5 ms·

Why not, it worked out so well for Google with their deep search history, world-beating teams of big data specialists, deep pockets and massive Gmail/Gapps user

• mtts 14y ago
  Google Wallet is actually fairly useless. To load it up you need a credit card. If you have a credit card, you could just as well, uhm, use a credit card.
  • jurre 14y ago
    I think your parent was being sarcastic. We need a sarcasm tag in HTML.
    • mtts 14y ago
      I was aware of that. But parent did raise an interesting point. Google Wallet isn't doing too great. Why?
      • naitbit 14y ago
        I cannot talk for everyone, but I use paypal instead of Google Wallet, because it allows me to pay without using credit card. I do think that current model of credit card payment is broken so I refuse to use it. Sure if dishonest merchant purges all my cash from credit card I could get it back by contacting bank, but money lost would be covered by all bank clients. I don't have much trust in paypal, but I can transfer to it appropriate amount of money from bank just before the payment, so possible damage is much lower. That said my level of trust with facebook is so low that I would probably refuse to put on their account even 100 USD.
      • iamgilesbowkett 14y ago
        the sheer number of possible answers is overwhelming, but pretty much everything Google does fails, except for search and email. (I can't be the only one who's afraid to find out what their cars are like.) so I'm going to say the reason Google Wallet failed is because it was neither search nor email. I guess you could say Android is only half a failure, because the constant catch-up game they're playing with Apple isn't going as badly as the constant catch-up game Google Plus (and Wave, and whatever they called the other one) plays with Facebook. but seriously, business failure can happen for so many reasons, it doesn't really mean anything at all, unless of course you see a string of people failing at the same thing.
        • shrub 14y ago
          Wave was scraped a while ago and taken completely offline just recently. I loved the per-character live action, but the rest of the UX was non-revolutionary and mostly a disaster.
        • chrisrhoden 14y ago
          Woah. Google Wallet failed because they didn't already have accounts for everyone when they launched it. Paypal was the only competitor but they didn't offer anything paypal didn't already offer, and everyone was already on paypal. > pretty much everything Google does fails, except for search and email. I can see that you're having some difficulty with google recently, but you can't actually believe this. What about Maps? Saying that maps is search because it has search built in means we can call GMail search too. What about Calendar? > I guess you could say Android is only half a failure, because the constant catch-up game they're playing with Apple This is where the snark starts to bother me. Let's acknowledge that Apple made a phone with a big glass touchscreen before Google. What, since then, has been a great innovation that Android has rushed to rip off?
          • iamgilesbowkett 14y ago
            Calendar is worthless. Maps you have a point. Android is a joke.
        • icebraining 14y ago
      • planetguy 14y ago
        Because internet payment is a solved problem. Here's my credit card number, click click. It works, it's easy enough, and I'm not sure I want it to be any easier.
        • andybak 14y ago
          You obviously haven't had the pleasure of using 3D Secure... I tend to always use Paypal or Google Checkout (sorry... 'Wallet'...) if given the option as I don't have to fish out my card and go through several screens of slow badly implemented web forms. Often I don't even have to enter my address whilst with a credit/debit card option I always do.
        • GFischer 14y ago
          It's not a solved problem. 66% of the world does not have a bank account (much less a credit card). However, 90% have access to a cell phone. That was the basis for my failed micropayments project :) It didn't fail because of a lack of demand, but because it's hard to tackle without significant resources. I still might resurrect a less ambitious version (being a middleman here in Uruguay).
          • planetguy 14y ago
            Ehh, those 66% don't have enough money to be worth selling to anyway.
        • guelo 14y ago
          It's not a solved problem on the web merchant side.
      • jcmhn 14y ago
        > Google Wallet isn't doing too great. Why? No support. You NEED to be able to reach a human being to clear up problems with credit cards. I used google wallet to pay for a google apps yearly account. I also used a different card to pay for a couple games from the android market. I dutifully checked all the options to make sure that the card I used to pay for those games could never ever be used to pay the renewal fee on the the apps account. Then one day I found that the wrong card had been charged for the apps renewal. I couldn't get ahold of anyone at google. I couldn't find any help online. I couldn't even find a phone number to call. So I removed the cards from my wallet account. Cancelled the wallet account, and snarl "no" anytime google tries to get a credit card from me.
        • mdwrigh2 14y ago
          Just as an fyi, a phone number does exist for wallet: support.google.com/wallet/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1350364
    • ktizo 14y ago
      I thought that was what the blink tag was for...
    • mw63214 14y ago
      I think I've posted this before on an older thread, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_Markup_Language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_Markup_Language
    • smashing 14y ago
      Sarcasm is ignored on HN because it is such a contrarian culture.
      • JonnieCache 14y ago
        No it isn't.
    • rmc 14y ago
      There is an irony/snark/sarcasm punctuation symbol in English: ⸮ cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation
      • m0shen 14y ago
        I'm not sure why, but the mark you posted doesn't work for me, but these work from wikipedia, sarcasm mark: ¡ , irony mark: ؟
        • rmc 14y ago
          Both display fine for me on Chromium on Ubuntu. But on HTC Desire Android phone, I can't see my original, but can see your ones. Yay! Unicode! Encoding! Fun!
    • rplnt 14y ago
      It was proposed to w3c.. kind of http://i.imgur.com/UE85t.png http://i.imgur.com/UE85t.png
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    • nachopg 14y ago
      I think your parent was being meta-sarcastic. You have to keep up with the new forms in the internet.
    • joelrunyon 14y ago
      No we don't. We need less sarcasm on HN.
• Akram 14y ago
  Well, Google is also struggling with Social. It doesn't mean that if Google checkout failed no one else can do anything good.
  • eli 14y ago
    I think the point being made is that simply having a strong brand and bright engineers does not mean you can solve any problem you try to tackle.
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
• jusben1369 14y ago
  Yeah but let's be honest. Google's track record is littered with failures that seem more around focus and execution than opportunity.
• roguecoder 14y ago
  Google failed at implementing Facebook too.
  • diminish 14y ago
    Why not "Coca Cola Buy" NFC payment chip in every bottle too to be used in restaurants/bars? My mother knows the brand Coca Cola, and if Coca Cola hires 1000 engineers to provide an NFC chip in every bottle; they may get 1% from global.....
    • kevinrpope 14y ago
      Wouldn't this get a bit crowded? For example Coke buy, Pepsi buy, McDonalds buy, etc. I personally wouldn't want to use a system for payment that would only work for one brand.
      • thomasluce 14y ago
        In seriousness, though, that crowding may not be bad. Competing currencies tend to drive the total value of the "winning" ones up. And I know a lot of people (myself sometimes included) that would like non-US currencies to use on a daily basis, simply for ethical or political reasons. Plus, I played a lot of fallout and I like the idea of paying for things in caps!
• gringomorcego 14y ago
  that's what happens when you don't fight for what you want. they let others rule the nfc area, what the hell did they think was going to happen.