The concept of stream gaming was done before? I don't think anyone argued that Google couldn't technically develop a solution as good as the predecessors who have far less resources.
I don't think Google has solved the fundamental issue which is latency and home broadband infrastructure. They can handwave it with AI, ML latency algorithms and video compression algorithms, but the latency is still not competitive to conventional gaming.
After following this nonsense product timeline for 16 years from the original Google Talk days, my last chat thread still using Hangouts moved to Facebook Messenger. chat.google.com is just aggressively worse in far too many ways, and will surely be killed circa 2024.
We do to, the main feature is you’re able to start a quick meeting on Google Meet. Google Chat gets the job done, no one really enjoy using it, but it mostly just works.
They could improve Chat a lot if they just cared to do native clients. Seriously, how many developers would that require? Like three for macOS, and the same for Windows and Linux?
it sat on top of gmail, yes, but felt like a different product. Much cleaner interface, and it integrated things like reminders and "upcoming trips" and things like that in the email feed.
I much preferred it to gmail, and I was not happy when they discontinued it
Does anyone have any insight into Google's internal politics or processes that lead to this mess, and why is chat so much more fragmented at Google than other services?
From what I understand, promotions at Google are largely granted at the completion of leading some kind of initiative; for example, launching a new product. The problem being that once the project lead has been promoted, they are no longer in charge of that project, and no one really takes over for it, leading to neglect and eventually being shut down entirely.
> The problem being that once the project lead has been promoted, they are no longer in charge of that project
That’s not how it works, promotion does not move you to a different position. Project leads in charge stay in charge after promotion. What often happens though is that promoted people leverage their new, higher level to move to or start more desirable projects.
It's not messy in Google standard. Politics are normal, for an unsuccessful in Google's standard.
It's just not meaningful for Google. It's like Jeff Bezos is so rich that he picked a very awkward candidate to replace his wife, but having a female companion to Jeff is no longer crucial for his success (imagine what would happen if Jeff married his current girl friend...).
I’m not sure how true it is, but the common refrain I keep seeing on HN and elsewhere is that Google’s promotion track incentivizes new products over maintaining and expanding current products.
That's the common refrain, but making a new product doesn't put it front and center at a Google I/O keynote or push it as the official new Google strategy. You'd think that C-level executives have a word on what is announced in keynotes, etc.
making a new product doesn't put it front and center at a Google I/O keynote
It doesn't automatically put it front and centre at I/O, but as it's certain Google will want something to highlight which makes working on a new product is a fairly sensible idea if that's your goal. Innovating or maintaining an existing one is a lot less marketable.
The cycle of neglecting/shutting-down established good products and creating dozens of new half-baked products instead continues, so unless you have a better explanation, this being true is Occam's Razor...
I tried so hard to integrate into the Google ecosystem. I had a Gmail account and Google Talk to start. Eventually an Android phone, on Project Fi, with Hangouts and SMS (so I could send SMS over the internet). I upgraded from Gmail to Inbox. Then when they ditched that for Allo and Duo I tried to switch to those. Then I lost SMS on my computer because it got removed from Hangouts. Then I tried to switch to Google voice after they redid that, but you couldn't have Google voice with Fi...I also uploaded all my music to Google music. All my RSS in Google reader. I had a Google+ account. Multiple Google pixels.
I really thought Google was going to be the answer for a completely integrated, non-Apple online life.
Anyways, long story short, after endless frustration trying to get everything to work seamlessly, I ditched Google entirely.
My email is now IMAP. I have multiple accounts in one app. My calendar and contacts are now WebDAV. Every other app I use on PC and mobile can integrate with them. My messaging is now Element/Matrix with bridges to whatever other services I need. My search is DuckDuckGo, browser is Firefox, etc.
Currently, everything is as integrated, or more integrated, than it was with Google, and worlds more stable. Somehow, despite being huge and having all the data and basically a monopoly, they still can't integrate to save their lives.
Which service do you use for CalDAV / CardDAV? I've been trying to migrate from a gmail account to my own personal domain, but my current provider doesn't support those so I want to move on to someone else.
The thing that annoys me most is that (as far as I can tell) only the big name providers have integrated mail/caldav/carddav, if you use a bring-your-own-domain solution they need to be added as 3 separate accounts (at least on iOS/macOS).
I use mailbox.org that has CardDAV and CalDAV in addition to email. I use DAVx⁵ for syncing to my Android phone. Mailbox.org's web UI is clunky but I rarely use it for anything other than extending the subscription. The calendar/contact sync and email have worked well.
+1 for DAVx⁵. It was free on F-Droid, but I've paid for it anyway because I want to support the developer (and also I think it's a nice touch making it free on F-Droid but charging on commercial app stores).
Fastmail's calendar is built on the Cyrus IMAP server's CalDAV support, which does all the open-standards. It also has the upcoming JMAP Calendaring support and JSCalendar (soon to be an RFC) format.
There's a couple of other good CalDAV servers out there too, though of course as Fastmail CEO I can't really advertise anybody else :p
Fastmail is fantastic if you have an iOS device. They provide a file which you simply download/open on your iOS device and it automatically configures your phone to access FastMail mail, calendar, contacts, etc. I believe they use the same mechanism that corporates use to configure employees phones. Could not be more easier and you get to use all of Apple's native apps. iOS + Fastmail is the best combo I've found so far for easy Mail/Contacts/Calendar independent of the big giants.
Yet another +1 for Fastmail. Long time customer when I got sick of running my own IMAP/SMTP about 5+ years ago.
It has IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV. It has a snappy and responsive web interface and their iOS app is equally as good.
They have configuration of profiles for MacOS and iOS down (I can't talk to other environments).
I have a bunch of domains doing email through there, but I run my own DNS. I had a need to configure things that Fastmail's DNS doesn't deal with (IPv6 etc) but for general use, it's great. Properly configured SPF, DKIM, DMARC, good spam filtering, easy contact managenment etc.
I used Google Voice when they first acquired it - it was years early and really ahead of things back then. Texting from the web, voice transcription for messages, could ring multiple numbers.
Then they did nothing with it for maybe seven years? MMS would silently fail so people inviting you to events via group chat or sending you a photo would just think you were ignoring them.
Hangouts came and the mess with that and sms was worse. I had nexus phones back then which also had turn by turn navigation before the iPhone did.
Huge missed opportunity, years wasted. When the iPhone 5 came out and Apple Maps shipped turn by turn nav and eventually iMessage did everything voice did but better I switched and never went back.
Google’s software consumer stack sucks. I also tried to like it - it’s a mostly crappy mix of stuff that gets dropped, ignored, and poorly integrated.
At the same time Apple’s stuff has improved year over year. Out of all the large tech companies I’m most bearish about Google’s future - they seem aimless. Deepmind is cool, but Google better hope that ad money machine never stops printing.
> At the same time Apple’s stuff has improved year over year. Out of all the large tech companies I’m most bearish about Google’s future - they seem aimless. Deepmind is cool, but Google better hope that ad money machine never stops printing.
As an iOS user, I feel the opposite in most areas except calling/messaging/facetime. I find Apple software to be severely limiting their own hardware. Their iPads are such excellent devices yet severely limited because of iOS. If iOS hadn't done calling/messaging/FaceTime right, I would have completely ditched them.
I agree there’s a lot more potential for iPad hardware UI, but also think they’ve improved year over year.
It’ll be interesting to see what they work out for iPad OS to make it more powerful. They’re obviously not willing to just slap a standard PC OS on there. I’d guess they’re going to come up with new stuff from first principles as best they can for it (even if that means limiting it in the short term).
Based on how MacOS switched app icons to rounded corner similar to iPad and they added extra spacing on menu bar icons, controls (volume/display etc) are all similar to iOS ones, I won't be surprised if they put MacOS on iPad. iPad already has M1 chip too.
As against all the awesome tables OSes and applications on competing devices?
I think it's just that growing tablets to be competitive with desktops is either really, really hard or just not reasonable to expect. As a form factor, for all that I love it and you'd have to tear my iPad out of my cold dead hands, it just has inherent limitations to go with it's strengths.
I'm glad Apple are putting in better support for keyboards and touch pads in iPadOS. It makes sense that these can improve usability in a lot of use cases. However I don't use those and even if I did iPad apps must always be usable without them.
