[deong]

A consumer-focused messaging app. There's also Duo for video calls and "Messenger" for SMS (on Android). There's also the older thing called "Messenger" that's still running on all those devices that no one ever updated.

On the desktop/browser, I guess there isn't a consumer-focused messaging app anymore. Unless I'm missing something obvious, Google apparently ceded that ground to others.

I'm beginning to realize why Allo is as goofy as it is. It's not actually a messaging app. It's a machine learning playground app with a feature to send stuff to other people occasionally. Allo makes more sense as a concept if you look at it that way, though as a product, that's a bonkers idea that basically no one needs. Hence the non-existent user base.

[technofiend]

App fatigue is real... when Captain Kirk flipped open his communicator he didn't select which app to use when requesting a transport. That Google has several apps which compete and conflict with each other is absurd. The fact they keep migrating functionality in and out of them is moreso. Just pick a winner and be done with it. There's not really a competitive advantage to splitting your ecosystem into 5 different communication apps, google, there's really not.

[derefr]

> when Captain Kirk flipped open his communicator he didn't select which app to use when requesting a transport

The original TOS communicator was just a dumb pipe into the ear of a switchboard operator (the naval rankings Uhura bosses around, presumably.)

In TNG and beyond, there doesn't seem to be "operators" per se, but the device still has a Conversational UX. Less like a phone, more like the Amazon Echo.

Presumably, in the future there will still be individually-packaged suites of software (and even such suites existing as rival products); but likely, in something like a space-navy, everyone has got the same software, and it's all been centrally requisitioned and integrated into monolithic monster workflows that show no hint of its origin. I imagine personal "communicators", despite the CUI, would resemble today's phones much more closely, as there'd have to be a way to install your own software packages and then manage the resultant overlapping suites of functionality, without requiring some full-time engineers to put it together into a streamlined system.

> That Google has several apps which compete and conflict with each other is absurd.

Google is a bunch of independent teams competing and conflicting with each-other (to launch products, mostly.)

The jockeying would be a lot clearer if each team had a distinct marque, beyond just "Google" or "Google Research" or "Android" or "Chromium Project."

[deong]

> Google is a bunch of independent teams competing and conflicting with each-other (to launch products, mostly.)

Well, Google needs very badly to stop that then. If you think internal competition somehow breeds better products, then by all means run the company that way. But pay one person to keep this fucking Thunderdome isolated from the public. Someone needs to declare a winner before you trot out 83 contestants, all of which suck because you couldn't make a damned decision.

[derefr]

Let me rephrase: there is no central part of Google that could "declare a winner." Google is a bunch of small companies that happen to share office space and a treasury, and are all called Google for some reason.

[deong]

That's nonsense. You said it yourself -- they share a treasury, if nothing else. Google has a CEO (Pichai). Alphabet has a CEO (Page). There are dozens of executives who control the myriad different little fiefdoms, but all of those people report to someone.

I'm certain that four random engineers don't get to make a new thing, slap the Google brand on it, and prominently sell it on the front page of the Google store without someone approving it first.

And even if that were the case, it's a pathology to be solved, not a reasonable justification for them to continue to be catastrophically bad at making consumer-facing products. If there's no one entity called "Google" that can stop them from releasing absolute garbage that they then never once update, then I'll just rephrase my complaint to "Google needs to come up with a single entity that can stop them from releasing absolute garbage that they then never update."

[derefr]

It's a model that predicts their behavior well, is what I meant. It "makes sense of" their decisions. It doesn't justify those decisions; of course they're awful decisions.

I'm doing kremlinology here: attempting to model an opaque organizational structure so that you can change your behavior to avoid its inferred structural inadequacies. Because any organization in need of kremlinology ain't gonna be able to change in response to even a top-down order to do so.

Google can't stop being catastrophically Balkanized, any more than IBM can stop being catastrophically monolithic, or Facebook can stop being catastrophically lackadaisical toward code-base quality. It's in their DNA: in the kind of people they have hired, who now choose who they hire, and will continue to be biased however they're biased even if a top-down order tries to push against those biases.