for it. And the perf process and the culture around it produces terrible results on top of that. Paid well, but was a terrible place to work. Especially once COVID hit and the free gourmet food and subsidized massages were a thing of the past.

by pradn 4y ago

KerrAvon 4y ago

> leadership downplaying the cost to the Google brand of shutting things down all the time. When brought up internally, execs shrug saying that we must be willing to try and see if things stick. This makes sense, but why are people particularly mad at Google for doing this? It must be for a good reason, not merely a meme. Because it doesn't actually make sense. * Google has an audience. I suspect everything Google does is a good enough idea for a small subset of people -- or solves a problem for a lot of people but isn't profitable, like Google Reader -- and because it's Google doing it, a lot of people hear about it and use it. So the shutdown of Google's random ideas affects more people than the shutdown of some random startup. * Google just kills the products completely instead of spinning them off or selling them to interested parties as earlier incarnations of Silicon Valley tech companies would have done. A company not bloated from search advertising revenue would have happily sold something like Google Reader for some money instead of just killing it.

hot_gril 4y ago

When I joined Google, I realized it was the same on the inside as the outside. There's a lack of direction. It's not just chat apps, and it permeates the entire company including Sundar. Maybe it's just too easy to lose focus when nearly all your income comes from one product and none of the others matter.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

Most of the problems with product @ today's Google come from "shipping the org chart." You touched on this in your third point. This was one of the major factors that led to me walking away from there after a decade. That, and it's just a slow boring place to work most of the time. One spends the bulk of one's time basically seeking permission to do the thing that needs to be done -- by this I mean: get in the right MDB groups, get the right sign off on design docs, be sure to be in the right team, be sure to have gotten the right people on your code reviews, made sure there's visibility to the right stakeholders -- and hope to god the thing you're working on isn't sexy enough that somebody better connected won't just steal it from you when you're halfway through it anyways. Or just take credit for it. And the perf process and the culture around it produces terrible results on top of that. Paid well, but was a terrible place to work. Especially once COVID hit and the free gourmet food and subsidized massages were a thing of the past.