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.