No. The Netflix mail business was very significantly profitable and the streaming business was losing a ton of money for years. The mail business carried, paid for, the streaming business.
That's because of the the entirely different business model of the disc rental business (first sale doctrine) vs streaming licensing business (you're screwed, the content owners will squeeze you to the wall). The horrible licensing costs of the streaming business is what prompted Netflix to push into production (basically direct those fees equivalent into assets they'd own outright instead of paying all their revenue back out to licensing fees forever).
The horrible streaming licensing cost problem is why Spotify struggles to earn a decent profit despite how much they've grown and having a zillion subscribers. You get no benefit of scale on your margin, because the content owners always squeeze you as you grow.
Spotify is up to $8.6b in revenue and still losing money. Their business has no margin at all, and that's essentially all due to the music licensing costs. That's why they're desperate to push into anything else, other lines of business, where they can not have to pay all their revenue out in licensing fees.
You could also argue that Google tried to reinvent Skype, Slack, Discord, and a million other chat apps, and they cannibalized their own offerings because they were feckless and mercurial.
Yeah, and also cuz they kinda sucked. 1st-gen iMessage, or even old-school Trillian, was loads better than Google's graveyard of shitty chat products.
Google had no overarching chat strategy, just threw gobs of money and different teams at reinventing different spokes of the wheels, never thinking about the cart as a whole.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Also: please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. We're trying for a different sort of site here.
Google Talk evolved into Hangouts which then evolved into Chat. It's all one continuous line with a terrible marketing strategy. From what I can tell, Meet seems to be just a confusing way to access Hangouts video chats.
I can still see all of my Talk/Hangouts/Chat history going back years. Removing XMPP sucks, and I was annoyed by that too, but the chat history is still there.