[stephbu]

It feels like Google’s attention span, leadership longevity, and product development patience is roughly 3 years. Any product that survives longer than that probably has transcended beyond being a “pet project/toy” into a PR-problem or revenue-stream significant enough that it takes on a life of it’s own. As management turns over, that lease on life is renewed…

https://killedbygoogle.com/

While this fosters new ideas and opportunities, that conversion into long-term direction and execution can be pretty rough.

[sbrother]

3 years is roughly the average time it takes to get promoted at Google.

[enduroman]

Or the time someone leaves and goes to another job.

[formerkrogemp]

Or the time for a product to die.

[justinjlynn]

Funny how they all seem to be correlated. /s

[fswd]

You nailed it. Every 3 years google renames and rebadges their chat system. I don't even know what to call it anymore.

[samizdis]

I've posted this link before in comments, but for anyone who's not read this arstechnica piece it is well worth it:

A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...

[ImprovedSilence]

Good stuff. To give google a little credit, google talk is what killed off AIM for everyone I knew. Mostly because you could knock out chat and email on one page and it was cool cuz google was not yet being evil and then eventually they had other fun stuff to integrate with like reader and igoogle…

[tablespoon]

> A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps

How do they keep failing over and over, in the same way, when these failures are a well-known embarrassment?

You'd think the CEO would either just ban development of new messaging apps or pick a winner and give it the same kind of care and feeding as GMail.

[the_only_law]

I was completely fine with the old Hangouts thing. A small little call/chat system embedded into the inbox. Would occasionally ping friends and occasionally chat.

[ako]

You maybe, but Google is looking for a whatsapp/wechat killer, and will keep trying till they have it, or abandon the idea.

[throwawaylinux]

My guess is because things like that don't make any or much direct revenue, so they aren't going to get senior executives to want to take ownership and champion the thing.

Killing a chat product that has always been a net loss for the company might not appear to be a failure.

[tablespoon]

> Killing a chat product that has always been a net loss for the company might not appear to be a failure.

Doing that once, yeah, doing that over and over, no so much.

At this point the smartest thing to do it just kill them all and definitively say: "No more, this is the end of Google chat apps."

[throwawaylinux]

> Doing that once, yeah, doing that over and over, no so much.

What do you mean? It's always good move to kill a product that loses money for the company.

Why do they start so many new products that are losers? That's a different question. Possibly the incentives for starting new products are poorly calibrated, which is the common narrative. But possibly they aren't and they are quite happy to make a mountain of shit, including doing almost the same thing over and over, for the small chance of a diamond. That's entirely consistent with the rest of the start-up industry.

[skinnymuch]

Wow! This really does cover everything. I just wrote a comment saying Disco is never brought up. It is here.

[easrng]

There's Google Chat, which is really made for companies but available on normal accounts too, and Google Messages, their SMS/MMS/RCS app for Android, which requires that you have an Android phone and a phone plan.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

Also Hangouts, Meet, Duo, Allo, Spaces. I don't even know if all of them are alive now, and I don't care enough to check.

[easrng]

Hangouts is just another client for Google Chat now, Allo is dead, and Spaces is a feature of Google Chat. Meet and Duo are not chat apps really, but there is a pretty clear separation in that Meet is primarily designed for business meetings (competes with Zoom) and Duo is more primarily for personal use (competes with FaceTime)

[hiptobecubic]

> Spaces is a feature of Google Chat.

This is true today, but 3-4 years ago Spaces was actually a completely separate product that was so bad that most Googlers didn't even know it existed.

I have never met a single person, including on the Spaces team, that used Spaces for anything. Ever.

[skinnymuch]

Disco is forgotten usually. From the early smartphone days before Whatsapp and others had firmly won. I believe they even owned Disco.com. I had that app installed way back when.

[zeusk]

I'm pretty sure there was a Google+ chat, and who remembers Google Talk?

[joeframbach]

And Wave, whatever that was?

[Izkata]

It was Slack/etc years before those existed. They just couldn't figure out how to market it because there were no reference points at the time, so few could see any reason to use it.

[kanzenryu2]

Loved Wave, thought it was terrible that it got shelved

[na85]

Buzz

[hda111]

To be even more confusing, it’s also possible to chat and video conference with the Gmail app. But maybe this changes tomorrow who knows?

[DangitBobby]

They removed the ability to install the dedicated chat app and moved it all into the Gmail app. Infuriating. Oh, and it opens all links on the built-in chrome browser instead of respecting your default browser settings. There is no option to change the behavior.

[filoleg]

> They removed the ability to install the dedicated chat app and moved it all into the Gmail app.

The first part of it is not true (but the second part is true, in that you can access chats from Gmail as well).

I just checked, and Google Chat exists as a separate app on iOS, Android, and web (chat.google.com). Even though the web version redirects to a gmail url (mail.google.com/chat), it is still a separate web version, not embedded into gmail. The only thing it shares with gmail is its subdomain, the page itself has zero mention of gmail or any gmail-related functionality.

[IX-103]

The separate chat app still exists (at least on Android). I have it, because I often like to copy and paste between them.

[lyton]

I used Allo for some time. It's long gone now.

[seizethegdgap]

Not to be confused with Chat, which is inside the Google Messages app, which is RCS.

[easrng]

That's actually "Chat Features"

[ss108]

I think I may make an independent thread about this soon (but my question may be stupid): why does messages use this paradigm of connecting to one's phone directly instead of accessing texts in some centralized fashion? Is that impossible because only the carrier has the contents of the thread (even though other services can be used to post texts)?

[kevin_thibedeau]

The surveillance state likes it that way.

[lostlogin]

> I don't even know what to call it anymore.

Google.

[llaolleh]

“Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.” - Charlie Munger

[stephbu]

This is probably the most insightful answer, the system is geared to rewarding creation of the next greatest technology. Sustaining what ever your predecessor did just doesn’t get prizes.

[Mo3]

I generally agree but I really dislike that site. Change is inevitable, as is progress.

Angular 2010-2021? Seriously? Angular was simply superseeded after 11 years by better technology, and same goes for a lot of other projects and services on that site.

I’m not a Google fanboy and I know about the few instances where they screwed over users by turning stuff off but cmon now.

[b112]

* see google product

* create stealth startup to compete

* wait???

* pounce on userbase when Google crashes and burns

[llampx]

* get bought by Google

* profit