I think that imposes significant limitations. Some of the more powerful apps I use on my iPad have quite fiddly interfaces that would be fine on a desktop, but are really awkward on the tablet. It is getting better, but very slowly as developers figure out how to adapt to the form factor.
The new Multitasking interface does look like a big improvement though. Hopefully that will help developers to step up a bit.
> ... but Google better hope that ad money machine never stops printing.
Right wing governments the world over should be actively talking about how to neuter the political threat of leftists in Silicon Valley. One form that strategy might take on is legal blockades restricting stopping foreign advertisers, which makes sense on a couple of levels and can probably make up a solid coalition.
More than half Alphabet's revenue comes in from overseas and that is a tempting target now no matter where in the political spectrum people sit. There has to be a risk there for Google.
"should be actively talking about how to neuter the political threat of leftists".
That's a lot of bias in just one phrase. I doubt that the libertarians and others in SV consider themselves "leftists". Or that Palantir, JPL, DARPA, which fund a lot of SV work can be considered "leftist".
So yes, having Google as a monopoly on search and advertising is a trust-busting issue, but that's not "right/left", it's good government regulation to maintain a free market in those services.
As we all know, anti-capitalists definitely tend to work for and own mega-corportations. The bay area is more left than right, but leftists are definitely not in control of tech companies.
It's because Google voice wasn't a Google product, it was an acquisition. It used to be Grand Central. But yes they basically bought it, threw the G on it, and then let it bitrot.
Google has the same problems Microsoft has always had. They have one huge cash cow that funds the entire company, and everything else is peripheral (a first world problem of course). Arguably MS now has more than one, but they've existed twice as long as Google and it's taken many decades to get to that point.
It never really mattered if PlayForSure, Zune, Bing, Windows Phone etc were big successes or not, the company was absolutely fine anyway. XBOX is a success, but the massive billon+ write off they suffered back in the day means even now overall it's probably not made a profit, and if so not much. IE has floundered for over a decade. They do have many successful products but most of them could die and it wouldn't matter.
It's the same with Google. As long as they're awash in a torrent of search advertising money nothing else matters. Like Micorosoft they do have some successful non-core products. Chrome, Android, GMail, Google Docs, Chromebooks. However all of those could drop stone dead and they'd be A-Okay.
This is why Amazon is so impressive to me. Bezos built two world class mega-businsses simultaneously from scratch. I can't think of a single other example of this anywhere.
They're not quite at the same scale as amazon, but many of the Korean/Japanese behemoth companies have enormously succesful businesses in multiple areas. Samsung, Sony, Yamaha for example.
The Zaibatsu/Keiretsu took many generations to get where they are now, and relied on heavy political patronage and financial muscle to grow over protracted periods of time. None of their founders built multiple global businesses from scratch in a single lifetime, let alone simultaneously.
They're also very much artificial constructs, in the sense at this point they are as much political as economic artefacts. The Chaebol are more recent in their modern form but followed the same model.
Surface is already ~$8B of revenue/year business, not sure how or why you think a business of that size is unnoticeable or nobody would notice that if it were to wither away. Not sure how specific revenue figures I'm allowed to express here publicly but Dynamics and Hololens have also been big cashcows lately.
Research, sure it isn't a direct revenue generating group but their patents portfolio is immense.
Heck, even LinkedIn is $10B/year business now. Maybe you're living under a rock?
They’re nice businesses, but losing them would not substantially change or harm the company the way losing Windows or Azure would. The way losing AWS would harm Amazon, losing Search Ads would harm Google, losing iPhone would harm Apple. If Microsoft lost XBox or LinkedIN they’d walk it off. That’s the point I’m making.
I addressed XBox specifically. They wrote off $1.5Bn over the XBox 360 red rings of death issue. It's possible they might have recouped that since, with inflation and interest adjustment, but doubtful.
Windows and Azure are the tent poles I was thinking of when I said they had more than one now.
I tend to see Windows and Office as fundamentally the same business though, along with development tools, in the same way that I think it's unreasonable to consider Apple's applications business separately from MacOS. Split Office from Windows and I think it would struggle, certainly it wouldn't have got to where it is now. It's an add-on to the Windows business. On it's own it wouldn't be industry dominating the way Windows, AWS, Google Search, etc are. It's a good business but not industry shaping, not anymore anyway.
Now they’ve pivoted to grow azure and O365 successfully in addition to leverage the Xbox via game pass to fit into that strategic world.
I think this mostly supports your point - it took an existential crisis and ousting a CEO that couldn’t adapt in order to save them when their cash cow started to falter.
Desktop operating systems as a differentiating feature started being a strategic failure because of the web. Ballmer doubled down on Windows at the expense of other stuff.
There is a common HN trope that Ballmer was doing everything perfectly and Nadella just continued it.
I don’t buy it and neither did the market. (Neither did Microsoft’s board presumably)
I think Ballmer’s entire strategic direction was long-term wrong and Nadella changed it. This isn’t to say no projects started under Ballmer (they definitely did) it’s about whether those were prioritized or would have ever shipped under him successfully.
If the wrong things are considered important - it doesn’t really matter what projects are happening.
Google was the one pushing web relentlessly and has arguably made computing UX worse for everyone. From bad performance and overdone advertising+tracking to relatively smaller issues like bad accessibility.
They're still trying very hard to put everything on web so Chrome can be what windows used to be.
The web won because it's cross platform, keeps state across everything and puts collaboration among users first. In a lot of ways that's easier for users - it's the closest thing to a universal OS.
This is mostly a failure of desktop operating systems to be interoperable and perhaps most seriously fail to support good network first/collaborative thinking in design. I think they did this in part because they saw being distinct as a way to differentiate themselves, but also because they were created pre-internet before a lot of modern application use cases were really possible or relevant, in the end this made them less competitive and native applications less desirable (in most cases).
I also wish it wasn't that way because the web has a lot of issues, it's slow, creates incentives towards megacorps that run centralized servers and ads, etc.
All this is one of the reasons I'm hopeful Urbit might succeed against all odds - they're rebuilding the OS with network first in mind.
Chrome isn't really comparable to windows because anyone can make a browser that reads the open web standards - while only Microsoft could make an OS that ran windows apps (outside of hacks). This reason is why web won out over native even though native apps have nice performance advantages.
That plus limited amounts of high quality devs can target the web and ship to everyone without having to build multiple native applications for multiple platforms, and again native platforms still haven't solved collab really.
Keeping state across and putting collab first is something native apps can do as well. You don't need a web interface to do that.
I do however agree about the positive cross-platform support. From my experience, which is very limited - it is the decades of backward compat and complexity that makes native development so tiresome. It gets even worse when there are multiple platforms with not much in common.
Thanks, I'll check out Urbit.
And? How many non-Chrome browsers do we have? Even Microsoft gave in to Chromium. Can't wait for Google's next move to tie their protocols deeper into the browser just like they did with Android and playstore services.
This was another eye opener to me, how limited high quality developers are.
>What? Windows, Office ( cross-platform since recently) and dev tools are totally different cash cows.
Office for Windows was released in the same year as Windows 3.0, supporting all the new core technologies including OLE. Before then MS desktop software products were also-rans. From this point on they dominated, because they had been engineered natively for Windows right alongside the development of Windows itself before any of their competitors even had access to the frameworks and dev tools, or Windows 3.0 to develop and test on. It was part of a single coherent integrated platform strategy for Windows. Now it's grown beyond the platform, but the reason it matters is because of it's privileged position on the Windows platform.
XBox just doesn't matter. It's not big enough. If it died, Microsoft's bottom line would barely shift. Office does matter, we just see it's strategic position differently.
> It was part of a single coherent integrated platform strategy for Windows. Now it's grown beyond the platform, but the reason it matters is because of it's privileged position on the Windows platform.
Just like iOS and Apple apps or Chrome and Google sites?
> XBox just doesn't matter. It's not big enough. If it died, Microsoft's bottom line would barely shift. Office does matter, we just see it's strategic position differently.
xbox was $3.5B (8.5%) of the $41B revenue last quarter - not sure why you think that wouldn't affect bottom line or understand the fact that gaming/xbox is a growth business with a recognizable brand.
To give you a perspective, xbox alone made more than all apple services except for App store (even then the difference isn't that huge).
Is it existential in the way that Windows is, or AWS is for Amazon, or iPhone is for Apple, or search ad revenue is for Google? That’s what I’m talking about.
