[mbreese]

There might be an institutional block in Google due to the way that Google Wave was received. Google has tried (a few times) to get chat to work. It's never quite lived up to expectations (or hype in the case of Wave). Knowing their history, I can see why they'd want to avoid trying to take on that market again. It's difficult to get enough traction with users to make it a successful product.

Not impossible, but it's not like they haven't tried before in the past.

[StopDisinfo910]

Wave's core ideas are at the heart of modern collaborative tools. It's just the UX that was poor. If they stuck at it and refined it, they could be the leader of this segment. Something that I can say for a lot of what Google does. They quit too fast and maybe more importantly they don't use the knowledge they got from their failures to improve.

It's the same with Inbox which remains the best email client I ever used but weirdly Gmail never got the core UX ideas which made it works so well. I would like to say Google doesn't get UX but clearly they have great UX designers on board. It's just that they probably never get final say and are not first class citizen.

For me, it's an issue of discipline. A lot of Google products seems to be built like R&D projects with the mindset which goes with it. They don't have the discipline to do the boring refining work that great UX requires.

[seanhunter]

It’s not just the UX in wave was poor. They didn’t have one compelling use case that made sense to people and they botched the launch.

1. They did the same “invite” thing they had done with gmail so you couldn’t get an account (even if you had a gmail account). They repeated this mistake with google+ also (a social network for people who work at google).

2. They basically had a working CRDT and said “you can use this for all sorts of things” (which is true) and a thin UX on it that implemented a sort of bizzaro threaded chat with document sharing and said “this will replace email” (which is blatantly untrue) and everyone was just confused.

[falcor84]

> Google has tried (a few times) to get chat to work

The original gmail-integrated gchat/google-talk first released in 2005 was fabulous. If they had just kept developing it instead of repeatedly creating a new one, they would easily be the undisputed leaders in this space.

[iamacyborg]

Sometimes you have to question whether the product organisation actually hampers effective delivery of products as PM’s chase career winning moves

[compsciphd]

Google leadership failed in chat because they forgot the most important thing. Metcalf's law. the value of a network is scales to the square of the number of users.

when they wanted to create new chat apps, they had a choice. do we force all of our users to move to the new app or do we figure out a way to bridge the apps. They chose to force users to move.

The problem is, when you force people to move, you also give them the chance to leave and try new things. Instead of figuring out how to make the new chat app more valuable to users it was meant to appeal to by giving them access to google's entire chat userbase without forcing anything on those users, they killed their existing user base on the hope of forcing them to move to the new app. They didn't and now google's an afterthought in the chat space.

They did the same thing with google+ in general. They had a community of committed users sharing data with each other and commenting on stories on google reader. Instead of figuring out how to leverage that user base to contribute "content" to google+ and users that would prefer to use this new interface, and thereby make that new interface more valuable, they killed google reader in an attempt to force those users to migrate to google+. They didn't and went elsewhere.

Google has repeatedly made the mistake of forcing their users to migrate from what they were used to, and every time they do they open the gates for those users to migrate outside of google.

Facebook has learned this lesson relatively well. They don't force users to migrate to Instagram/facebook or whatsapp/messenger. In the Instagram / facebook case they seem to be improving the ability of users to use their Instagram account to add content to facebook (though not in the reverse). While in the whatsapp/messenger case, they haven't forced anyone to migrate, but they also haven't had any interoperability. One would think the apps would have even more value if they could communicate with each other.