Google Hangouts, like all the other google chat apps, was never intended to gain dominance, it was intended to win promotions for those involved.

I've heard this explanation and I believe it. Nonetheless: Sundar Pichai has been CEO of Google since 2015. One would think that unifying messaging would be a priority from on-high since at least that time. Instead the company allowed poor management to continue, rather than grabbing this issue and saying "stop playing promotion games, this business is strategically important." But it didn't.

Why is chat strategically important? What is Alphabet's strategy?

They've only ever made substantial profit from ads, YouTube (which they acquired), and possibly Workspace or Cloud. The last time I looked at their filings, they weren't transparent about which businesses are profitable.

This isn't a company that's had a coherent identity or strategy.

iMessage is important to Apple because it's an exclusive social network that only Apple devices can access.

Slack is important because it's a backbone of a business SaaS ecosystem.

But Hangouts was never going to have either of these functions.

Because protecting their lucrative ads business means preventing a competing hardware/OS company from gaining majority market-share and strangling you with its platform. That's why the very expensive (not profitable) Android project exists in the first place. And when such a competitor gains too much power, your ads business can suffer very real non-theoretical harms [1].

Right now Apple iOS marketshare is increasing: it's reached 60% in the US and an amazing 87% among teenagers! (Who tend to "stick" with a platform even after they become adults.) And while there are many features that are driving the push towards iOS (it's not just messaging!) the dominance of iMessage is definitely one feature people [particularly younger ones] care very much about. And while fixing messaging might not be the only problem here, it's relatively "inexpensive" to run messaging correctly compared to the cost of fixing things after your OS market share crosses a tipping point.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/09/06/apple-cras...

Android as a zombie OS (not profitable) makes it certain that a quality OS (gets software updates sometimes) competitive with iOS won't emerge. It's really a gift to Apple.

chatting on the web improves uses of said web ?

and in any case, throwing out 20 services in a row to kill them is certain to damage your brand.

there was a time where google was synonimous with free and unavailable features (gmail, gmaps) and now google is that weird ever changing stream of A/B testing customer distracting devices. (youtube just flubbered their UI in the most spectacular manner btw)

You just listed some of the reasons for having a successful messaging app. Why wouldn't any of those reasons be attractive to Google? They could have _finally_ owned a social network. Or a "backbone for a business SaaS ecosystem" tightly integrated into their Cloud services.

Its funny, I was at the TGIF where Hangouts was originally announced, by Chee Chew (who had run messaging at google for a while). Apparently Gchat was not growing while competitors with emojis and other features were. So gchat had to die to make room for hangouts. Many googlers explained taht gchat was not a competitor to those chat systems, but it still lead to the evisceration of classic gchat. Chew got his promo and continued to miss things up for years before finally leaving.

The leaders never realyl understood that gchat was for professionals working in gmail, not teenagers in japan.

> TGIF

What’s that? Besides « thanks god it’s Friday »?

Google had a weekly meeting where the executives would explain their latest crazy ideas and accomplishments. It's held on Thursday, because Sundar wanted to make people in Japan happier about attending.

Due to timezones? or is there something in Japanese culture that makes friday meetings disliked?

Yes, they wanted to find a time that worked for the major 3 locations- Asia, EU, and US. If they held it on Friday, that was Saturday in Japan. So it was moved from Friday early evening to Thursday early evening.

I never understood this argument.

> Apparently Gchat was not growing while competitors with emojis and other features were.

So... add emojis and other features to Gchat, not create a new messaging app.

Seems like every time there was a hot new messaging app with a new paradigm/ feature-set, Google's reaction was to build another competitor and sunset its previous efforts, disappointing everyone internally and externally.

I'm sure the product manager involved had a long design doc justifying the decision but at the end of the day, the obviously right move was to keep the name, swap out the backend, and not try to create a new brand doing the same thing. whatever has to change behind the scenes to make that happen is what needs to happen. If that person reads this I'm sure you're thinking I don't know all the details but the point is it doesn't matter. the right move is the right move.