One contrast between Microsoft and Google is that Microsoft doesn’t repeatedly break working products and confuse everyone with changing names around yearly.
Microsoft has a long history of failures from Bob to the Zune, but their core stuff, including Windows, Office, Visual Studio, is solid. Bob didn’t destroy Windows. Occasionally the products go off course, like Windows ME, but they seem to correct fairly quickly.
It certainly has been disappointing watching rock solid software from Google just disintegrate over the past decade. If it wasn’t for the iOS Mail app, I suspect gmail would be completely botched by now.
Another consideration to the Verge article, how much money has Google spent doing all of this wild stuff just to their messaging products? I would guess well over $10b. Organizationally Google’s management layers should be gutted. From the CEO to middle management, the company is run by people who couldn’t operate an average company lacking a high margin cashflow cow.
The difference is, when Apple's software and services are disjointed and user hostile, it's because they think it serves their business interests, and they may be right. I'm proof of it.
I buy all their hardware in spite of not being able to use FaceTime or iMessage (beyond than SMS functionality) or any of their iCloud and services sharing because my wife and friends are all on Android/Linux/Windows. It's not a big deal because most software I use is on the web anyway.
But Google is a mystery to me. I recently tried to subscribe to Youtube Premium, but they wouldn't let me sign up with my Google account because it's a Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) account. So if you pay for one of their services you're locked out of others. I don't think this is a business strategy. Google is simply flotilla of rudderless ships.
Google Voice was basically almost de-staffed for few years. Then they started to invest into it again around 2017, I don’t remember exact reason why the strategy changed.
The original acquisition was simply to get their hands on the mounds of voicemail data so they could train their fancy new speech recognition models. It was a prescient move (the Google assistant is still years ahead of its competitors), but they never really had any interest in nurturing that baby. They got what they want from it and let it wither on the vine.
Years later, when Apple neared feature parity, they tried to salvage what was left of it, but it was too little to late. They started creating new messaging apps from scratch that didn't catch on, and now they have a flotilla of pseudo-connected messaging products in various states of abandonment.
Ironically, I think Apple is the only entity with the power to guide Google out of this mess. If Apple integrated its (encrypted) iMessage platform with the already-existing (encrypted) RCS standard, it'd suddenly be the closest we've gotten to having an interoperable communication standard since XMPP/Jabber in the mid-aughts. Apple won't ever choose to do this on their own of course, but I'm holding out hope that it sees the antitrust storm clouds forming in the distance and starts to take some drastic pro-consumer measures to neutralize that threat.
WebDAV is a fairly portable file (or "resource") transfer and remote directory listing etc. protocol over HTTP designed such that it doesn't conflict with regular HTTP operations (GET, POST) send from browsers and implemented by traditional web servers to replace late-1990s FTP-based site maintenance practices by a webserver-integrated facility. It uses HTTP PUT operations (not normally send from browsers unless using JavaScript) and introduces WebDAV-only HTTP verbs (COPY, LOCK, MKCOL, PROPFIND, etc.). It uses XML payloads for representing directory listings and arbitrary file metadata attributes. In the context of this thread, the add-on protocol CalDAV is meant, which specializes the "resource" concept to calendars and scheduling events. There's also a much more elaborate XML-leaning protocol for messaging called XMPP.
> . Somehow, despite being huge and having all the data and basically a monopoly, they still can't integrate to save their lives.
In a way its a blessing for other smaller companies to perform better. Dinosaurs may have all the money in the world but it does not make them better in execution.
Thanks for laying out alternatives. Others were already asking about Calendar, but additionally I am curious if you found a solution for Maps/Navigation and Photo syncronisation and sharing. I'm still trying to find a migration path off from Google...
Photo sync I use Nextcloud for. It will automatically upload my photos to my Nextcloud instance. That takes a bit of effort though, because you have to set up a Nextcloud server.
> Then I lost SMS on my computer because it got removed from Hangouts
This isn't true, if you were a Fi subscriber. Fi subscribers were able to keep using Hangouts SMS up until they launched the replacement, Fi support in Messages for Web. There was no time where Web SMS was unsupported.
The transition worked reasonably well for me. I do miss the Gmail integration, and it's lame that you can't have RCS enabled if you want Web support (of course Hangouts never supported RCS anyway so it's not a regression, and hopefully it will be fixed someday). But otherwise it's a fine replacement and I use it every day.
I'm confused. I have Fi and I lost SMS in Hangouts as well as the ability to call in hangouts. Now I need to separately open google voice website to get those features. It's infuriating.
Yes, you lost SMS in Hangouts. But you didn't lose SMS on the web. The deprecation of SMS in Hangouts was delayed (for Fi subscribers only) until the replacement web SMS solution was ready.
I agree, as I mentioned, that the loss of Gmail integration is annoying. But the ability to use SMS on the web, without requiring a connection to your phone at all, is still there. There was no time period where Web SMS wasn't available for Fi subscribers.
I remember buying the first DVD Recorder on the market and being pissed later on that I couldn't burn the (much better) DVD+R type discs in my drive.
I never switched from my carrier to Project Fi. Never switched to Hangouts. Never switched to Inbox. Never switched to Allo and Duo.
So as far as I'm concerned... Gmail and Google Voice have pretty much always been working as intended for me.
It's kind of what you have to expect when you consider that we are Google's beta testers. Gmail was in beta for YEARS. If something new shows up, I may wait a year and see if it's still around, then maybe consider that I start using it... if I have a use for it.
In the end, Gmail is worth it to me over having to run my own email server. Never again. Ugh.
Google's beta in production strategy worked great when they were turning whole categories on their heads. I'm not sure it still works for them given the reputational damage. They're creating an in for more focused upstarts to swoop in and disrupt them piece by piece.
My concern is that there really isn't much left to 'turn on their heads' anymore. When Gmail came around, webmail was mostly hot garbage. Things just have matured since and well... I can now almost understand the culture issue that Google has now: Needing to reinvent something new instead of making what exists better. (And that's also entirely the problem)
Can't wait for Project Back to the Basics. If it ever happens.
I don't think Google or Microsoft have the culture to compete with Apple in consumer space. Microsoft is all about milking enterprises and Google seems to be geared towards launching random projects and then getting them stuck in limbo or killed off.
This is sad for me because I hate how locked down Apple ecosystem is, I constantly get rubbed by their store policy that I stick with Android, but life is much simpler in the Apple ecosystem and none of their competitors look like they have what it takes to compete (eg. Samsung software is a joke even when the hardware is competitive).
without giving names or identifiable details, could you explain what a "shitshow" looks like in those kind of environments ?
Is it like having an insane amount of validation, or everchanging requirements, or huge technical constraints, demotivated or unqualified people, etc.. what is it ?
i still remember the time when google was at the forefront of web app innovation, and it was probably already quite big. So i'm really curious to know what are the things that make it different today.
The name of product in question hypothetically might have started with A and ended with o.
This was last-ditch effort to outwhatsapp WhatsApp. Essentially this is high-risk high-reward project. Google comp is not setup to deal with this. Some people who were early in the game and shipped initial version got their good reviews/promos and quickly left after ship. Rest of the team started a shaky ride trying to find that extra secret feature that will turn this ship around, while metrics were not so good. This lead to worse reviews, management reshuffles, unsteady short-term micromanagement. Which in turn motivated more people to change projects.
The failure of enthusiastic VP of Communications and Photos (I kid you fucking not, he traded Hangouts for Photos, he wanted to shutdown Hangouts, but it turned out a lot of enterprise customers depend on it. So GSuite/GCP said they are going to take over Hangouts, so after some politicking he traded it for Photos). Anyway, he’s failure is to setup and manage this project in such a way when smallest negative result doesn’t lead to a shitshow.
Meanwhile I’m using Google stuff just fine. Skip the fads and stick to the basics, and it all still works. I’m glad your setup works for you, but Google apps haven’t been all that frustrating for me.
I’ve been using Gmail and Hangouts since they were introduced, migrated from Google Talk to Hangouts which was fairly transparent except I had to stop using Pidgin and use the web app instead. Still using Hangouts all these years later until they make me switch to Chat. It works fine.
There is a chance I try to get my family and friends to switch to Element or something instead of Chat, but it’s unlikely, since Google will provide a smooth switchover and we’ll all just have to tap a button to switch, and they’ll interoperate.
