Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16882539

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16881497

There are 2 front page stories about Google messaging strategy, both of which were spawned from TheVerge article[0][1] that was posted last night that didn't get as much traction then. Google gave them an exclusive interview and they put together a well detailed piece that is talking about what Google is doing around messaging and why.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16881497

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17252486/google-android-m...

FWIW, I'd much rather read a journalist's take on what Google is doing with messaging than a Google PR piece from a site which mostly writes PR pieces.[1] But there's probably good cause for multiple threads on the topic to be merged together.

[1]Mostly when a company does exclusive interviews with a site, you should be very skeptical of anything that site says on the matter. Especially if they have a design team making custom animations and such for said exclusive article.

The Ars piece is much better researched than the one written by The Verge. In the latter case they seem to make it like RCS is a wholly Google project when its in fact a GSMA thing with several RCS solution providers.

Google already had a product that could've beated WhatsApp, iMessage and every other messaging app. It was called Google Talk/Chat. It was sticky b/c it was embedded in Gmail. They killed it.

Wasn't it called Google Talk? And it was based on Jabber/XMPP, which let you use any compatible client.

I hate that they dropped support for it, choosing to go with a proprietary protocol without any public APIs.

It was Talk, but I think before it was a separate offering/app, it was just "chat on Gmail", and hence, "GChat" took off as an informal name for it.

> which let you use any compatible client

Which means that third-parties can easily capture large parts of the "friends" graph with just a small number of users consenting to give them data.

You're also now entrusting your communications to whatever clients other people are using without any chance/need for you to consent to their privacy policies.

Yep, sorry, Google Talk. Edited my message

Also it was reliable and interoperated fairly well despite other chat providers' sporadic attempts to build moats.

For me Gtalk was the Yahoo Messenger of late 2000s. Me and my friends almost exclusively used Gtalk since it was very lightweight, it worked well, and you could use any of the large number of free clients with it.

Google had Slack too, two years before Slack, in the form of Wave.

Google's problem is launching products to to compete with something that's just there. I would guess there's a very large chunk of iPhone users, perhaps a majority, that are completely unaware they're using an Apple messaging service. Messages is just their SMS app that happens to behave slightly differently when talking to other iPhone users.

I'm pretty sure most iOS users were at least once aware they were using Apple's messaging service because they were required to initially sign into iCloud (or create their iCloud account for the first time) and explicitly opt into iMessages.

But because the service and application are reliable and consistent and because upgrading between iPhones is also mostly seamless and carries those settings forwards between device upgrades, it just fades into the background as something you did 5 years ago and don't need to think about again.

'The cell carriers fear being turned into "dumb pipes" and generally prefer proprietary services that give them customer lock-in.'

Uhh, that's kind of what I pay my service providers to do though; deliver services through their "dumb pipes" and infrastructure. There's not a lot of differentiation in internet or phone services from provider to provider for consumers. The biggest difference I can find is price and network availability. Your job as a provider is to give me access to "dumb pipes".

That's what I want, too. The thing is, that's so very much not what the carriers want. They don't want to be a commodity (like corn or bacon): one provider of a commodity is very much the same as every other, which means that there's a race to the bottom on price. What the providers want is to differentiate themselves from their competition, in order to add friction to switching and thus help sustain higher prices.

The thing is, with general-purpose computing devices in our pockets we can run just about anything. We don't need special carrier features, and in fact those are anti-features: why would I want something I can only use with those of my friends on the same carrier?

Ultimately, of course, this also applies to OSes: why would I use something Android- or iOS-specific when I could use something universal instead? Right now, there are plenty of iPhone users using iCloud services which lock out their Android-using friends & family, but over time social pressure will lead the to find more platform-neutral ways to share.

The web is eating the world, and that means being in the ISP or OS space is a losing game (in the long term: in the short term, of course, there's plenty of profit to be had).

