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Google Communications

Google Just Can't Get the Message (phandroid.com) 135

Posted by msmash from the everlasting-quest dept.
It's been a rough week or so to be invested in a Google messaging service, hell it's been a rough decade to be invested in a Google messaging service. Phandroid: The latest victims are Allo, which will be going away in March of 2019, and "Hangouts Classic" which has a more nebulous end of life forecast. These products join the host of other Google messaging casualties over the years, Google Wave, Google+ Huddles, Google+ Hangouts, Google Spaces, to name a few. Now if this left us with an entirely clear picture of Google's messaging strategy going forward that would be something, but the reality is that the company still has 5 such apps with at least some overlapping functionality.

The 5 survivors are Duo (Video), Messages (Text), Hangouts Chat (Enterprise Text), Hangouts Meet (Enterprise Video), and Google Voice (Voice and Text). Why am I including two enterprise-focused products in a discussion about consumer messaging? Because the head of those products, Scott Johnston, indicated that "Hangouts (Classic) users will be migrated to Chat and Meet." This was corroborated by an official blog post from Google's VP of Consumer Communications Products, Matt Klainer, who similarly put no definite timeline on this migration.

This is a problem that Google themselves seemed ready to settle once and for all almost exactly 2 and a half years ago when they announced Allo and Duo at Google I/O 2016, this was going to be the two-pronged answer to messaging on Android. But it became clear reasonably quickly that Allo wasn't going to hold up its end of the bargain, it saw limited adoption and within two years of launch, Google has now admitted that it shifted resources away from Allo and instead was focused on bringing the relevant features into Messages.
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Google Just Can't Get the Message More

Google Just Can't Get the Message

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  • They are calling the new system "Chat and Meet"? Seriously?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mermeid007 ( 5624172 )
      A huge problem google has is that they tend to release product quickly and then assume that any positive feedback is not random noise. I would bet that google has gone years believing it was collecting feedback on things when in fact it never was. And they also assume some kind of lock-in. Example: if you happen to use one google product at one time, they automatically assume that you have suddenly become a complete google customer. And they try to put your credit card on file, etc. It's the one company tha
      • I think the worst part is that they eventually try to integrate any product with the rest of their ecosystem even if it makes no sense or isn't something that users want. This invariably pisses off the user base and garners all kinds of negative reactions and does nothing to help Google grow its other products. If people wanted to use them, they already would be using them. Then they eventually kill off the product when they realize that they can't get what they want or they've lost interest in it, only for

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          Google is crap a social media because they are an advertising platform, the is the raison d'etre, their reason for existing. Social media for them is nothing but bait, how good, just good enough to get the sheeple to bite and hopefully become hooked, how bad, as bad as they can possibly get away with.

          They are not a social media company, they are a advertising company, that is the way the bit shit at Alphabet positioned them and why with the SJW marketing nuttiness, they are bad at social media.

          They are fa

    • Never heard of a meat market... its where all the chics r. :P

      • Those were taken over by zombies about 20 years ago.

        Don't let her give you any pills, that's where zombies come from.

        If you get a skin infection from it, you're probably going to die. Antibiotics rarely work on zombie diseases anymore. Try smearing it with raw honey.

  • Scanning (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Sunday December 09, 2018 @03:10PM (#57775988)
    My requirements for messaging is that the service NOT scan my messages for ways to advertise to me. Beyond that, the requirement is that I be able to enter text and have it be seen by the person it is meant for. I'm sure Google can do the second requirement just fine, but it is the first requirement they have a lot of problems with.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Fuck, are you shitting me? Just the Google App alone, even when set not to, will modify system settings to set Google's own services back as default. Bottom line...If you are accessing the Play Store, then Google is accessing your shit regardless.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        That's why I don't use the Google Play Store or Google Play Services (they aren't even present on my phone). I use Yalp Store, F-Droid and microG instead.

        Some other replacements:
        K-9 Mail [f-droid.org] or Tutanota [f-droid.org] instead of Gmail.
        Privacy Browser [f-droid.org] or IceCat [f-droid.org] instead of Chrome.
        Conversations [f-droid.org] or Telegram [f-droid.org] instead of Google's messenger app of the week.
        NewPipe [f-droid.org] or SkyTube [f-droid.org] instead of YouTube.

        The wonderful thing about Android is that it's totally open source and isn't reliant upon Google's crapware.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Scanning (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Sunday December 09, 2018 @05:06PM (#57776522) Homepage

        You going to pay for it? Or do you expect to be provided with a service at absolutely no cost to you? If ads don't pay for it, something has to.

