* 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.
- 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.
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, ...).
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 :-)
I loved GChat. It was simple. I could use Pidgin or Adium or any number of third-party clients. It did what I needed. However, I'm guessing at some point, they were working on and maintaining a product that didn't really have the metrics that they were looking for. Growth probably slowed a lot once so many people were using it (so the honeymoon phase of "we'll figure out the money and strategy later" was over). Likewise, one of the great things about GChat was that it felt so un-monetized. There were no ads or anything. Compared to the alternatives of the day like AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc. it just felt like this easy, clean, simple messenger that worked without distractions.
When you're a company worth so many billions (now nearly two trillion), why are you putting engineering time into something that seems to have little growth and little money? Shouldn't you re-task those engineers to projects that might be the next big thing? I know that in a certain light companies can hire more people, but the hiring pool isn't infinite and you can only grow your staff so quickly without things becoming chaotic (you want enough veteran staff members around to mentor new people who don't know what is going on with the giant systems that are created in such a large company).
To me, messaging feels like a product that everyone wants to solve because it's cool, but people haven't really figured out hoe to monetize it well. I think Facebook wants messaging to reinforce its ecosystem and fend off rivals more than anything. Apple really likes iMessage because consumers seem to be really into iMessage and it seems to create a positive feedback loop to get people to buy iPhones (I'm an iPhone user and I don't get what's so great about iMessage, but people are really passionate about it). What does Google get out of messaging? What does Signal get out of it? Signal and Telegram have both been looking for business models and they've looked into cryptocurrency, but I'd argue that neither has really found a business model.
The messaging apps that seem to have found business models are the ones that aren't general chat/text replacements, but community chat systems like Discord and Slack. Microsoft's efforts with Teams and the new Google Hangouts Chat/Meet enterprise Slack clone show that Microsoft and Google see a Slack competitor as where the money is in messaging. It's easy to get a company to give you $5-25/mo per user when they're spending $5,000-50,000 per month on that user already (not just salary, but benefits, office space, equipment, etc).
I think the real problem is that there's little money to be made in the old Gmail/GChat messaging. So, in comes some project manager that wants to make their bones solving a potentially large market in messaging and they don't have any wonderful ideas, but they're hoping that if they move enough things around and rebrand enough things they can cherry-pick some metrics and show how genius they are and why they deserve a big promotion. You don't get recognition and promotions for keeping a ship steady in calm seas. Combine that with a product that doesn't seem to meet expectations for return on engineering investment and why should Google keep investing in this?
If we look at the companies that have succeeded, they're not general messaging apps and they're usually aimed at taking advantage of an enterprise play - with a generous enough free tier that home people can play with it. I think Google didn't want to continue offering a general purpose messenger that didn't have a path to profitable growth. They also didn't want to abandon messaging. So they kept shaking things up trying to find product market fit - profitable fit, not just something that free users enjoyed without something in it for Google.
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.
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.