I got a Google Voice number many years ago too, but only use it for forwarding, never set up Fi, and it still works fine. Never enabled the hangouts SMS integration, because I can already get texts on the computer.
I skipped out on Allo and Duo; they seemed like a lost cause from the start. Never really posted much on Google+ anyway.
My music was in Google Play and now it’s in YouTube Music, but I mostly stream anyway. I don’t love the new interface, but it mostly works fine.
I had lots of RSS feeds in Google Reader, but NewsBlur had a simple import and works just as well as Reader ever did.
There's not even a button. Google Chat seems to "just work" already. I am cautiously optimistic. It actually also seems better than Hangouts. https://mail.google.com/chat actually works well. Pageup/pagedown works, which is a nice change.
"Google Chat" feels a lot like they finally fixed all the bugs they introduced when they replaced GChat with Hangouts.
Zawinski's Law of App Envelopment: Every app attempts to expand until it can do chat. Those apps which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
I feel they missed out massively in not centralising the communications standards.
Not sure if this was realistic or the new products were trying to create whole new tech that stopped this but when they saw different directions some core standards for interoperability would have helped. So if you had Hangouts and I had Allo we could still chat as least in the most standard was of voice/video/message. Proliferation would have mattered less and the product teams could have focused on UX/ new features/brand separately to their hearts content.
It would also help people try platforms cause I I could swap to the latest and greatest but still chat to my contacts Id be more willing to try vs trying to drag people across to a new platform.
Phone lines have this solved. You don't need to be on ATT to call someone on ATT. I don't get what's the deal with the messaging platforms. I hope some regulation forces interoperability.
So interesting, it’s like the old times again. That website gave me a flashback to Trillian in the ICQ/AOL/Messenger days. Wow, just checked and they are still around.
Interesting, but it seems that in order to make it work, I have to know about various different types of "bridges", "plumbing", and whatnot. So, really, quite different from the simplicity of calling someone on a different phone network. Or at least the descriptions on the website make it seem that way. As someone rather busy that cannot spend a few hours configuring I'm not even going to download it...
It depends on the bridge. Some bridges you might use without being aware. E.g. a public open source room/channel that is bridged between matrix and libera.chat. You just use either IRC or Matrix and interact with other users without caring what protocol they use to access the room.
Never bring a hardware solution to a software problem.
Communications should happen on the internet. Not on switched lines. Hard disagree with the proposal here that phone lines solve interoperability. Have you tried starting a phone company? How fun was that?
Edited to add: I should note that their public reasoning for ending an era of open communication standards support differs from some internal accounts I have heard. Google Hangouts was launched amid a lot of internal turmoil related to Google+ and their desire to reclaim social.
Gmail now displays a splash/loading screen that reads "Google Workspace".
Confused the heck out of me because I have a personal account with Google One for extra storage space, and a Google Workspace account for a managed domain for my startup.
Because accounts in Google ecosystem is such a mess, no one understands how they work. This isn't helped by all the systems they acquired and bolted on, and by various teams coming up with their own login flows.
It hasn't been all that confusing to me. I was on Google Talk, then I switched to Hangouts, which I have been using with my family until about a month ago, we've since transitioned to the new Google Chat and it's been fine. I like that it works on every device just by logging in. I also use Signal if there's more confidential stuff I need to send. I haven't used SMS in years and I really hope they don't try to bake that back in. Nobody I know in Europe uses SMS, it's just for receiving codes and stuff.
Time based one time password authenticators, or one time password lists?
Mobile phone plans can be highjacked just far too easily, and is a highly vulnerable vector for getting "keys to the kingdom" (ie your private Gmail account) for complete identity and asset theft.
Living abroad, I'm still very reliant on Google Voice for the 4-5 annual calls I need to make with say my bank or credit card because they will only do certain transactions by voice. Or other services demand a US telephone number without allowing a country code because of myopic design.
We really need to disconnect the need for phones for services that can be digital. People don't have landlines and there's a lot of people that would probably prefer a data-only plan since they don't make phone calls. Regular phone calls aren't normally encrypted either.
At least with Google Voice I've been able to circumvent having a 'real' US number -- giving the data brokers more data points. That is until I get locked out of services like PayPal who blocked Google Voice so I have no way to authenticate (not that they have a reason to need my phone number to bridge my already-verified bank with another service).
Had no idea Hangouts still had XMPP connectivity, wow!
I really feel like the article is massively missing out for not mentioning that Talk/Hangouts had interoperability, that you could Bring Your Own Software.
Yes, I feel like its something Google receives insufficient credit for. Amongst all the the massive propriety / walled garden orgy going on with messaging systems it is a real stand out differentiating feature and something they have maintained for nearly 2 decades now without interruption.
Google does plenty wrong, but I have to say it's noticeable that when tech companies actually do something right they often get zero to negative credit for it, so from that perspective it is hard to blame them sometimes.
There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, (and off-by-one errors....)
I feel like naming things is something Apple works really hard on. And why they place so much emphasis on it in their keynotes, when they use the phrase "And we're calling it ..."
I've used Google Talk ie Hangouts since the beginning with my friends/family. It's been a service that's worked reasonably well, for ages - and we can't have that, can we? So now, on Android, they're trying to force us over to "Chat in Gmail".
No, just no.
I don't want to open my email to then hit a chat tab to message my brother. They must be separate apps; it's messy when they try to cram everything into one app, there's even Meet there now.
(So there's a separate Google Chat app as well, but that's not mentioned at all in the Hangouts messaging, so I can only assume it's another dead project#. Functionality was awful and clunky when I tried it at some stage before).
Whoever's come up with this has absolutely no idea how their products are being used in the real world.
Looking for an alternative now that's not eg Facebook. Not sure about Discord, due to security. Not too keen on Signal due to ease of use, but might end up on that.
----
Edit: Signal is looking much nicer on the mobile than I recalled, sharing multiple pictures is really easy! This might be the go to.
#Also checked again on "Google Chat", still buggy (tried sharing multiple pics, weird behaviour) - but at least it's got a dark background now, so appears to be in dev - even though they'd like us to Chat in Gmail..
Signal is just as easy to use as WhatsApp for example. You register with your phone number and you can call/text anyone on your contacts who has installed Signal.
It even has video calls and recently added screensharing to them.
His peers -- Satya Nadella, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg -- all deeply understand and concern themselves with their companies' respective places in the world. They think twenty years into the future and frequently take risks to mitigate a changing landscape and position themselves for future wins.
Sundar Pichai isn't one to make bold bets. His company is a fat pig suckling on ad money. Google itself is completely drunk, comatose.
Google needs bold leadership. If nothing changes, it will eventually fall into decline and become a footnote.
Not only can this happen, it's already happened many times before.
I agree, however, these problems started showing up soon after their previous CFO, Patrick Pichette, left Google and Ruth Porat took the reigns. Since then I've noticed they've been obsessively bean counting. Sundar, IMHO, was part of their strategy to get into the Next Billion Users.
I don't think Google has yet realized Microsoft is going after their backend and B2B/enterprise customers (365[Azure, Teams, Office]), while Apple is going after all their frontend customers[2]. Google still acts like it's 2004 when Microsoft and Apple still acted like it was 1984.
Google is mainly concerned with protecting its own advertising turf and the data its platforms gobble up: search, YouTube, Gmail, Android, Maps. Apple may be gunning for market share in some of these areas, but hard to imagine Google losing its dominance here any time soon. YouTube and search are absolute behemoths, and monstrous cash cows.
Seen through this lens, their enterprise offerings and free messaging services are almost an afterthought.
A comment I don't see here yet is that this is to some extent a consequence of Google's business model. The assumption seems to be that a company should be wary about doing what they're doing, because they'll lose business. But Google's not directly selling these services, in most cases. I assume they're happy with the way they do things, which is try a bunch of stuff in a slightly chaotic but fairly nimble way, be happy when some of it works well (Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs), and kill the rest. Frustrating for users, absolutely, but that's the company you're getting your free stuff from. It's pretty clear that this behavior isn't affecting their profits and maybe it's not even hurting their reputation, outside of circles like this one.
Maps was entirely rewritten to use WebGL and support 3D. Gmail had the entire backend rewritten to scale much larger, priority inbox and categories, rich content emails, auto suggest as you type. Docs was completely rewritten, and they're working on another rewrite using canvas. Spreadsheets was rewritten twice, and a huge number of excel features ported over.
