It gets worse though, the app actually split into "Google Pay" and the new "GPay", where the latter was originally an India-only app they reworked for the rest of the world. In old Google Pay you'd see messages that it'll stop working soon and that you should migrate to the new GPay, but if you ignored them you could still use it. Then, they eventually overhauled old Google Pay back to "Google Wallet", and now they're telling people in the US remaining on "new" GPay that it's deprecated and to switch back...

Pulled precisely from the Google textbook. Specifically the chapter on Hangouts.

Don’t worry, they’ll kill the product years later due to “low customer demand.”

I likely lost touch with some friends over the years because of general confusion over Google Talk, GTalk through GMail, Google+ Hangouts, later Hangouts, GChat (which I understand to be separate from the current Google Chat?), and Google Chat. The ones I've kept in contact with all agreed to move back to SMS and email.

Meanwhile ten years after Apple supported adding boarding passes to their wallet, I finally managed to force a plane ticket into my Google wallet by taking a picture of the barcode, so there's that.

> I know Sundar has been great...

Think the execs responsible for this were excused en masse or quit: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/google-pay-team-repo...

Some founded a fintech company that now also does AI, because why not.

This sort of thing is part of Google’s culture now. I don’t understand how ousting a team could forgive all the similar issues they had before.

No. The VP, Director of Engineering, Product Manager everyone quit. These people have been working 10+ years with Google.

Well there was Inbox by Gmail at one point, and I feel there was something else that tried to be an alternative to gmail as well at one point. I'm waiting for YouTube to be split back into YouTube and Google Video, one going full in on TikTok/Shorts content and the other going back to long form content.

Google Wave is the other one you're trying to remember.

Full circle, maybe. But at least a bunch of mid level product managers got promotions.

Google's lack of product sense is embedded in their culture. Consider that they consider this [1] a good interview question, then extrapolate that to the rest of their culture and you can see how we've ended up here.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35545817

Google interviews make a lot of sense if you imagine that on day one it was some CS students with no experience, and maybe a CS professor's influence... so they did what they thought was important.

Then people started training for the interviews.

Now people's egos are propped up on it, and they'd get upset that you were lowering the bar if you tried to change it.

Google processes $XXXB payments a year. This means they have their own internal Stripe like payment processing system which serves almost like an independent company to Google's various internal products.

Google Wallet is an Android only feature which was possible because of NFC etc. Its primary purpose was to seek parity with Apple Pay. This team can be seen as Android's part.

Google Pay is what merchants display. It means you can tap your phone and pay (using your wallet). It also allows online websites to accept payments using "Google Pay" button.

Gpay => Is the App. This is like Venmo/Cash app.

You might ask why create Gpay App when you have Google Wallet ? The answer is "India". Google Wallet is worthless in India because no one had cards and no one accepts them. Also phones do not have NFC. But India has UPI which allows easy real time transfers using QR codes and phone numbers. It made perfect sense for Google to create an App to cater to this case in India and it was widely successful.

For some reason some leaders thought they could replicate the same success in USA using the SAME APP. This was nonsensical because in USA you need to iterate fast and launch things even faster. Piggybacking on Indian App which has like 300M monthly active users was a bit like you trying to take your 1996 camry and trying to make it an EV.