A little over a decade ago at Google TGIF, the leader of Google Chat, ch(the one that sat in the corner of Gmail) stood up and announced we'd be replacing Google Chat with a better chat system. He explained that he'd "looked at the data" and japanese teenagers were using emojis, and Chat didn't support that, so we'd be completely replacing Chat with another system that supported emojis.
At the time, chat was changing quickly from an ICQ-like IM tool towards a more SMS-style, although there was still a use case for gChat in enterprise and professional contexts. Google was losing users to other chat systems, such as ones that only ran on mobile, and used phone numbers, not gmail identities, to keep track of users.
After the debacle that was the first Hangouts launch, they pivoted a number of times more, completely messing up each subsequent rollout, while also having several almost-competing projects fighting for dominance. All of this happened around the time that the leadership was deeply invested in Google Plus and made a number of antisocial decisions.
And quite the opening, too. They could have replaced the dead/dying Skype, gotten the market Slack/Teams have, and been the video-conferencing option everyone reached for instead of Zoom.
I feel like expecting them to have created Discord is a bit too much - I think most people didn't realize there was such a strong demand for a chat program structured into 'servers' like IRC.
the standard wisdom behind why google has so many chat apps is that the way for high-level people looking to get promoted to an even higher level is to launch a new product. so you have people launching a product, getting promoted, and then moving on. rinse and repeat. not sure if true, but at least plausible.
https://capitalg.com/team/nick-fox/
"he was responsible for Google's communications products"