| Tackling this point separately: the entire reason they do this is because they routinely experiment with side projects and then build the ideas that work well into the services that gain traction. As much as it comes with the drawback of being scattershot in general, it specifically creates a track record for failure with messaging because successful messaging products, as a rule, have network effect - something you can't build when you're playing with three different approaches simultaneously. For an example of where this works really well, look at how all of their adaptive UI efforts feed into each other: * The enhancements to multiwindow that were built for foldables became Android's desktop mode, to the point that it was built specifically as a test environment and now underpins DeX etc * Desktop mode's only hardware requirement is a display output, suggesting in addition that Android apps as a whole are no longer bound to specific 1:1 relationships of UI and form factor. (This is, imo, a much bigger deal than we're making it out to be, and opens up possibilities ranging from hybrid game consoles to mobile content creation to better takes at mobile-powered VR.) * The existence of a base OS implementation and the fact that it's controlled by the system launcher, a component the user can rip and replace, pretty much ensures that custom ROM communities are already toying with this * Android supports PWAs - installable, natively-scalable webapps - meaning that when desktop mode inevitably stops being feature-flagged there will be examples of convergent apps that work on day 1 * Desktop support for Android apps enhances those same apps when used on ChromeOS * Flutter, the toolkit built for Fuchsia - an OS designed from the ground up with this sort of scalability in mind - is capable of targeting all of the above |
I think what Google needs to do is to seperate the messaging protocol from the messaging software. The protocol needs network effects. The software doesn't. That's why shutting down Google Inbox didn't kill email and it's why any new experiments with email software can benefit from the network effects that email protocols already have.