>Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from the early Gmail days and kept investing in it.
That's just not what Google was back then. It was all about PMs/designers wanting to jump onto the shinest and newest projects and lots of politics were involved to win support/attention/resources from the top management.
I once worked at a startup that made the mistake of hiring an entire remote product team from silicon valley. All they did in the year before they mass resigned was inject drama and politics into everything and force some really bad design decisions that will quite possibly kill the company in a year or so. Got me thinking what it must be like at scale.
Interesting, because it seems (from the outside) like that was what Microsoft was like internally for years. Blogs like mini-ms seemed to confirm some of that, but of course that was "just one side" of the story.
It’s quite an amazing transformation Microsoft has gone through, never complete of course, but still impressive.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/readwrite.com/2013/07/11/micros...
What is Social? Is that at major product vertical within Google? "Possibly" is a potential good answer here :).
As I understand it, GChat wasn't seen seen as able to integrate well into G+. So Hangouts was built on the G+/social infrastructure.
To that team's credit they did somewhat seamlessly move users over from GChat to Hangouts without many hiccups.
Of course, after the G+ effort disintegrated... we got Allo & Duo
I don't think it's a bad thing that google ha a diverse set of products that didn't work together. I don't need my google calc/excel to integrate with youtube, and I don't need google play music to integrate with gmail.
Google should look at these things as individual companies, which it seems like is something that they finally somewhat figured out with the alphabet rebrand. Just let gmail be a successful company on its own, and let youtube be a successful company on its own. From my perspective as a user, things actually get worse when all of these things try to play together.
That makes sense to an extent. Unfortunately, Google has created a number of products or "companies" with overlapping features that are in direct competition with one another. Just in the communication space, they have: Hangouts, Gmail, Inbox, Allo, Duo, Messages, and Google Voice.
These actively compete with one another and make the sum of all the products worse than just one good product. If I want to send an SMS message, I can currently use Hangouts, Messages, or Google Voice. I don't want to decide which to use, and I certainly don't want the one I choose to just disappear one day while I get booted over to another app.
Specious?
A 'product' is something you sell to clients.
Google's only product is advertising, and they don't need to focus on making better advertising because they are a monopoly.
Everything else Google does is just a smokescreen for investors and a creeping fear that they won't be able to exist in a post-monopoly world.
Google's main product is user attention, which they sell to advertisers in the form of advertising.
Right now, they farm this attention mostly through web search, but hone it through data they collect with other venues, such as e.g. location and other data collected from Android handsets, the vast tentacles of Google Analytics, Google DNS, G-Suite (GMail, G Docs, G Drive, ...) etc.
AFAIK, G-Suite for business is actually making money (a round-off error compared to advertising, but still, a profitable business), and the various cloud storage and compute offering are actually making money that is not a round-off error (though still dwarfed by advertising).
Also, they DO need to make better advertising (and farm better attention), because they are in many ways a "natural monopoly" - they're the monopoly because they are the best in many ways, mostly not because of network effects or anti-competitive behaviour (which they have practiced at times, especially with YouTube, but not nearly to the extent practiced by any other player of this size).
I would take that (as anything else) with a grain of salt. They might not today, but things change and they might tomorrow (you know, they used to "not be evil" and they aren't anymore).
Furthermore, rest assured that everyone who can, which includes - but is not limited to - three letter agencies, is monitoring traffic into 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
And if you compare to what happens on hotels' or other such dns servers.
I'm saying, perhaps things will change at Google, but they'd have to change a whole lot before they'd be as bad as the normal alternative.
Not true. Their advertising business is absolutely built on network effects. Advertisers advertise where there is user data (anything else is a money losing proposition), and lots of user data collection only happens in services that have the money to host (and curate) a large search index, which in turn needs a healthy and growing ad business.
It's a self-serving cycle that eventually leads to one player becoming the monopoly.
(Same deal with social networks, though less pronounced.)
Microsoft has the money to to host and curate a large search index, funded by their other businesses. And after more than a decade, they've gotten almost nowhere -- everyone I know who tried Bing (or DDG) goes back to Google for quality.
Whereas e.g. Facebook and WhatsApp do have a network effect - you have no use for them unless your friends use them too, so a new contender - no matter how well funded e.g. Google+ - is not useful until critical mass is achieved; and critical mass is not achieved until it is useful.
Weird, because I pay them monthly for google play music, and for google apps, and for youtube red, and for youtube TV.
I also have several android devices, and look forward to paying them every time I get into a waymo.
Google has LOTS of products. The "you aren't the customer you're the product!" redditism is just wrong. It's something that sounds really insightful if you don't know anything about the company, or are trying to stir up drama.
