Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?
Several years ago, from within Gmail, I could:
* Make a phone call
* Send an SMS
* Send a Google chat
* Start a video call with my parents
Now, all of this has been split up, and to start a video call, I have to start a video and send an email inviting someone. SMS has been split up into a separate web app that won't work without my phone being present.
How did it come to pass that they took an easy, integrated system and mangled it so badly? I mean, it wasn't perfect, but it mostly just worked, and was easy to use.
95 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadPreviously I had rules, almost all marketing went to labels or trash. Is it just me or have the rules become inconsistent?
I was never blown away by the user interface, but many rely on the gmail interface to manage their emails effectively.
Later, we switched to O365 and so use Microsoft for email. I still use IMAP for that, because the Outlook interface is not one that I enjoy.
See it is another symptom of the bottom-up product strategy. Categorization was a key feature of Inbox (by Gmail (by Apps (by Google (by Alphabet)))). After they killed Inbox they wrecked the categorization bundling, too.
Like you say, the old experience was great if you use gmail. Now the new split out messages thing is annoying for gmail users, but not tied to a google account. I think their strategy is to break things up into individual lowest common denominator services (like whatsapp), instead of having something that is pretty good at several things, but not the dominant product for any of them.
So, as an engineer, it's probably better to jump on the bandwagon with everyone else, and try to get a promotion from it. It's stupid, but it's how it works. You will not progress within a company by saying "no", even if you are right and it stops a bad project.
(I've never worked for google, but did work in a large software corporation)
I wouldn't work for Google, but have worked at a couple of very large software companies and this echoes my experiences with them.
It's one of the reasons that I prefer not working for large software companies -- people there tend to be more concerned with their own career than the products they work on.
In any engineering organization, one can find people saying "wait a second, that's not a good idea" to pretty much anything.
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.
If the big company is hurting, legal works to find ways to justify everything and anything.
I also worked for FB and it’s not as strict as Snap but similar.
Now, having worked at Google during these times (including the Allo launch where the team went around Google trying to rally the troops on why it was going to work), I can say that the PM structure at Google meant that a ground up led effort to build a competitive messaging platform just wouldn't happen. PMs basically rotate products every few years and nobody really has passion for the thing they are working on it. Its a very mechanical role oriented around features, roadmaps, growth bookkeeping etc. None of these things would yield a competitive messaging platform without a mandate from the top.
Now why was there no mandate from the top? Well, I think that leadership was confident that Google already had what it needed to build messaging into their dominant platforms. Between youtube and Android it felt like that if the competition in messaging were to grow in feature set, it would become more like these platforms (facebook turning into youtube with video, etc). Google could then add messaging and meet them at some point in the future. Schmidt also references youtube as a messaging/social platform in the podcast episode.
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/village-globals-ventur...
I've heard that from other people at Google as well. But the fact that YouTube isn't a messaging/social app in any significant way is part of why I stick with it. I wonder if I'm not the only one.
I think this just goes to show it isn't as easy as they thought it was. I am sure Microsoft leadership thought it would be easy to turn a dominant consumer computing platform (windows) into a dominant mobile platform. I mean it is true that we are seeing a convergence to some degree with ios/ipad/macos. The thing is it doesn't happen as fast as needed for the competition to captialize on it. Facebook might eventually look like youtube. However, by the time it happens there will nothing left for youtube to gain. The market will be cooked.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a community engineer at Mux.)
I wish we could rewind most of the web at least ten years. Everything was better then — I enjoyed Gmail, Twitter, Foursquare, Flickr, etc.
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.
The problem isn’t really with SWEs but with the entire incentive structure of PMs and the product management chain.
They in turn are able to get more SWE headcount for these unfruitful ventures and end up failing upwards.
At the very least, I think it is clear that Google’s product failings are not just a result of the promo system.
This allows Google to be lazy about product-market fit and avoid asking the hard questions like "is this thing really better than the alternative" and "what's the ROI for people who adopt this".
I worked on what I'd consider a failed product, and there was no explicit acknowledgement of that fact ever, we just waited 3 years and quietly turned it off. A more drawn-out version of the same thing happened with Google Plus. There was never anything like a "product postmortem".
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.
Wait... what was the question?
Show me a centralised protocol that is better at interoperability between various services?
Dozens of thousands of xmpp servers interoperate and deliver messages to each other. Or do you expect it to interoperate with Telegram? What next would you expect, UDP <--> ICMP interoperability?
https://jabber.hot-chilli.net/server-specifications/#Transpo...
https://www.jabbim.com/home.html
Moreover, I came to a conclusion that reliance on transports reinforces the network effect of external services and weakens XMPP's network effect. Do not use them.
In addition XMPP can be linked with other protocols/networks via bridges/gateways. Some examples:
- Spectrum: XMPP gateway project based on libpurple (support for many protocols): https://spectrum.im/
- WhatsApp bridge: https://git.eta.st/eta/whatsxmpp
- Telegram bridge: https://github.com/codingteam/emulsion
- Signal bridge: https://gitlab.com/nicocool84/slidge/ (replacement of https://gitlab.com/nicocool84/spectrum2_signald/ )
Given such a diverse ecosystem of open-source and proprietary implementations, I'd say XMPP is one of the best examples of widespread protocol interoperability that there is.
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.
Do you have concrete examples?
Lots of businesses have multiple services/virtual servers running on a single host. Also VPS, shared hosting, seedboxes. Google/Amazon are experts at it.
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 :-)
It's not that their system has stagnated - they've actively made it much worse and more difficult to use.
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!).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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, ...).
- 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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281259
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.