Without brand it's hard to stand out in the crowded messaging space.

Honestly crap like this is devaluing their brand. At this point I have 0 faith that Google will stick to any of their random products (Google Wave, Buzz, Reader, Code, Google+) and therefore I avoid using them.

It really is devaluing the brand. Bring back Google Talk.

Google had corporate/cross platform messaging before it was cool. Gmail, Google Talk was a killer combo for our small teams.

Dumb dumb dumb.

Google Talk was perfect. PER-FECT. Of course they killed it!

They didn't even properly kill it, they just let it slowly stagnate.

Like they're doing with Hangouts now. No real new features have appeared in years.

I really miss Google reader.

Feedly isn't bad. I have been with them since Reader was shut down.

That's precisely the point. It should compete on its own merits.

I think danohu's point was that with branding, it's hard to stand out in the crowded Google messaging space.

Two easy ways to stand out:

1. Brand 2. Money

If they took this approach it would require a much more concerted marketing strategy.

Well they happen to be in the marketing business so...

Google/Alphabet are not in the marketing business. In fact they have pretty awful marketing. They are in the displaying ads business.

Exactly.

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.

That's what Google Labs was. If they had kept Google Labs and released some of these products under that brand, people might not be as worried about them killing the full-fledged Google projects when experiments are ended.

eh, Google Labs is still very obviously Google though. the idea would be, for each new product, to create an entirely new brand with no obvious connection to Google, that Google could later bring on full time if they decide they're ready to commit

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

Use the Nexus brand for them. It's not like they're using that anymore.

I don't think Scion is a good example. They sold _exactly_ same cars under Toyota brand outside of NA market. The Scion brand was more about flat price and limited options.

And now it is dead.

Hell, it might be great if they'd just actually do that part about "doubling down on the winner".

If they are going to launch it and hide that it's from Alphabet, why not just let non-Alphabet companies make those products and then buy the most successful one?

That's what Facebook did.