The acronym simply means either product manager, project manager, or program manager, but the responsibilities can be any/all of the following, and probably more, depending on the company:
- Full product owner, "the buck stops here" person. Many different possible titles here other than PM (usually "project manager" if that's the title), like general manager (GM), different flavors of producer, product owner (PO), VP of X, etc.
- Feature designer/owner/manager (product manager): writing specs (junior), pitching specs (mid-level), setting and selling product vision (senior), driving strategy (staff/exec, though at that level all roles start to get blurry). Decent business school grad representation here, you have to be good at strategy, negotiation, communication, and Powerpoint; having good product ideas helps a lot, too, but not if you can't sell them. A persuasive PM of this type is a force to be reckoned with and will get a lot of executive attention, which can be very good or very bad depending on whether the strategy they're into pans out or not. This is probably the type of PM the parent was talking about "armies of".
- Development director (project manager or program manager): a whip-cracker at worst or an impenetrable shitshield at best, they manage the practicalities of running a project, like project scoping, meeting and managing hard/soft deadlines, handling support, cross-team communications, processes, compliance, etc., often stepping in as an all-purpose guard against randomization so that others can focus on producing the product. Many PMs of this type ended up being the go-to folks for GDPR compliance over the past couple years, so it's not just internal process stuff that they deal with.
- Task checker: can blend into to the development director mentioned above, but at some companies this sort of PM will mainly focus on tracking tasks that are in-progress, getting estimates, watching velocity, and sending reports up the chain. Some devs find this role pointless and annoying, but it really depends on how good they are - if they're solid, they'll find a lot of ways to improve things instead of just tracking them.
- Scrum Master (project manager): Big-S Scrum is falling out of favor so it's not as fashionable to have this title anymore, but within some processes a similar role still exists as a type of project manager. In a nutshell, Scrum is a simple yet effective "People Over Process" process that consists of a bi-weekly no-laptops-allowed retrospective meeting where you get the team together to have a free-ranging discussion where everyone feels heard, so that you can all decide together whether the team should estimate engineering tasks in terms of hours or hats. You need a trained and certified Master because otherwise people new to Scrum might not know to pick hats. A more seasoned Scrum Master will also schedule a quarterly retrospective-retrospective where the team discusses a strategy for what guidelines to put in place for the next retrospective so that the team can decide on hats faster and leave more time for the less settled question about whether or not the Fibonacci sequence is the right way to count hats or if a size-based approach will make people feel better supported in their work.
- Monetization designer (product manager): mainly at game companies, PM is often a super different role, probably best described as the profitability-focused counterpart to a game designer. They focus on setting prices, managing game economies, speccing and evaluating A/B tests, inventing loot boxes, etc. Ideally PM and designer would be one and the same, and the game design would be holistic with the monetization, with a designer that has serious Excel/analytics chops and deep inspiration and sensitivity about gameplay, but that's a more rare combination than you'd think, so a lot of companies split them out.
I'm probably missing some other ways this acronym is overloaded, but I think this covers most of it.
You certainly don't need a certified scrum master. Ideally, the scrum master should be somebody who is already in the team. A scrum master who does just that is really a project manager, and having a project manager is, IMHO, antithetical to doing scrum.
Project Manager: manages day-to-day running for project e.g. fighting for the right number of devs, designers etc
Product Manager: (also product owner) determines what the product should look like.
Not necessarily. In many companies 'project manager' is just the techie name of what used to be called a 'secretary'.
A Product Manager doesn't need to have a technical background, but a Project Manager should.
A totally new, half-baked business product called Hangouts Chat.
The UI is useless, Google try to be clever about “conversation” and tries to group them together, but now people miss most conversations that happen when they aren’t looking. Notification is broken, you can only get to many or not enough.
Chat seems to be designed by the same incompetent team of interns that did Google Groups. Using the two products feel oddly similar.
Again it's personal, but I feel that Chat is a prototype. The interface is butt ugly, almost like it's something that's just slapped together to the if the backend actually works.
I'm not quite sure how though, it just happened.
For real communication we have letter so in digital world mails or we have phone calls so in digital world VoIP one's extended with eventually video/screen sharing and conferencing capabilities, no more.
Discord, Slack, ... are all only a mean to keep abandonware live for business purpose and, unfortunately, many companies fell in the grave. People who want productivity should rediscover classic software, modernized to actual "graphic style" but nothing more so:
- good desktop MUA (I can, unfortunately, only list notmuch-emacs, mu4e, mutt, pine) instead of limited and limiting webmails. Of course we have to add few things to the mix like having our mails in a local maildir and a good filtering/autorefile/autotagging solution (alot, IMAPFilter);
- good VoIP desk/softphones, something like old sip-communicator (now Jitsy);
- decent software to share screen as needed (actually I know only proprietary one's like bomgar, anydesk or teamviewer, xpra etc are simply too limited);
- local, well integrated, productivity suite. Mine is Emacs, not easy to convince office guys to learn it, but even ancient plain office suite can do the business with a decent DMS that enforce good taxonomy and have decent full-text search (YaCy for search, nothing for DMS in my list... They are all crap)...
