Apple runs on Intelligent Design. You have a room full of geniuses who decide what to build, make sure it fits perfectly into their overall product portfolio with minimal overlap or cannibalization, spend years in a dark secret room building it until it's perfectly polished, and then do a big-bang launch.
Google on the other hand, runs on evolution. You've got tens of thousands of smart people all over the company, each with their own cool ideas and visions. Director #1 decides it would be cool to have a single unified messaging/video app that works across all platforms; Director #2 decides it would be cool to have a messaging app that's perfectly customized for mobile phones and Random-Guy #3 decides to do a 20℅ project on a messaging app that integrates AI functionality. Instead of trying to pick a winner, and telling everyone else to abandon their projects, Google allows all 3 visions to play themselves out on a small scale, and then doubles down on the winner. Rather than having a perfect product portfolio like Apple, Google is almost like an incubator, full of interesting ideas and projects, even if they lack the structure that comes with Central Planning.
The downside of course, is brand confusion and dilution. People looking for a messaging app, and not having the time to explore all options thoroughly, will have a hard time figuring out which Google-messaging-app to go with. If they pick a non-optimal one, it's going to hurt the Google brand in their eyes. But the upside is innovation. Allowing multiple ideas to play themselves out at the same time, allows for so much more innovation, experimentation and iteration. And ultimately, I think those are the qualities that Google wants to prioritize.
Like, when Unilever launch a new detergent, they give it a totally separate brand. If it fails, they drop it quietly, and if it succeeds they can roll it out worldwide.
I wish Google would do the same. Launch this as 'allo', with the fact that it's from alphabet buried in the small print. Once it's been doing well for a couple of years, they can think about pulling it into the Google brand and pushing it to every user in the world.
Dumb dumb dumb.
Like they're doing with Hangouts now. No real new features have appeared in years.
1. Brand 2. Money
If they took this approach it would require a much more concerted marketing strategy.
Disney has Miramax for films that don't fit under the Disney brand.
Toyota has the Scion brand for quirky, weird car designs.
Google could have a brand for experimental apps that they're not sure about.
for example, "Google Allo" could have just been released as "Allo", separate website and everything, and if Google feels it's working out and is the future of their messaging platform, eventually officially bring it in to the Google ecosystem. sort of like a buyout
And now it is dead.
That's what Facebook did.
Yes, absolutely!!
> and then doubles down on the winner
…I'm not so sure about that step ;-)
What a clusterfuck of a company.
It wasn't a mistake, it was deliberate with the intention to lock in users.
But, as the saying goes, "the best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry".
Google really does have a really skittish habit of acquisitions, creations, and closures. Remember 'buzzing' with your email? Remember Wave, the product that not even Google knew what to do with? Having a large assortment of applications in your portfolio isn't what is being criticized when calling Google a "clusterfuck", it's the strangeness by which this portfolio is managed. Products rise and fall seemingly without a lot of warning. Some are integrated into others, others are heavily promoted while others are left to fester. With Facebook's acquisitions, they mostly are left to run on their own, just under Facebook control with Facebook slowly sliding their tendrils into each app. (We see this with Whatsapp, Instagram is overrun with ads), but the products themselves aren't integrated or changed dramatically for the end user.
With Google, it's really difficult to get excited or really heavily invested in products that aren't called Gmail because it's just really hard to tell what the product is going to be doing even half a year down the line, or if it will even exist. This isn't "like all other products", this is a statement based off of how Google historically has operated.
It's great that Google is willing to take risks, but they keep pushing these new ventures as having re-invented the wheel and all of the ventures require quite a bit of buy-in from the end-users; if it fails for Google, they write it off since they can. End users are left with a obsolete product they likely intended to use for a heck of a lot longer.
So yeah, when you have Google releasing new apps that compete with already existing Google Apps (as well as a multitude of other similar apps from other companies), I think it's fair to wonder what is going on. Even if there is a strategy, I'm not convinced that it's much more than "let's see if people like this better than ____", which isn't exactly a winning strategy in my book.
