What Google heard is: buy discord, glue it into everything and then shut it all down after 2 years.

I'm imagining a meeting a few years back, at Google:

"Ok, you know our motto, 'Don't be Evil.'?"

Heads nod.

"What if ... what if ... what if we simplify that?"

"How so?"

"Just cut off the first word, 'Be Evil.' Simple, elegant."

"I like it!"

----

Jokes aside, I think Google does a pretty good job of keeping the major products steady. Our little cohort on HN isn't a great sample for determining what "major" is.

Seems to me that either "Hangouts" (or whatever it's been most recently renamed to) is "major," and so many might argue it proves you false regarding "steady," OR it's not major, and discord would thus not be major and likewise not be kept "steady".

That's a fair assessment.

Google Play Music, Hangouts, AngularJS, Works with Nest API....

They've killed off a lot of buds, but they've also killed some great products.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Given some of their moves with Google Workspace tying together Gmail / Meet / Chat, I doubt they could get away with this without significant antitrust issues.

They still haven’t fully closed on their Fitbit acquisition, so I’d expect they’d have a tough hill to climb for a Discord or a Slack.

Would antitrust cover....a hypothetical unlimited budget de novo build? Sort of acquihiring without going after Discord employees.

It would if they build a completely free product to price out competitors. Then there's an easy case to be made that they're leveraging market power / dominance in one market to undercut rivals in another (e.g. running this new service with negative profits to gain market share before eventually boosting prices later.)

Yeah, Google has a chat app addiction that’s not going to be solved by buying yet another chat app.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/