[spankalee]

I do not think it's even innovator's dilemma.

Take chat, one of Google's biggest fumbles. They had a good thing with Gtalk. Really screwed things up with Hangouts (thanks, Vic!), added the weird Allo to the mix, almost turned things around, and then brought in Chat to compete with Slack as opposed to AIM...WhatsApp.

If they had just incrementally invested in chat, even if they swapped out back ends, they could have kept most of their user base, maybe even have grown it. Gchat was pretty popular, even during the rise of Facebook Messenger.

But they screwed around with the public-visible product side of things too much, and revealed their tech stack and org chart as product changes. There was no product-first, continuity-oriented planning.

[mtrovo]

The main problem with chat is that there are too many angles to communication, making it impossible to fulfil all requirements with a single tool. Apple does IM, period, they don’t want any of the Slack-type team communications and that's fine for them. Even Facebook realised that having multiple chat apps is fine as long as they offer value on their own. Meanwhile, Google has gone through several iterations, with internal groups competing for the top spot in defining what a chat app should be, but ultimately falling short because there's no single chat app for all requirements. They aimed too close to the average and failed to deliver anything useful enough for any specific group.