It's true they don't overhaul the whole product every year, or make major UI adjustments, but a fair bit has changed in those products.
All these products have improved incrementally, adding new features in an unobtrusive way. Which is from my perspective as a user how it should be done. I was just yesterday building spreadsheets and charting from hundreds of thousands of rows of data, something you couldn't do with sheets a few years ago, it just crumbled under the load. Usually when I look up a way to do something, Sheets and Excel are feature parity. That's a pretty big accomplishment. And I respect that they've kept the interface pretty consistent over the years in all these products, unlike in some others where I get constantly frustrated with superfluous changes or deprecations (I was a heavy Google Play Music user, sigh)
Disclaimer: Work for Google, but not on these products or anything user facing.
If the improvement is not felt by people that uses it everyday, i consider that a failure to improve... and as i was saying, i see the evolution of Maps. I do not see it as significant for gmail.
The multiple inbox thingy for gmail may be great, but i still have a gmail that is sluggish af
Same for gdoc. Parity with excel ? It is so sluggish and a pain to do anything with it that i now pay for excel...
> All these products have improved incrementally, adding new features in an unobtrusive way.
Sure, but there’s unobtrusive, and then there’s completely imperceptible. Where are these new features? I can’t think of anything that’s been added to Google Docs in years.
I often get stuck trying to do something and search for “How to do X in Google Docs”, only to discover that they haven’t gotten around to implementing something super basic.
Like placeholders in template documents. You can create a template document in Google Docs, but as far as I can tell, it’s just a normal document with a different way to make a copy of it. You can’t set up placeholders! Surely that’s the whole point of template documents‽ It feels like an intern had a passing interest in implementing templates then left before they finished. And then nobody was interested in working on it for years afterwards.
Out of interest, I searched for a changelog and found this:
Does this seem like anything other than a mothballed project to you? This is meant to be a flagship product from a giant company, and they were barely scraping together one tiny feature per month until September 2020, then lost interest and managed just one single new feature in the nine months since then. And you still can’t do super basic things with it.
But hey, at least they found the time to completely rewrite the UI layer, right? You don’t see how this appears to be a team who feels zero market pressure treating it like a retirement hobby rather than a job, right?
I use Google Docs nearly daily for work and they have definitely gotten new features over the last few years. Mostly around better collaboration. A few notable ones: @mentioning prime in a doc, assigning actionable comments as action items, automated creation of action items in meeting notes.
This and also: I wonder if the messiness of these products derives from a messy company structure. Maybe different departments or teams competing against each other for money, career advancements, etc. all without a strong leadership that can cut bad ideas before they start to be developed. Does anybody have information to prove or disprove this conjecture?
Interesting. Perhaps this is why large corps often can’t build cross-functional flat apps that effectively share data and make said company more efficient and profitable.
"Mess" (a term from the article, I realize) might be too perjorative of a term. Coordination, hierarchy, and lack of redundancy can also have downsides.
For consumers: sure. It's free, so expect nothing.
But if I were an enterprise, I'd be super cautious to sign any contract with Google for any product. Who knows they'll cancel the product your business is built on, with 30 days warning.
Can you imagine IBM / RedHat / Microsoft doing that? No. Can you imagine Google doing it?
> it’s almost possible to see Google’s strategy. Gmail exists for emails; Chat is the GChat / Hangouts-style messaging system for real-time conversations and group chats; Spaces is the Slack / Discord-style area for more persistent, larger rooms based on a particular topic or conversation; and there’s Meet for video chats.
This is like the exact opposite of what we want. It was the best when my gmail tab was email, SMS, chat, video calling all in one.
I think Google tries so many things at once and this is why they end up killing most of their products.
I remember when they launched an email app Inbox i loved using it but 3 years later they decided to kill it and guess what they decided to integrate inbox app features into gmail app and then I was forced to use it.
On contrary if we compare apple to Google. Apple does one thing really better they integrate their services really well across all devices and that’s one of the reason its hard to leave Apple Ecosystem.
This mostly skims over two additional issues that add whole additional dimensions to the mess that is Google's messaging services:
* How / whether you're allowed to integrate SMS / phone messages with web based chat (what we used to call instant messaging). E.g. can you get your text messages and voicemails on the computer? At some points you could, at some points you couldn't. At one point there was Google Voice, at another point Hangouts could do it, now you have to use the "Messages" app for texts, which is still relatively broken compared to either of the previous methods and doesn't support any kind of instant messaging.
* The different rules that apply if you're using Google Fi. For example, the Messages help page [1] says you can turn on "chat features", which lets you send messages over data and get other conveniences like read receipts and large photos (because they're not sent over MMS). But wait, if you use Google Fi, if you want to get messages and make calls on your computer (i.e. with your phone off), you have to disable chat features. You can't have both. [2] It's absolutely insane. This worked 100% correctly with Hangouts - perfect integration.
It really was the most convenient messaging has ever been with Google. Basically equivalent to iMessage, with the added convenience that I knew way more people on Hangouts than iMessage anyway. Plus the Google Fi integration was perfect.
But what's the situation for most people? Many people's personal messaging eco-system looks like this:
- Out of use: AIM
- Out of use: IRQ
- Out of use: IRC
- Insert your old messanger: here
- Privacy nerds: Signal
- Feature fans: Telegram
- Lonely people: Tinder
- Parents-Generation: WhatsApp / FaceBook / deprecated
- Brick phones (the real privacy nerds): SMS or E-Mail
- Ahead of time people: delta.chat
- Grandparents: E-Mail
Is this any better?
Let's have a different take on this: This company likes to experiment and innovate. :) Glad that this is still possible.
Having said that: Probably naming the messengers in a different manner could receive an overhaul to confuse less people. And: Wouldn't route my chat traffic neither over Apple, Google or any other FAANG+.
You forgot XMPP which we used about ten years ago for team chat, and it worked well and still does. The idea being, like with SMS and email and phones and IRC, that multiple client and server implementations can inter-operate. Especially when chat software has been in use for well over 30 years now.
Google have really made a hash over this entire space. I wouldn't even know which products to search for if I wanted to.
They had multiple opportunities to dominate the markets which Zoom, Slack, Discord, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger own today. Simply iterating within a single brand rather than this ADHD approach would have got them there.
They own controlling percentages of the email market and mobile market, it was all an enormous open goal.
I think it's a fair assessment to say that Google does not have a strategy. They're at their best when they were making something that hadn't been made before. Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Docs were/are in a league of their own in terms of offering, especially when they initially released, but now that Google is effectively trying to play catch-up and won't commit to anything that doesn't catch lightning in a bottle, I feel like confidence is remarkably low.
It's not so bad trying something new every once in a while, but a strategy of assuming everyone will immediately jump ship from an old product that worked just fine to a new product that does less and sucks more is self-assured destruction. You can apply this to a lot of Google products, such as Google Play Music > YouTube Music, not just their messaging blunders.
Have used all of them services and at the end I gave it all up because of their lack of commitment to their products. Tired of so many features that eventually lead to nothing.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadYou work for Google; there may be some bias here.
>E.g. Stadia, which a lot of people doubted would be technically possible at all.
Technically impossible? Really? I don't think anyone held doubt. Perhaps people figured it'd be expensive to develop but certainly not impossible.
Yes, so many people were citing latency would make it unplayable, etc.
> You work for Google; there may be some bias here.
If I was stating an opinion, maybe. In this case, I am merely pointing out the counter example: Stadia, etc.
I don't think Google has solved the fundamental issue which is latency and home broadband infrastructure. They can handwave it with AI, ML latency algorithms and video compression algorithms, but the latency is still not competitive to conventional gaming.
Wii U, Steam Link/Remote, nVidia Play/Geforce Now etc
I can't say I've ever heard it talked about in my gaming circles.
After following this nonsense product timeline for 16 years from the original Google Talk days, my last chat thread still using Hangouts moved to Facebook Messenger. chat.google.com is just aggressively worse in far too many ways, and will surely be killed circa 2024.
> chat.google.com is just aggressively worse in far too many ways, and will surely be killed circa 2024.
I doubt it. Google Chat is Google's enterprise product offering like Microsoft's skype.
