Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

[+] mdorazio|4 years ago|reply

Having talked about similar questions with friends who work/worked at Google, you need to first ask "How do people get promoted at Google?" The answer to that (by launching new things that get abandoned soon after rather than improving/fixing existing things) answers your question and many others like it.

[+] habosa|4 years ago|reply

Everyone at Google says this. It’s not true. Of course it contributes to the problem, but trust me a broken messaging strategy doesn’t naturally arise from Software Engineers trying to get incremental promotions.

It comes from two parts of google that are totally broken and don’t know it:

1) Product Management 2) Legal

The PMs are running from meeting to meeting trying to please execs and not doing anything that looks like sophisticated product development. Each team has their own broken process and crappy dashboards. I can’t even describe how irrational and broken the process for making product decisions is.

Then there are the lawyers. If you even think about doing something interesting or original they will say No and that’s the end of that. They’re shockingly risk averse. Even if every single competitor is doing a thing, you almost definitely can’t do that thing at Google. My team was BARELY allowed to know how many users we had! And we certainly couldn’t know anything about them. Because Legal.

[+] UncleMeat|4 years ago|reply

This is a meme. Yes, you need to change something about the state of the world but that change absolutely does not need to be launching a product. I work in the Core organization, which builds tooling for the rest of the company. My org within that has among the highest promotion rates (even to high levels) in the company and the primary thing we focus on is the sort of grungy "keep everything functioning" work that everybody says is anathema to promotions.

It is no secret that Google's product strategy is a mess. But I'm not convinced this is caused by the promo process. For communications strategy I think it is instead the following:

1. Messy code stacks make surviving tool deprecation a problem.

2. Google seems to be bad at staffing for proactive protection against maintenance work. If a product is working, staffing dwindles to match the maintenance load. But if suddenly a huge mandate comes along like a stack switch, it is not easy to get the heads you need to handle that spike in maintenance. Instead, the product gets triaged or dies.

3. It is really hard to push past 1B users of anything, and growing populations outside of the US and Europe are not desktop focuses, encouraging a "mobile first" solution that leaves desktop integration in the dust.

[+] amelius|4 years ago|reply

And there's never another employee saying: wait a second, that's not a good idea ...?

[+] matv|4 years ago|reply

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...

[+] clircle|4 years ago|reply

Incredible

[+] obarthelemy|4 years ago|reply

I think it's - corporate ADHD. Managers whose project succeed are rewarded away, and the project flounders, until another bright young thing starts again... from scratch because ego

- Google is all about algorithms not users, and messaging is mostly about listening to users and iterating. Google has thrown away... 5 installed bases of users ?

- OEM politics: Google must constantly negotiate what is theirs and what is the OEMs'. OEMs want as much as they can, and that means messaging. It took iMessage becoming such a forte on Apple's side for OEMs to back off on Messaging and allow a single Android platform.

- ditto carriers.

- Apple is a spoilsport. Whatever Google do, on iOS it'll never be default, nor even as integrated as, iMessage. Knowing you won't really have access to the juiciest 50% of the US market is a bummer, even if you still can reach 80% globally.

Who cares anyway ? Android allows one to use whichever app as default, just pick one. I actually removed Messages because it's idiotic and won't display a full text in the Notification, hence cuts off credit card confirmation codes, hence prevents me from buying anything from my phone. Idiots.

[+] pedalpete|4 years ago|reply

I think this was the missed opportunity for Google+. If I recall correctly, when Google launched Google+, everyone we knew and wanted to communicate with was there. They had all the communication infrastructure, and even built it into the app with messaging and hangouts. But it was just mixed in with all the stuff you could do very well on facebook, and that everyone was doing on facebook.

They were on to a good trend with circles, and that was a great differentiator from facebook, but they couldn't really tell us why we should use Google+.

If they had focused down onto a niche in communication, I think they may have been able to crack the code. They would have been able to say "google+ is where everyone you know is, your friends, collegues, and family, it's the place where you can communicate with these groups independently."

Unfortunately, they tried to be all things to everyone, and ended up being nothing to nobody.

[+] boulos|4 years ago|reply

Disclosure: I used to work for Google.

The chat and video call are in the same place again (both on the web and on mobile). The little TV symbol in Chat, invites someone to a video call.

I personally don't love the WeChat-style "make the GMail app into your all in one comms app", but I get that some people do.

The last part is that SMS and phone calls were in a separate universe and mostly focused on Android.

Roughly at the scale of any mega company, it isn't one company: it's several that have the same funding and ease of transfer (people, resources, etc.) but not necessarily coordination. To wit, there are multiple "CEOs" (YouTube, Cloud, etc.) so I really do encourage folks to think of "Google" as like a dozen companies (Search/Ads, YouTube, Cloud, Geo, ...).

[+] bitcuration|4 years ago|reply

The truth is, other than search engine advertising, google doesn't know how to make money.