If a potential employer told me they relied on VoIP phones over Slack/Discord I would consider that a _major_ point against them.
Of course voice will be faster--eight out of ten times at least one involved party's main goal is just to get off the phone.
Optimizing for time is a mistake. Optimize for disruption (I can switch back to other work while waiting for a chat reply--there's context-switching overhead there, but not nearly as much as a phone call), retention (I can refer back to what someone said in chat, rather than "hey, Jane, what was that hostname again?", waiting for an atrocious speech-to-text conversion, or manually seeking around in a call recording), and mutual investment in communication (professional or not, a synchronous call usually has at least one participant that wants to be there less than the other[s]--in chat, people can participate when they're most interested in doing so, meaning that their contributions are less half-assed).
There are situations where sync is best (trying to pitch something or persuade colleagues of something is a big one--it's just easier to reject/be reluctant without engaging critically via chat for some reason). But a lot of the time chat is more efficient.
I've found that many people I've worked with who strongly dislike chat are not practiced or comfortable writers in general, and, after some training (if such folks are willing, I've had them take documentation, presentation-building, or RFC/RFO writing tasks as practice), they tend to be much, much happier about (and better at!) textual communication.
Fortunately I'm in EU (France) so I have still a bit of choice (less and less, unfortunately) to avoid certain bureaucratic companies too much common in modern English world (and I evidence modern because when UK was a real power and USA was a really strong economy they do NOT have such modern mania or at least it was far far far less developed).
What I simply measure is how much I can do with single tasking concentrated operation vs how much I can do and how bad the resulting quality is when I multitask. The result are simple: the more I try to be quick the more error and time I waste, the more I go calm the best result I achieve.
And while I do not have real consistent data I can see result of a certain kind of work paradigm everyday in any aspect of our society.
Not at all. Voice chat is synchronous - you must stop whatever you're doing and listen or talk in real time. And people nearby will overhear.
Chat is asynchronous and private. I can chat and consult a colleague while I'm in a meeting with a client. I can keep a chat open while coding and read/respond when I'm not most concentrated. I can go offline and answer a question the next day.
Text chat isn't literally "chatting through text". It's email with a different UX, more suited for quick communication.
Many have thought and still think that multitasking and quick things are productive, I see the exact opposite. And we can see it at another level in mean per capita hourly productivity: in the past (so before business model substantially merge around the world) French hourly productivity was the highest in the world, and they are still one of the less-working in term of hours and holidays. USA, Japan and Germany are the opposite, they work far more and have a far lower hourly productivity. To the over extreme try the difference between a lover vs a prostitute...
Open spaces are another TOTALLY unproductive things, born only to push more economic constructions sold as a higher price and facilitate reorganization. The letter also is one of the less productive thing we have if done constantly because any change, if positive, demand time to start pay back, doing constantly means NEVER get paid back, only suffer the change itself.
I guess Google really is turning into Microsoft!
So, to compete with Skype for Business?
Messages <-> iMessage
Duo <-> Facetime
Hangouts <-> Slack
I think they should rename the Hangouts to something completely different. That at least will increase clarity for consumers and businesses.
Hangouts is also integrated with Google Voice and GMail. So when someone calls my GV phone number, it rings on my cell phone and in any open GMail tab (but not in the GMail app). I get an SMS, it pops up as a hangouts message too.
It is a mess, but trying to kill Hangouts is insane, it's deeply integrated and it's extremely convenient to use.
Unless you have google voice installed instead of hangouts. It manages to be two apps still.
All these "side projects" create the illusion that Google is not a monopoly. More importantly, new Product X, whatever it is, helps to attract new top talent. Top Talent is going to want to fix old things, they want to build new.
While this might sound a bit extreme, even if it's not actually true (in tandem) both of these "incentives" are real. Google does need to mask its dominance. And it does need to attract top talent (if only to keep soneone else from acquiring it).
Is that really true? I would personally chose to work on Facetime than Google's new messaging system, all else being equal.
Facetime is really solid and I'm sure I could learn a ton from the expertise there; as well as working on something new within that product.
In contrast, Google's messaging systems just seem like a mess. I would feel like it could be cancelled at any time, that we didn't have the best talent (because it's spread across the various systems) and honestly would be slightly embarrassed to talk about it ("yeah, I know, yet another message system from Google").
Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from the early Gmail days and kept investing in it. It was great on the early versions of Android! The failure here is entirely self imposed and a major indictment of their senior management team.