Wtf is Google's strategy with chat apps
This is regarding https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16484461 Timelines: 1. Google voice gains voicemail functionality. Gains SMS functionality. Gains "make phone call" functionality. 2. Google Voice deprecated in favor of Hangouts. Hangouts gains SMS functionality. Gains "make phone call" functionality." Gains "receive phone call" functionality. 3. Google Hangouts "receive phone call" functionality removed. 4. Google voice gets a makeover. No new functionality, better UI though. 5. Google Hangouts SMS functionality deprecated. 6. Allo released. Duo released. Nobody is sure why. 7. Google Hangouts converted to "enterprise app." 8. Google Hangouts deprecated in favor of Google Hangouts Chat? whyyyyyyyyyyyy???
I just want one disposable free num for receiving calls and texts... Is it voice or hangouts now? Could you Googlers stop fucking with it and decide on one thing?
Deprecate something, launch something (could be something previously deprecated), get promoted, leave. Repeat. That's basically how it works at Google Social there right now.
You dont have to use it. That’s why we have startups. Big companies rarely launch new successes. Totally different incentives at work. Why do you even care what google does? There are tons of better products out there, other than search, gmail, google doc and map (map is getting shittier by the day). I don’t use any of other google product. And it’s ok. Kudos to those googlers who learned to play the game to their best.
It's because Google is run by gen X'ers. When Hangouts was released as part of Google+, no one thought it was that important (Vic Gundotra would describe the value of Hangouts as helping parents to lower the cost of their kids texts, during a time when unlimited texting was a free feature of most phone plans or at most a five dollar fee), and the leadership was _shocked_ when a 23 year old did some logs analysis and discovered there were 10x as many Hangouts messages/day as Google+ posts. It's a generational problem that the decision makers are old enough their social lives aren't as actively facilitated by text based communication, so they're not motivated to make text communication work.
Only 10x? That sounds insanely low for 2 reasons: 1) chat apps generally have WAY bigger message volume than any social media post volume. 2) nobody used Google+ to begin with. 10 x nothing = nothing.
Hangouts only works (functionally) if both people in the convo use it. Not many people used Google+, thus Hangouts wasn't that useful. At the same time _so few_ people used Google+ to post things that there was still 10x volume. Hangouts won over Gmail chat not because it had that much better of a user experience, but rather Google talk was running on an ancient and crumbling stack.
After the current set of chat clients, and the next five, there's only twelve chat clients left. At that point, well announce the launch of one true set of six chat clients for the year.
We do it for the lulz
Theres no strategy 😂
Everyone at Google studied leetcode and can make chat apps. Come promo time, they don't have anything to show to a random blind committee. So they all end up doing what they already know: make another chat app
I think Google just does all this for fun to keep competitors busy in predicting their next move in social while they are busy focussing on how to make more money of there core products like maps, search, YouTube and Android. Sometimes these companies have to widen their scope in order to not come off as a monopoly in one single space and avoid antitrust issues. They keep playing and if anything clicks (like Gmail) they probably become a bit more serious about it then. They have large sums of money at their disposal. They can do a lot of useless things.
That's called failing, learning, pivoting and repeating
And utterly confusing your user base in the process?
I'm only seeing the failing part.