Google built ten different chat products, how did that go?

Does it matter? Microsoft won by default with Teams because it actually turns out no one cares about chat or even has a choice in it: employees use whatever the company picks.

The world, other than the US, runs on WhatsApp. Business, support and payments are done there. So people do care.

If you're going to say "other than the US" then you've got to say at a minimum "other than the US and China", but really "other than the US and China and Japan and Korea and Taiwan and Thailand and Russia and most of Central Asia".

Only mentioning the US is wildly americentric even by HN standards.

It's bundled with office and no serious business can live without excel.

Gosh doesn't that sound familiar.

No one uses Teams for personal use. LLMs are used daily for personal use by hundreds of millions of people at this point.

This was the same argument made for Google Wave and Google+ and both completely tanked

The tech behind wave eventually made its way into Google docs though and pioneered collaborative document editing, so wasn't a complete failure even though the product itself was killed.

No comment on Google+, Google has a storied history of failure on any kind of social media/chat type products.

Where Google wins is just simply having enough money to outlive anyone else. As the saying goes "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" In this case, Google is the market and they can just keep throwing money at the wall until OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. go under.

Google Docs has no features remotely like what Google Wave was.

And there was collaborative editing long before Google Wave.

> made its way into Google docs

Google didnt make it though, they bought a startup which did it and integrated their tech.

Social media has strong network effects that keeps competitors at bay. What network effects are OpenAI/Anthropic/etc accumulating?

Yes, but Gemini is actually good and so are their APIs.