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. What's the point of a feature like RCS to me when I can only use it with other Fido users? I'm not going to expect my friends and family to stay on my provider, so that actively discourages me from wanting any provider locked in features. Make your dumb pipes better and available to all networks and maybe I'll consider it.

When it comes to messaging tools, you really have to play the long game to get any real traction. I don't think I'd move away from Telegram unless Google's chat app had been around for 5+ years with growing popularity, and is better than Telegram (UX wise).

That's the great comedy here: Everyone succeeding in the chat market has been around for a number of years. Google tries something for about a year, decides it doesn't have enough immediate traction, and then dumps it before anyone even has an account. And they keep abandoning the little shares they gain each time.

If there's anyone who I have to chat with in the Google world, it's likely they still use or have Hangouts, because, including Talk, it's been around for a long time. As soon as Google decided to abandon it's existing, sizeable user base, it basically left the market.

No, Google just sinks in people into project which is going to be doomed anyway - otherwise the same people could build businesses of higher chance of success and endanger Google's position. It's destroying competition by paying people salaries. Not sure if Google does it purposely or it's uncontrolled fatal mechanism.

Yeah, I am pretty much in that situation, still use Hangouts daily, mostly with long running group chats.

Being able to use it from any device, or even a browser while at work makes a big difference.

(ham handed attempt at market research) Does anyone think there's a market opening for a NxN group chat? We've been trying to find a usable group video chat application. GotoMeeting is a 1 to many (broadcast) solution. Skype has degraded over the last decade such that there's always at least one person who can't completely join the meeting.

In my hubris, I wonder how hard it would be to create an NxN group video chat app with OpenCV, some ffmpeg, and a lot of my own ignorance.

"Google Allo was Google's attempt at a WhatsApp clone, and it launched just a year-and-a-half ago with a laundry list of deficiencies."

With the greatest talents working in tandem, I fail to comprehend how they can ever create something that is less than perfect? A great product failing due to market dynamics is one thing, but releasing a half-baked product is something that leaves me bewildered.

This will fail also.

Why on Earth would anyone write a message system that wasn't based on dumb-pipe internet? What can RCS do for an end user that IP can't?

Nobody likes being tied to their carrier. I have been using Google Voice for 5 years now and love that I am not tied to my carrier.

Yes I am tied to Google, but so is any other messaging system from Google.

This may just be a political move. "Hey carriers! Look? See? We're on your side!"

SMS/MMS is already operated through your carrier. RCS is no different, in that regard. My main peeve with this whole Google Jibe thing is that we, as consumers, won't get to opt in or out of Google collecting our conversations.

Since we didn't all decide to send Google our chat conversations, Google has decided to start convincing carriers to hand over our chat conversations in bulk without our permission.

I don't see how this ties you to a carrier -- if RCS ends up being what it promises to be, inter-carrier operability should not be an issue.

Yep, that was the last time I pushed for a Google messaging service to my family members who did not want to deal with Signal's limitations.

I hoped Google became self-conscious with their image on messaging services.

I hoped they had changed.

Time to check if Signal's desktop client sync speed improved and start the move for them.

You'd think that Google giving up on proprietary silo protocols and switching to an open inter-operable standard would have people cheering from the rooftops.

Yes, I'd rather have a standard that isn't tied to carriers and supported encryption, but this is still a massive step forward IMO.

The thing, in my opinion, that killed Allo, was not getting SMS right. I have to use Hangouts for SMS. Why on earth would I use Allo? If I can't have one unified inbox, I don't want the app.

Getting unified messaging "right" is very hard. I don't know if Apple has really solved it either. I recall people having weird problems if they switched away from iPhones because Apple would still try and prefer their own proprietary protocol over SMS. There's like a web portal now to remove yourself from iMessage, right?

I wouldn't be as salty if Hangouts didn't work fine. Hangouts almost totally seamlessly deals with chats and SMS. Allo makes a complete mess of it.

Make hangouts great again.