I've posted this link before in comments, but for anyone who's not read this arstechnica piece it is well worth it:

A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...

Good stuff. To give google a little credit, google talk is what killed off AIM for everyone I knew. Mostly because you could knock out chat and email on one page and it was cool cuz google was not yet being evil and then eventually they had other fun stuff to integrate with like reader and igoogle…

> A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps

How do they keep failing over and over, in the same way, when these failures are a well-known embarrassment?

You'd think the CEO would either just ban development of new messaging apps or pick a winner and give it the same kind of care and feeding as GMail.

I was completely fine with the old Hangouts thing. A small little call/chat system embedded into the inbox. Would occasionally ping friends and occasionally chat.

You maybe, but Google is looking for a whatsapp/wechat killer, and will keep trying till they have it, or abandon the idea.

My guess is because things like that don't make any or much direct revenue, so they aren't going to get senior executives to want to take ownership and champion the thing.

Killing a chat product that has always been a net loss for the company might not appear to be a failure.

> Killing a chat product that has always been a net loss for the company might not appear to be a failure.

Doing that once, yeah, doing that over and over, no so much.

At this point the smartest thing to do it just kill them all and definitively say: "No more, this is the end of Google chat apps."

> Doing that once, yeah, doing that over and over, no so much.

What do you mean? It's always good move to kill a product that loses money for the company.

Why do they start so many new products that are losers? That's a different question. Possibly the incentives for starting new products are poorly calibrated, which is the common narrative. But possibly they aren't and they are quite happy to make a mountain of shit, including doing almost the same thing over and over, for the small chance of a diamond. That's entirely consistent with the rest of the start-up industry.

>> Doing that once, yeah, doing that over and over, no so much.

> What do you mean? It's always good move to kill a product that loses money for the company.

Look at the Ars Technica article I was responding to. Google has failed at chat apps repeatedly for a long time, to the point where it's an embarrassment AND they've created a self-reinforcing vicious cycle of failure. The smart decision for users is to avoid any Google chat app like the plague, because it will inevitably be killed, which means those apps will also fail for lack of users.

A business doesn't have infinite tries to get something right. Eventually they burn up all their credibility. They should kill them all, and stop developing new ones, completely exiting the space.

I know they have repeatedly scrapped them and repeatedly made new ones. That's the whole basis for the discussion we're having.

The question is what their strategy is. Obviously they know this too. The idea that nerds on HN know what is best for the company's brand or reputation is dubious at best. Google is (allegedly) one of the most valuable brands in the world, and more trustworthy than Microsoft or Apple or Amazon (https://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-tiktok-least-trusted-...).

Sure us supernerds will guffaw and chortle into our neckbeards to one another and deride Google for killing lots of things, but how much does that actually hurt their bottom line or brand value?

Wow! This really does cover everything. I just wrote a comment saying Disco is never brought up. It is here.

There's Google Chat, which is really made for companies but available on normal accounts too, and Google Messages, their SMS/MMS/RCS app for Android, which requires that you have an Android phone and a phone plan.

Also Hangouts, Meet, Duo, Allo, Spaces. I don't even know if all of them are alive now, and I don't care enough to check.

Hangouts is just another client for Google Chat now, Allo is dead, and Spaces is a feature of Google Chat. Meet and Duo are not chat apps really, but there is a pretty clear separation in that Meet is primarily designed for business meetings (competes with Zoom) and Duo is more primarily for personal use (competes with FaceTime)

> Spaces is a feature of Google Chat.

This is true today, but 3-4 years ago Spaces was actually a completely separate product that was so bad that most Googlers didn't even know it existed.

I have never met a single person, including on the Spaces team, that used Spaces for anything. Ever.

Disco is forgotten usually. From the early smartphone days before Whatsapp and others had firmly won. I believe they even owned Disco.com. I had that app installed way back when.

I'm pretty sure there was a Google+ chat, and who remembers Google Talk?

And Wave, whatever that was?

It was Slack/etc years before those existed. They just couldn't figure out how to market it because there were no reference points at the time, so few could see any reason to use it.

I doubt it's just that. If those things were actually great, people would have embraced them like they did slack.

Consider Google+ also. They had plenty of reference points for that. It was just not very good.

Google tends to abandon development on new projects way too quickly, before they're ready for mass appeal. They probably expect it to explode like Gmail did. But I think they forget they lost a lot of promotors like us when they abandoned the don't be evil thing.

At the time I recommended Gmail to everyone, now I try to get people away from Google :)

Before Slack there was Flowdock (which was never as popular) and I'm pretty sure another I'm forgetting from back then. I used Slack as probably the best-known example.

"We couldn't figure out how to market it" was from an interview straight from the people who made it: The companies they pitched to responded with things like "why would we need this, we have email".

Loved Wave, thought it was terrible that it got shelved

Buzz

To be even more confusing, it’s also possible to chat and video conference with the Gmail app. But maybe this changes tomorrow who knows?

They removed the ability to install the dedicated chat app and moved it all into the Gmail app. Infuriating. Oh, and it opens all links on the built-in chrome browser instead of respecting your default browser settings. There is no option to change the behavior.

> They removed the ability to install the dedicated chat app and moved it all into the Gmail app.

The first part of it is not true (but the second part is true, in that you can access chats from Gmail as well).

I just checked, and Google Chat exists as a separate app on iOS, Android, and web (chat.google.com). Even though the web version redirects to a gmail url (mail.google.com/chat), it is still a separate web version, not embedded into gmail. The only thing it shares with gmail is its subdomain, the page itself has zero mention of gmail or any gmail-related functionality.

>I just checked, and Google Chat exists as a separate app on iOS

I used to have this app installed, then one day it started telling me I had to use the GMail app for chat instead.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they were rolling the out the migration to accounts incrementally, or they've reversed course. But I deleted the google chat app because it wouldn't let me use google chat.

The separate chat app still exists (at least on Android). I have it, because I often like to copy and paste between them.

I used Allo for some time. It's long gone now.

Not to be confused with Chat, which is inside the Google Messages app, which is RCS.

That's actually "Chat Features"

I think I may make an independent thread about this soon (but my question may be stupid): why does messages use this paradigm of connecting to one's phone directly instead of accessing texts in some centralized fashion? Is that impossible because only the carrier has the contents of the thread (even though other services can be used to post texts)?

The surveillance state likes it that way.

> I don't even know what to call it anymore.

Google.