[+] jeffbee|4 years ago|reply

Close, but not quite. The only thing Google knows how to do is make dirt-cheap large-scale computers and hire people. Then they let the people do whatever they want with the giant cloud, because the marginal cost is nothing.

So, the reason that gchat etc keep appearing and disappearing is because there never was a plan for it in the first place. One or a few engineers just threw it together at some point and there it was. Nobody truly owned it, it wasn't strategic. The churn is just a superficial symptom of the bottom-up product management style.

There are tons of Google products and features that were thrown together by individuals or pairs of people over a weekend and then subsequently got launched to the public. That this is possible is pretty neat, but that the products might not be durable is a downside.

[+] H8crilA|4 years ago|reply

It's not just Search, YouTube has very good earnings too. But yes, almost all ads, at really fucking good margins.

[+] indymike|4 years ago|reply

> How did it come to pass that they took an easy, integrated system and mangled it so badly?

I think each of these things were part of gmail at different times.

Google talk (their original chat that competed with Yahoo messenger) was and sorta still is there even though the talk product is something else now.

Google voice was required for SMS. It sorta worked from gmail, for a while.

Then they tried to merge all the things into hangouts and it was kind of really nice for a few months...

Then they tried Duo, Allo, Hangouts, and Google Chat (which is a slack work-a-likiesh thing) and I quite keeping track :-)

[+] davidw|4 years ago|reply

For a while, it worked really well. I lived in Italy and had a Google Voice number from Oregon, and I could just make US calls for free from within Gmail and it didn't just work ok, it was pretty good. I could also place video calls to people who were contacts right there in Gmail with one click, and it worked well too.

It's not that their system has stagnated - they've actively made it much worse and more difficult to use.

[+] jeffbee|4 years ago|reply

Google Voice was not required for SMS from gmail. You used to just be able to "chat" with any phone number from within the gmail web frontend. It cost a dime, but your dime was refunded if the other party responded, as an anti-spam measure.

It was also formerly possible to make a voice call to any phone from the gmail web frontend, no Google Voice account required. Now you need Google Voice to do this (not Google Fi!).

[+] netsec_burn|4 years ago|reply

I believe the reason is that there are incentives internally to create new products rather than maintaining existing ones.

[+] mdasen|4 years ago|reply

I'd guess that it's a combination of things, but I think what sticks out to me is that a) they probably hit a plateau and felt like they needed to do something to break out of that (and didn't really have a good idea so they started "mixing things up"); and b) messaging seems like a product that everyone wants to solve, but doesn't necessarily offer amazing monetary returns.

I loved GChat. It was simple. I could use Pidgin or Adium or any number of third-party clients. It did what I needed. However, I'm guessing at some point, they were working on and maintaining a product that didn't really have the metrics that they were looking for. Growth probably slowed a lot once so many people were using it (so the honeymoon phase of "we'll figure out the money and strategy later" was over). Likewise, one of the great things about GChat was that it felt so un-monetized. There were no ads or anything. Compared to the alternatives of the day like AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc. it just felt like this easy, clean, simple messenger that worked without distractions.

When you're a company worth so many billions (now nearly two trillion), why are you putting engineering time into something that seems to have little growth and little money? Shouldn't you re-task those engineers to projects that might be the next big thing? I know that in a certain light companies can hire more people, but the hiring pool isn't infinite and you can only grow your staff so quickly without things becoming chaotic (you want enough veteran staff members around to mentor new people who don't know what is going on with the giant systems that are created in such a large company).

To me, messaging feels like a product that everyone wants to solve because it's cool, but people haven't really figured out hoe to monetize it well. I think Facebook wants messaging to reinforce its ecosystem and fend off rivals more than anything. Apple really likes iMessage because consumers seem to be really into iMessage and it seems to create a positive feedback loop to get people to buy iPhones (I'm an iPhone user and I don't get what's so great about iMessage, but people are really passionate about it). What does Google get out of messaging? What does Signal get out of it? Signal and Telegram have both been looking for business models and they've looked into cryptocurrency, but I'd argue that neither has really found a business model.

The messaging apps that seem to have found business models are the ones that aren't general chat/text replacements, but community chat systems like Discord and Slack. Microsoft's efforts with Teams and the new Google Hangouts Chat/Meet enterprise Slack clone show that Microsoft and Google see a Slack competitor as where the money is in messaging. It's easy to get a company to give you $5-25/mo per user when they're spending $5,000-50,000 per month on that user already (not just salary, but benefits, office space, equipment, etc).

I think the real problem is that there's little money to be made in the old Gmail/GChat messaging. So, in comes some project manager that wants to make their bones solving a potentially large market in messaging and they don't have any wonderful ideas, but they're hoping that if they move enough things around and rebrand enough things they can cherry-pick some metrics and show how genius they are and why they deserve a big promotion. You don't get recognition and promotions for keeping a ship steady in calm seas. Combine that with a product that doesn't seem to meet expectations for return on engineering investment and why should Google keep investing in this?