Yeah, at our company we have actually used Google Chat somewhat succesfully as main tool for internal communication
They could improve Chat a lot if they just cared to do native clients. Seriously, how many developers would that require? Like three for macOS, and the same for Windows and Linux?
I much preferred it to gmail, and I was not happy when they discontinued it
That’s not how it works, promotion does not move you to a different position. Project leads in charge stay in charge after promotion. What often happens though is that promoted people leverage their new, higher level to move to or start more desirable projects.
It's just not meaningful for Google. It's like Jeff Bezos is so rich that he picked a very awkward candidate to replace his wife, but having a female companion to Jeff is no longer crucial for his success (imagine what would happen if Jeff married his current girl friend...).
It doesn't automatically put it front and centre at I/O, but as it's certain Google will want something to highlight which makes working on a new product is a fairly sensible idea if that's your goal. Innovating or maintaining an existing one is a lot less marketable.
I really thought Google was going to be the answer for a completely integrated, non-Apple online life.
Anyways, long story short, after endless frustration trying to get everything to work seamlessly, I ditched Google entirely.
My email is now IMAP. I have multiple accounts in one app. My calendar and contacts are now WebDAV. Every other app I use on PC and mobile can integrate with them. My messaging is now Element/Matrix with bridges to whatever other services I need. My search is DuckDuckGo, browser is Firefox, etc.
Currently, everything is as integrated, or more integrated, than it was with Google, and worlds more stable. Somehow, despite being huge and having all the data and basically a monopoly, they still can't integrate to save their lives.
The thing that annoys me most is that (as far as I can tell) only the big name providers have integrated mail/caldav/carddav, if you use a bring-your-own-domain solution they need to be added as 3 separate accounts (at least on iOS/macOS).
I've been looking for a sane calendar service that's not Google calendar and there's just nothing that's open-standards compatible.
There's a couple of other good CalDAV servers out there too, though of course as Fastmail CEO I can't really advertise anybody else :p
Will check it out right away :)
It has IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV. It has a snappy and responsive web interface and their iOS app is equally as good.
They have configuration of profiles for MacOS and iOS down (I can't talk to other environments).
I have a bunch of domains doing email through there, but I run my own DNS. I had a need to configure things that Fastmail's DNS doesn't deal with (IPv6 etc) but for general use, it's great. Properly configured SPF, DKIM, DMARC, good spam filtering, easy contact managenment etc.
Then they did nothing with it for maybe seven years? MMS would silently fail so people inviting you to events via group chat or sending you a photo would just think you were ignoring them.
Hangouts came and the mess with that and sms was worse. I had nexus phones back then which also had turn by turn navigation before the iPhone did.
Huge missed opportunity, years wasted. When the iPhone 5 came out and Apple Maps shipped turn by turn nav and eventually iMessage did everything voice did but better I switched and never went back.
Google’s software consumer stack sucks. I also tried to like it - it’s a mostly crappy mix of stuff that gets dropped, ignored, and poorly integrated.
At the same time Apple’s stuff has improved year over year. Out of all the large tech companies I’m most bearish about Google’s future - they seem aimless. Deepmind is cool, but Google better hope that ad money machine never stops printing.
As an iOS user, I feel the opposite in most areas except calling/messaging/facetime. I find Apple software to be severely limiting their own hardware. Their iPads are such excellent devices yet severely limited because of iOS. If iOS hadn't done calling/messaging/FaceTime right, I would have completely ditched them.
It’ll be interesting to see what they work out for iPad OS to make it more powerful. They’re obviously not willing to just slap a standard PC OS on there. I’d guess they’re going to come up with new stuff from first principles as best they can for it (even if that means limiting it in the short term).
I think it's just that growing tablets to be competitive with desktops is either really, really hard or just not reasonable to expect. As a form factor, for all that I love it and you'd have to tear my iPad out of my cold dead hands, it just has inherent limitations to go with it's strengths.
Not them, but my argument would be compared against a full desktop OS.
I love the form factor and for smaller things, if I had a full blown OS, I would be able to do so much more and not carry both my laptop and my iPad.
I think that imposes significant limitations. Some of the more powerful apps I use on my iPad have quite fiddly interfaces that would be fine on a desktop, but are really awkward on the tablet. It is getting better, but very slowly as developers figure out how to adapt to the form factor.
The new Multitasking interface does look like a big improvement though. Hopefully that will help developers to step up a bit.
Right wing governments the world over should be actively talking about how to neuter the political threat of leftists in Silicon Valley. One form that strategy might take on is legal blockades restricting stopping foreign advertisers, which makes sense on a couple of levels and can probably make up a solid coalition.
More than half Alphabet's revenue comes in from overseas and that is a tempting target now no matter where in the political spectrum people sit. There has to be a risk there for Google.
That's a lot of bias in just one phrase. I doubt that the libertarians and others in SV consider themselves "leftists". Or that Palantir, JPL, DARPA, which fund a lot of SV work can be considered "leftist".
So yes, having Google as a monopoly on search and advertising is a trust-busting issue, but that's not "right/left", it's good government regulation to maintain a free market in those services.
This is also awfully authoritarian of you.
It never really mattered if PlayForSure, Zune, Bing, Windows Phone etc were big successes or not, the company was absolutely fine anyway. XBOX is a success, but the massive billon+ write off they suffered back in the day means even now overall it's probably not made a profit, and if so not much. IE has floundered for over a decade. They do have many successful products but most of them could die and it wouldn't matter.
It's the same with Google. As long as they're awash in a torrent of search advertising money nothing else matters. Like Micorosoft they do have some successful non-core products. Chrome, Android, GMail, Google Docs, Chromebooks. However all of those could drop stone dead and they'd be A-Okay.
This is why Amazon is so impressive to me. Bezos built two world class mega-businsses simultaneously from scratch. I can't think of a single other example of this anywhere.
They're also very much artificial constructs, in the sense at this point they are as much political as economic artefacts. The Chaebol are more recent in their modern form but followed the same model.
Office, windows, Azure/development, Xbox/gaming are all integrated and cash cows.
Research, sure it isn't a direct revenue generating group but their patents portfolio is immense.
Heck, even LinkedIn is $10B/year business now. Maybe you're living under a rock?
Windows and Azure are the tent poles I was thinking of when I said they had more than one now.
I tend to see Windows and Office as fundamentally the same business though, along with development tools, in the same way that I think it's unreasonable to consider Apple's applications business separately from MacOS. Split Office from Windows and I think it would struggle, certainly it wouldn't have got to where it is now. It's an add-on to the Windows business. On it's own it wouldn't be industry dominating the way Windows, AWS, Google Search, etc are. It's a good business but not industry shaping, not anymore anyway.
Now they’ve pivoted to grow azure and O365 successfully in addition to leverage the Xbox via game pass to fit into that strategic world.
I think this mostly supports your point - it took an existential crisis and ousting a CEO that couldn’t adapt in order to save them when their cash cow started to falter.
Nadella could quickly release office cross-platform because of work during Ballmer.
There is a common HN trope that Ballmer was doing everything perfectly and Nadella just continued it.
I don’t buy it and neither did the market. (Neither did Microsoft’s board presumably)
I think Ballmer’s entire strategic direction was long-term wrong and Nadella changed it. This isn’t to say no projects started under Ballmer (they definitely did) it’s about whether those were prioritized or would have ever shipped under him successfully.
If the wrong things are considered important - it doesn’t really matter what projects are happening.
They're still trying very hard to put everything on web so Chrome can be what windows used to be.
This is mostly a failure of desktop operating systems to be interoperable and perhaps most seriously fail to support good network first/collaborative thinking in design. I think they did this in part because they saw being distinct as a way to differentiate themselves, but also because they were created pre-internet before a lot of modern application use cases were really possible or relevant, in the end this made them less competitive and native applications less desirable (in most cases).
I also wish it wasn't that way because the web has a lot of issues, it's slow, creates incentives towards megacorps that run centralized servers and ads, etc.
All this is one of the reasons I'm hopeful Urbit might succeed against all odds - they're rebuilding the OS with network first in mind.
Chrome isn't really comparable to windows because anyone can make a browser that reads the open web standards - while only Microsoft could make an OS that ran windows apps (outside of hacks). This reason is why web won out over native even though native apps have nice performance advantages.