Allo/Duo just don't really seem to offer much that doesn't already exist, and their release makes me suspicious about whether or not their current message/video/voice service, Hangouts, is about to get axed or left in the dust or what.
No one is saying that the clusterfuck isn't valuable, profitable, or useful. They're just saying it's a clusterfuck.
The LA freeway system is a clusterfuck, but without it the city wouldn't work. We can still criticize LA's lack of a good transportation system, and recognize that something more organized would be, well, better.
Instagram and WhatsApp were in hindsight superb purchases since the network effects have turned out to be far stronger than I think most people ever expected. Likewise splitting out Messenger makes so much sense since companies are now targeting it for their AI/Bot strategies.
Their strategy seems to be throwing stuff at the wall and trying to get something to stick.
Also YouTube was already the dominant player (beating google video) by the time google acquired it. It wasn't built by google
And WhatsApp is an independent company.
It makes zero sense to compare it to Google which is absolutely a mess.
Google tore down the federation on purpose, with a configuration change. Rumour has it that it was a spam response.
There's an interesting similar spam campaign going on right now in email, BTW. https://wordtothewise.com/2016/09/ongoing-subscription-form-...
Of course Hangouts had potential too. And then Slack came along and ate their lunch on the business side. It's really kind of ridiculous that every single organization that I know of that uses Google Apps has decided to ignore Hangouts and use Slack instead. How shitty must your free group chat client be that your customers are paying to replace it...
I feel like Google is my corporate spirit animal because we operate the exact same why. We both like to start super cool side projects, get 70% of the way through it and then just completely lose interest.
That's a killer feature..
Maybe it's not quite what I am thinking though. I can't tell if the video preview is live or if it's something recorded before the call is made.
As long as the person on the other end knows that he's on-camera, I think it's NBD. The trick is ensuring that eh really does know that, and isn't picking his teeth, washing his hands &c.
I like the idea for video calls too.
From the calling end, the person just sees that you didn't pick up, right? So he wouldn't know that you declined because of the preview.
I'm often surprised how many people don't know that Messages semi-supports Hangouts (not implying that you don't)..
Obviously things like video chat don't work, so it's more like what Google Talk used to be, but it's better than keeping 2 apps open.
Voice is basically deprecated
Hangouts is enterprise
Allo and Duo compete with Whatsapp/iMessage and Facetime/Skype respectively
- Facebook Messenger combines all the functionality of Allo and Duo. - Whatsapp already has voice calling and is adding video soon (so I read on the internet) - iMessage and Facetime integrate in IOS much better than Google Duo does. In IOS, you go to a contact and press facetime. On Android, you go to a contact... then go back out to Duo and call them.
WeChat, of course, does everything that all these apps will ever do - as of many years ago.
Care to elaborate? I'm having trouble picturing what you mean. Long form with styling?
I wonder if WeChat will try to push the service more outside of China?
To me hangouts looks like a competitor to Skype only, at this time.
And Apple doesn't really treat Facetime as an app.
It's a separate app on the iPhone, no?
Upshot now if you use xmpp like you always did it's received as sms which is probably not what you wanted. Thanks google.
So get into bed with them by all means, but don't be suprised once you're tied up they flip you over.
If they made the bloody thing properly encrypted end to end all the time I could forgive them for their blatant bait and switch, for keeping everyone's email searchable by the nsa in gmail (whether you use it or not, your mail is there) and all the rest. But no, surveillance is what google do and they're addicted to it.
Do no evil, yeah they announced they dropped that, didn't they?
That's why they added it. Now they can market it as "we have encryption too", but it's so out of the primary experience that not many will bother with it. E2E has become a checkmark to list, because most don't care about the most important part - how it works.
It's similar with Facebooks secret messages, where the secret messages are apart from regular ones.
Lets face it: the only thing this was built is Google collecting data to feed the "Google assistant".