If we look at the companies that have succeeded, they're not general messaging apps and they're usually aimed at taking advantage of an enterprise play - with a generous enough free tier that home people can play with it. I think Google didn't want to continue offering a general purpose messenger that didn't have a path to profitable growth. They also didn't want to abandon messaging. So they kept shaking things up trying to find product market fit - profitable fit, not just something that free users enjoyed without something in it for Google.

[+] miked85|4 years ago|reply

I miss the days of AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GChat. I have lost contact with a lot of people after all of those died off.

[+] DantesKite|4 years ago|reply

> Apple really likes iMessage because consumers seem to be really into iMessage and it seems to create a positive feedback loop to get people to buy iPhones

Well, it would be a bit...naive not to have a phone that can send text messages. You gotta have something.

But it's interesting to note iMessages and Apple Pay work well with each other.

[+] heigh|4 years ago|reply

> Likewise, one of the great things about GChat was that it felt so un-monetized.

Maybe it felt un-monetized, but discovering reality that it’s not caused me to dump almost all Google products immediately.

When chatting with my friend I introduced him to several new concepts and products over the course of a conversation. We found that immediately after discussing said product, he would get advertisements for said product on Instagram.

I know when things are free, you are the product, but that was way too efficiently creepy.

[+] Gualdrapo|4 years ago|reply

I can't understand why they ditched XMPP for corporative Google accounts. Our uni uses Google services but for their stupid chat I have to keep a Hangouts tab opened because most XMPP clients won't work with it.

[+] mrweasel|4 years ago|reply

While I don't know, I have a guess: Google loves building infrastructure, and they're pretty good at it. XMPP wasn't build in-house, and writing a replacement protocol was something Google could do.

What Google absolutely suck at is UI and native applications (at least on the desktop). It's also why their products keep failing. Seriously how hard would it be to build native clients or open the protocol and have it integrated into libpurple. I find it extremely hard to comprehend why Google don't just hire five of the worlds best macOS developer, five Windows developers and five for Linux/BSD and just let them build fantastic clients that integrates into each platform and provide the very best chat experience.

[+] vadfa|4 years ago|reply

Everybody I know moved on from XMPP years ago. Google and Facebook dropping their support was indeed big part of it. But all in all centralised protocols have proven to be easier, more stable and simply better. Want to roll out a new feature? No need to sit down with a committee for years or wait for all 3rd party clients to keep up: you just implement the feature yourself.

Wait... what was the question?

[+] notatoad|4 years ago|reply

IIRC they were pretty up-front about why they dropped XMPP - most of the clients connecting over XMPP were spammers, and there were few enough legitimate users connecting over third-party clients that it made more sense to drop XMPP support than build spam-blocking solutions.

[+] Andrew_nenakhov|4 years ago|reply

Because at that time WhatsApp rose to huge popularity, was bought by Facebook and all of a sudden Google wanted their own walled garden clone.

[+] hbcondo714|4 years ago|reply

It's just not messaging / video / hangouts, Google "botched" their Pay app too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281259

[+] chakkepolja|4 years ago|reply

I wouldn't say botched for a single misfeature. It's pretty popular where I live, and I heard it's super convenient to do everything from phone recharge and electricity bill to train bookings. Whereas nobody talks about Google's messaging apps.

[+] criddell|4 years ago|reply

I've always wondered why they didn't just clone Apple Messages? Instead, they've done this seemingly random walk though the space and accomplished very little. Is it because Apple supports Messages through hardware sales and Google requires an advertising model?

And things like non-encrypted RCS seems downright negligent. I don't know how anybody at Google working on this stuff can be proud of what they do. From the outside, it's a mess and I'd be surprised if internally things look much better.

[+] mikebonnell|4 years ago|reply

Are you sure you don't have Meet and Chat turned off within Gmail? If I go to Setting -> Chat and Meet within Gmail, I can have chats within Gmail. Meet still does send an invite/give me a link to copy, but I can paste into the chat and away we go in a new tab. (Former Googler)

[+] pre|4 years ago|reply

Presumably they make more money with the user-hostile version and the user isn't paying so...

[+] noah670|4 years ago|reply

The real question is what newer products have managed to stick around at Google?

[+] bythckr|4 years ago|reply

I really miss G Talk, it was such a simple & light app and it just worked.

But I think the reason why Google didn't keep it is because there is no way to insert ads into it.

This is the main part about Google that we have to understand - Google is an ads distribution company. Like a billboard company or the company that plasters ads on bus stands & public benches. Any product they have will have a place to serve ads.

Serving ads in Gmail was a bad idea, but they have a nice user base. So, now they are offering it as a service that you pay for. I hope they come back to that.

Your google id needs to be used as an id instead of relying on mobile phone numbers.

I hope they bring back G Talk.

The issue with meet is the hassle of sharing the code with everyone. They should just have the option of a friends list.

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