That plus limited amounts of high quality devs can target the web and ship to everyone without having to build multiple native applications for multiple platforms, and again native platforms still haven't solved collab really.
I do however agree about the positive cross-platform support. From my experience, which is very limited - it is the decades of backward compat and complexity that makes native development so tiresome. It gets even worse when there are multiple platforms with not much in common.
Thanks, I'll check out Urbit.
And? How many non-Chrome browsers do we have? Even Microsoft gave in to Chromium. Can't wait for Google's next move to tie their protocols deeper into the browser just like they did with Android and playstore services.
This was another eye opener to me, how limited high quality developers are.
I suppose you didn't check the stock...
What? Windows, Office ( cross-platform since recently) and dev tools are totally different cash cows.
The ring of death ( = console) isn't even related to the cash cow in consoles. It's the 30% commission on 60€ games.
Anti-competitive behavior for not releasing it to other platforms in the past, doesn't mean it's "just an add-on".
Office for Windows was released in the same year as Windows 3.0, supporting all the new core technologies including OLE. Before then MS desktop software products were also-rans. From this point on they dominated, because they had been engineered natively for Windows right alongside the development of Windows itself before any of their competitors even had access to the frameworks and dev tools, or Windows 3.0 to develop and test on. It was part of a single coherent integrated platform strategy for Windows. Now it's grown beyond the platform, but the reason it matters is because of it's privileged position on the Windows platform.
XBox just doesn't matter. It's not big enough. If it died, Microsoft's bottom line would barely shift. Office does matter, we just see it's strategic position differently.
Just like iOS and Apple apps or Chrome and Google sites?
> XBox just doesn't matter. It's not big enough. If it died, Microsoft's bottom line would barely shift. Office does matter, we just see it's strategic position differently.
xbox was $3.5B (8.5%) of the $41B revenue last quarter - not sure why you think that wouldn't affect bottom line or understand the fact that gaming/xbox is a growth business with a recognizable brand.
To give you a perspective, xbox alone made more than all apple services except for App store (even then the difference isn't that huge).
Microsoft has a long history of failures from Bob to the Zune, but their core stuff, including Windows, Office, Visual Studio, is solid. Bob didn’t destroy Windows. Occasionally the products go off course, like Windows ME, but they seem to correct fairly quickly.
It certainly has been disappointing watching rock solid software from Google just disintegrate over the past decade. If it wasn’t for the iOS Mail app, I suspect gmail would be completely botched by now.
Another consideration to the Verge article, how much money has Google spent doing all of this wild stuff just to their messaging products? I would guess well over $10b. Organizationally Google’s management layers should be gutted. From the CEO to middle management, the company is run by people who couldn’t operate an average company lacking a high margin cashflow cow.
I buy all their hardware in spite of not being able to use FaceTime or iMessage (beyond than SMS functionality) or any of their iCloud and services sharing because my wife and friends are all on Android/Linux/Windows. It's not a big deal because most software I use is on the web anyway.
But Google is a mystery to me. I recently tried to subscribe to Youtube Premium, but they wouldn't let me sign up with my Google account because it's a Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) account. So if you pay for one of their services you're locked out of others. I don't think this is a business strategy. Google is simply flotilla of rudderless ships.
Every year I keep thinking Sundar Puchai’s ouster is imminent but it has yet to happen. Which perhaps explains Google’s disfunctionality even more.
Years later, when Apple neared feature parity, they tried to salvage what was left of it, but it was too little to late. They started creating new messaging apps from scratch that didn't catch on, and now they have a flotilla of pseudo-connected messaging products in various states of abandonment.
Ironically, I think Apple is the only entity with the power to guide Google out of this mess. If Apple integrated its (encrypted) iMessage platform with the already-existing (encrypted) RCS standard, it'd suddenly be the closest we've gotten to having an interoperable communication standard since XMPP/Jabber in the mid-aughts. Apple won't ever choose to do this on their own of course, but I'm holding out hope that it sees the antitrust storm clouds forming in the distance and starts to take some drastic pro-consumer measures to neutralize that threat.
> WebDAV
Can you explain how you implemented these too?
In a way its a blessing for other smaller companies to perform better. Dinosaurs may have all the money in the world but it does not make them better in execution.
This isn't true, if you were a Fi subscriber. Fi subscribers were able to keep using Hangouts SMS up until they launched the replacement, Fi support in Messages for Web. There was no time where Web SMS was unsupported.
The transition worked reasonably well for me. I do miss the Gmail integration, and it's lame that you can't have RCS enabled if you want Web support (of course Hangouts never supported RCS anyway so it's not a regression, and hopefully it will be fixed someday). But otherwise it's a fine replacement and I use it every day.
I agree, as I mentioned, that the loss of Gmail integration is annoying. But the ability to use SMS on the web, without requiring a connection to your phone at all, is still there. There was no time period where Web SMS wasn't available for Fi subscribers.
I remember buying the first DVD Recorder on the market and being pissed later on that I couldn't burn the (much better) DVD+R type discs in my drive.
I never switched from my carrier to Project Fi. Never switched to Hangouts. Never switched to Inbox. Never switched to Allo and Duo.
So as far as I'm concerned... Gmail and Google Voice have pretty much always been working as intended for me.
It's kind of what you have to expect when you consider that we are Google's beta testers. Gmail was in beta for YEARS. If something new shows up, I may wait a year and see if it's still around, then maybe consider that I start using it... if I have a use for it.
In the end, Gmail is worth it to me over having to run my own email server. Never again. Ugh.
Can't wait for Project Back to the Basics. If it ever happens.
This is sad for me because I hate how locked down Apple ecosystem is, I constantly get rubbed by their store policy that I stick with Android, but life is much simpler in the Apple ecosystem and none of their competitors look like they have what it takes to compete (eg. Samsung software is a joke even when the hardware is competitive).
Just imagine if there is a consistent, coherent multi-year strategy, it would be way harder to get a promotion.
(I actually worked on one of the mentioned messaging products, it was a shitshow)
Is it like having an insane amount of validation, or everchanging requirements, or huge technical constraints, demotivated or unqualified people, etc.. what is it ?
i still remember the time when google was at the forefront of web app innovation, and it was probably already quite big. So i'm really curious to know what are the things that make it different today.
This was last-ditch effort to outwhatsapp WhatsApp. Essentially this is high-risk high-reward project. Google comp is not setup to deal with this. Some people who were early in the game and shipped initial version got their good reviews/promos and quickly left after ship. Rest of the team started a shaky ride trying to find that extra secret feature that will turn this ship around, while metrics were not so good. This lead to worse reviews, management reshuffles, unsteady short-term micromanagement. Which in turn motivated more people to change projects.
The failure of enthusiastic VP of Communications and Photos (I kid you fucking not, he traded Hangouts for Photos, he wanted to shutdown Hangouts, but it turned out a lot of enterprise customers depend on it. So GSuite/GCP said they are going to take over Hangouts, so after some politicking he traded it for Photos). Anyway, he’s failure is to setup and manage this project in such a way when smallest negative result doesn’t lead to a shitshow.
I’ve been using Gmail and Hangouts since they were introduced, migrated from Google Talk to Hangouts which was fairly transparent except I had to stop using Pidgin and use the web app instead. Still using Hangouts all these years later until they make me switch to Chat. It works fine.
There is a chance I try to get my family and friends to switch to Element or something instead of Chat, but it’s unlikely, since Google will provide a smooth switchover and we’ll all just have to tap a button to switch, and they’ll interoperate.
I got a Google Voice number many years ago too, but only use it for forwarding, never set up Fi, and it still works fine. Never enabled the hangouts SMS integration, because I can already get texts on the computer.
I skipped out on Allo and Duo; they seemed like a lost cause from the start. Never really posted much on Google+ anyway.
My music was in Google Play and now it’s in YouTube Music, but I mostly stream anyway. I don’t love the new interface, but it mostly works fine.
I had lots of RSS feeds in Google Reader, but NewsBlur had a simple import and works just as well as Reader ever did.
"Google Chat" feels a lot like they finally fixed all the bugs they introduced when they replaced GChat with Hangouts.
https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/12446824/heads-up-...
https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/03/google-photos-adds-a-chat-...
