throw_away_chat

There's no rule/law that says businesses can't compete with themselves. Taking multiple independent bets seems like a reasonable way to put a lot of resources into a market that you are weak in.

This is similar to how startups beat big companies, a small focused group sometimes beat a big one. If you fund multiple small groups, you multiply your chances of finding a winner.

Microsoft famously killed its Courier project because it competed with Windows. Its now a decade later, and they are still way behind in tablet market share. Maybe if they had built both Windows for tablets and Courier, they would've done better.

All that said, Google has done a poor job of earning their user's trust after killing things like Reader. I believe the execs learned their lesson there.

Their strategy seems very reasonable to me.

- Duo was a bet that stand alone video chat app would be awesome.

- Google+ found some traction in groups, so that team built Spaces to extend the organic behavior. They could have built Spaces inside another product, but Google prefers to keep risky projects segregated from each other. That way one project failure does not kill the other one.

- Pushing proprietary messaging too hard into Android could anger partners (like carriers who make money from SMS) and raise anti-trust concerns (see recent Android troubles in EU). Because of this, you might want a stand alone SMS app.

- The messaging market is huge, and Hangouts is not that successful (even though people in tech use it). Hangouts was mismanaged, unloved for years, has a huge install base, and has some tricky core/structural/infra problems. This made it difficult to change and iterate on. Someone made a judgement call that it would be easier/faster/better to launch Allo than to extend Hangouts.