> Chew got his promo and continued to miss things up for years before finally leaving.

To go to Amazon, where one of my managers worked under him in Personalization and would later rave about him. It's interesting to read a balancing review now.

Yeah, he lasted a few years at amazon then went to twilio and now works at mParticle... who!? I think he probably peaked a while ago.

Definitely this. I have been an Android user since my first smartphone. I've been a Gmail user much longer than that. I still to this day don't have the slightest idea what the distinction between Hangouts, Chat, and Messages (and whatever else I'm forgetting... Wave?) even is. Sometimes my new phone has an app called Chat, sometimes it's Messages, one time it was Hangouts... they all seem to be the same app to me.

So I just use WhatsApp.

I just checked what my pixel 6 has installed. I have something called "Duo", which, when I click it, shows me something called "Meet". Is it different from the other "meet" on my phone? Seems to be but not sure.

Google's communication services are so complex and poorly defined I avoid them like the plague, always have. I just don't understand what app to use and how they all relate.

Yes. There's Meet, and then there's Meet (original), which is what was formerly called Hangouts... I think.

Doesn't matter, I always hit the wrong icon 50% of the time.

Meat, Wangouts, Allo, Duo(not duolingo)? Talk, or Chat?

I bet they took the team from Microsoft responsible for ramming the Skype/Lync/Communicator/Skype4Business brands into the ground and brought them over. Remember when Groove used to be Sharepoint but now it's a music player from them?

You're missing at least Duo & Google Voice (which was embedded into Hangouts, until it wasn't).

I have been using Voice since like 2007, it's one of the only services from Google I've latched onto because it's nearly impossible to steal a phone number out of it (nobody to social engineer and need to get access to Google Account and pay a few dollars to unlock the number). For YEARS, like 5+ nobody knew if they were shutting it down. It used to be possible to trunk SIP calls over Google Voice using GChat/Gtalk and XMPP to SIP bridge.

Out of nowhere they started to update it again sometime in the latter part of last decade, it still has 2 panels in the configuration backend because they halfassed implementing the Material interface and didn't include all the features. Despite this I'm ride or die with it because there's nothing else on the market that gives you a fairly un-stealable number for free.

Oh and to continue the fragmentation, Google Voice for Workspace is a totally different product similar to Vonage Cloud. As has often been the case with their paid services for years, the free users generally get a better experience.

EDIT: I honestly think a big part of the reason this has stayed running is Bandwidth.com runs most of the show under the hood and that company knows what they're doing. Another Google service they ran was GOOG-411 when that existed.

> 2. Why did they proceed to have half a dozen different messaging services?

Because they're different in ways that are not reconcilable into a single service. For example, considered just through an identity lens, you have:

Talk, which was a federated service with federated identity. Hangouts which was a centralized service with only Google accounts. And Allo which was centralized service using external identities (phone numbers). You can't do all of those, but need to choose one. And none of them is the obvious single correct choice.

(Hangouts and Chat are very similar though. But that was a completely transparent migration too.)

Or to put it another way: Why does Apple have both iMessage and Facetime? Because video + voice is different from text. Why does FB have both Messenger and WhatsApp? Because one uses FB accounts, the other uses phone numbers. Why has Microsoft made a dozen different messenger apps? Because what consumers wants is different from what corporations want.

> Talk, which was a federated service with federated identity. Hangouts which was a centralized service with only Google accounts. And Allo which was centralized service using external identities (phone numbers).

I never knew that, and it was far from obvious from the marketing. Actually, was there any marketing?

Hangouts started as a video app for Google Plus where you would just hangout and others would join after you posted you were hanging out on your stream. Then it subsumed gchat. Then video moved to other apps, eventually Meet

There were many. Google Meet, Google Hangouts Meet, Duo, Hangouts on Air video chatting, and even in 2008 Gmail had video chat https://www.technologizer.com/2008/11/11/gmail-adds-voice-an..., now there is a non-Hangouts Meet button banner integrated into Gmail wasting 10% of screen real estate of your inbox on Android's limited size screens.