“plus innumerable chat features built into other Google products we won’t mention here”
Not sure if this was realistic or the new products were trying to create whole new tech that stopped this but when they saw different directions some core standards for interoperability would have helped. So if you had Hangouts and I had Allo we could still chat as least in the most standard was of voice/video/message. Proliferation would have mattered less and the product teams could have focused on UX/ new features/brand separately to their hearts content.
It would also help people try platforms cause I I could swap to the latest and greatest but still chat to my contacts Id be more willing to try vs trying to drag people across to a new platform.
https://matrix.org/bridges/
Never bring a hardware solution to a software problem.
Communications should happen on the internet. Not on switched lines. Hard disagree with the proposal here that phone lines solve interoperability. Have you tried starting a phone company? How fun was that?
Although Talk was one of their longest-running messaging tools, they ultimately pulled back their openness approach, blaming... pretty much everyone else (for not following suit): https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-talk-to-...
Edited to add: I should note that their public reasoning for ending an era of open communication standards support differs from some internal accounts I have heard. Google Hangouts was launched amid a lot of internal turmoil related to Google+ and their desire to reclaim social.
Confused the heck out of me because I have a personal account with Google One for extra storage space, and a Google Workspace account for a managed domain for my startup.
Just an example of the mess: https://grumpy.website/post/0PU1U2r3v
Does it mean they are now plugged in SS7 network? Thats a throve of new user data.
I still use SMS in the UK if I'm in an area with poor data connection. SMS will work over 2G even.
I wish that would stop. SMS is horribly insecure as a 2nd factor.
Mobile phone plans can be highjacked just far too easily, and is a highly vulnerable vector for getting "keys to the kingdom" (ie your private Gmail account) for complete identity and asset theft.
I do. I don't own a smartphone though.
We really need to disconnect the need for phones for services that can be digital. People don't have landlines and there's a lot of people that would probably prefer a data-only plan since they don't make phone calls. Regular phone calls aren't normally encrypted either.
At least with Google Voice I've been able to circumvent having a 'real' US number -- giving the data brokers more data points. That is until I get locked out of services like PayPal who blocked Google Voice so I have no way to authenticate (not that they have a reason to need my phone number to bridge my already-verified bank with another service).
And of course, they are trying to kill it. (at least that is what the message I got last night said) ... sigh.
I really feel like the article is massively missing out for not mentioning that Talk/Hangouts had interoperability, that you could Bring Your Own Software.
Google does plenty wrong, but I have to say it's noticeable that when tech companies actually do something right they often get zero to negative credit for it, so from that perspective it is hard to blame them sometimes.
I feel like naming things is something Apple works really hard on. And why they place so much emphasis on it in their keynotes, when they use the phrase "And we're calling it ..."
iPhone Xs Max
Apple has improved their naming but they had a bunch of duds.
No, just no.
I don't want to open my email to then hit a chat tab to message my brother. They must be separate apps; it's messy when they try to cram everything into one app, there's even Meet there now.
(So there's a separate Google Chat app as well, but that's not mentioned at all in the Hangouts messaging, so I can only assume it's another dead project#. Functionality was awful and clunky when I tried it at some stage before).
Whoever's come up with this has absolutely no idea how their products are being used in the real world.
Looking for an alternative now that's not eg Facebook. Not sure about Discord, due to security. Not too keen on Signal due to ease of use, but might end up on that.
----
Edit: Signal is looking much nicer on the mobile than I recalled, sharing multiple pictures is really easy! This might be the go to.
#Also checked again on "Google Chat", still buggy (tried sharing multiple pics, weird behaviour) - but at least it's got a dark background now, so appears to be in dev - even though they'd like us to Chat in Gmail..
It even has video calls and recently added screensharing to them.
His peers -- Satya Nadella, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg -- all deeply understand and concern themselves with their companies' respective places in the world. They think twenty years into the future and frequently take risks to mitigate a changing landscape and position themselves for future wins.
Sundar Pichai isn't one to make bold bets. His company is a fat pig suckling on ad money. Google itself is completely drunk, comatose.
Google needs bold leadership. If nothing changes, it will eventually fall into decline and become a footnote.
Not only can this happen, it's already happened many times before.
[2] https://stratechery.com/2019/the-iphone-and-apples-services-...
Seen through this lens, their enterprise offerings and free messaging services are almost an afterthought.
I still see "Rooms" in my Gmail window.
All those were launched more than a decade ago, though.
It's true they don't overhaul the whole product every year, or make major UI adjustments, but a fair bit has changed in those products.
> Gmail had the entire backend rewritten
> Docs was completely rewritten
> Spreadsheets was rewritten twice
I think I’m starting to understand why these products very rarely receive new features, which I believe is the point di4na was making.
Disclaimer: Work for Google, but not on these products or anything user facing.
The multiple inbox thingy for gmail may be great, but i still have a gmail that is sluggish af
Same for gdoc. Parity with excel ? It is so sluggish and a pain to do anything with it that i now pay for excel...
Sure, but there’s unobtrusive, and then there’s completely imperceptible. Where are these new features? I can’t think of anything that’s been added to Google Docs in years.
I often get stuck trying to do something and search for “How to do X in Google Docs”, only to discover that they haven’t gotten around to implementing something super basic.
Like placeholders in template documents. You can create a template document in Google Docs, but as far as I can tell, it’s just a normal document with a different way to make a copy of it. You can’t set up placeholders! Surely that’s the whole point of template documents‽ It feels like an intern had a passing interest in implementing templates then left before they finished. And then nobody was interested in working on it for years afterwards.
Out of interest, I searched for a changelog and found this:
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9228272
Does this seem like anything other than a mothballed project to you? This is meant to be a flagship product from a giant company, and they were barely scraping together one tiny feature per month until September 2020, then lost interest and managed just one single new feature in the nine months since then. And you still can’t do super basic things with it.
But hey, at least they found the time to completely rewrite the UI layer, right? You don’t see how this appears to be a team who feels zero market pressure treating it like a retirement hobby rather than a job, right?
Docs is at the heart of the business suite and it lacks so many basic things, it drags down the entire suite offer.
But if I were an enterprise, I'd be super cautious to sign any contract with Google for any product. Who knows they'll cancel the product your business is built on, with 30 days warning.
Can you imagine IBM / RedHat / Microsoft doing that? No. Can you imagine Google doing it?
Of course that's the free version, but still.
This is like the exact opposite of what we want. It was the best when my gmail tab was email, SMS, chat, video calling all in one.
I remember when they launched an email app Inbox i loved using it but 3 years later they decided to kill it and guess what they decided to integrate inbox app features into gmail app and then I was forced to use it.
On contrary if we compare apple to Google. Apple does one thing really better they integrate their services really well across all devices and that’s one of the reason its hard to leave Apple Ecosystem.
* How / whether you're allowed to integrate SMS / phone messages with web based chat (what we used to call instant messaging). E.g. can you get your text messages and voicemails on the computer? At some points you could, at some points you couldn't. At one point there was Google Voice, at another point Hangouts could do it, now you have to use the "Messages" app for texts, which is still relatively broken compared to either of the previous methods and doesn't support any kind of instant messaging.
* The different rules that apply if you're using Google Fi. For example, the Messages help page [1] says you can turn on "chat features", which lets you send messages over data and get other conveniences like read receipts and large photos (because they're not sent over MMS). But wait, if you use Google Fi, if you want to get messages and make calls on your computer (i.e. with your phone off), you have to disable chat features. You can't have both. [2] It's absolutely insane. This worked 100% correctly with Hangouts - perfect integration.
[1] https://support.google.com/messages/answer/7189714?hl=en
[2] https://support.google.com/fi/answer/6188337
I'm really just waiting to have a free weekend to de-Google most of my connections to Google.
Let's have a different take on this: This company likes to experiment and innovate. :) Glad that this is still possible.
Having said that: Probably naming the messengers in a different manner could receive an overhaul to confuse less people. And: Wouldn't route my chat traffic neither over Apple, Google or any other FAANG+.
They had multiple opportunities to dominate the markets which Zoom, Slack, Discord, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger own today. Simply iterating within a single brand rather than this ADHD approach would have got them there.
They own controlling percentages of the email market and mobile market, it was all an enormous open goal.
It's not so bad trying something new every once in a while, but a strategy of assuming everyone will immediately jump ship from an old product that worked just fine to a new product that does less and sucks more is self-assured destruction. You can apply this to a lot of Google products, such as Google Play Music > YouTube Music, not just their messaging blunders.