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-...
What a clusterfuck of a company.