        I don't recall ever paying for access to an IRC server nor did they have any ads, not even back in the 90s. The problem is not so much operating the service, it's the evolution of the service. Why did everybody leave for ICQ? Why did skyping become a thing? Why did people leave Skype for Facebook Messenger? Why did we start using Discord for game chats instead? Telegram? Whatsapp? Signal? Because we constantly want new features and server-side support.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • There's a fundamental trade-off as you get big. You can try to use the size to support more niches and allow for the fact that different people think differently. In the example before us, different people actually want to communicate with other people in various ways.

    Or you can try to use the size to maximize profits by finding the one solution that is most profitable and trying to force everyone into the same mental straitjacket. That clearly seems to be the way the google is going these days, but they're

  • weren't they also social messaging something or another? What happened to those?

  • News titles are so pointed and dumb nowadays...

  • With all that money, (Score:3)

    by wolfheart111 ( 2496796 ) on Sunday December 09, 2018 @03:29PM (#57776092)
    Do something good for humanity. We have many problems that need solutions... and our minds are focused on social media... wtf.

  • This is a problem that Google themselves seemed ready to settle once and for all almost exactly 2 and a half years ago when they announced Allo and Duo at Google I/O 2016, this was going to be the two-pronged answer to messaging on Android.

    Google has a mole within its decision making hierarchy. A mole perhaps "planted", "bought" or "compromised" by one of its rivals.

    Otherwise how does one explain the following: -

    Google's inability of one of the world's richest company's inability to execute messaging on a platform it owns?

    Google's propensity to kill off [messaging] products that have traction, replacing them with ones that are half-baked and therefore not really ready for prime-time?

    I can do better even if I am no manager. My suggestion to

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • You got me there...

        Google's inability, even as one of the world's richest companies, to execute messaging on a platform it owns.

    • Toxic Ideology Has Metastasized / Crippled Google (Score:4, Insightful)

      by L_R_Shaw ( 5544684 ) on Sunday December 09, 2018 @04:07PM (#57776246)

      I don't know about a mole sabotaging Google. They have been so mind boggling bad in their execution that deliberate sabotage honestly sounds like a reasonable explanation. One would think even sheer incompetence would manage to get something right over the years.

      However, I have a large number of friends who all went to work for Google back when they were hiring like mad. They all say the ideological lunatics have completely overrun the company. And that inside the company it feels like a bizarre cult. A weird mix of people either virtue signalling in hopes it will keep the ideological crazies from coming after them and another group of people who no longer give a shit and just sit and pick up their paycheck and never do or say anything to bring attention to themselves.

      My friends have told me that so far the cancer hasn't really spread to the main search group other than fucking around with left wing/right wing search results. But if the crazies manage to infiltrate the core search team that Google will crash and burn faster than any large tech company in history. The cost to switch search engines is zero and all this tremendous growth and value Google has generate has largely been due to a small core team of incredibly talented people doing what other companies like Microsoft and all their billions have been unable to match.

      • Have a friend in Google who can confirm exactly what you're saying. He's constantly relaying stuff exactly as you describe to me. Furthermore this isn't just one office, he's in a non US Google office and same shit there. Extreme politic focused justice type people spending all their time on that (and bullying / Gestapoing the rest of the staff) that productivity, is generally down or on fruitless, stupid endeavours.

        Cult seems a fitting description.

    • Re:Here's my theory explaining Google's ineptness. (Score:5, Informative)

      by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Sunday December 09, 2018 @04:49PM (#57776460) Journal

      Google has a mole within its decision making hierarchy.

      Nah. The problem is that Google mostly doesn't have a decisionmaking hierarchy. I say "problem" but it many ways it's also Google's core advantage, though it clearly has its downsides as well.

      Google is a very bottom up company. Throughout most of the organization, decisions are made primarily by the engineers doing the work. They choose a team to work for (new hires are assigned to a team, but most people switch every few years), then look at the problems/opportunities with that team's products and decide what they think needs to be improved/built. They sell their managers / peers on their ideas and, assuming they're successful, set their objectives and key results (OKRs), then go to work.

      Performance reviews and promotions are evaluated primarily based on demonstrated impact, which is a vague term that has several dimensions but is mostly driven by measures of user engagement. Doing great work on a product no one uses is "low impact", as is doing minor work on a successful product. Keep in mind that Google measures success primarily by the "toothbrush metric", which is how many people use a product daily, and that a million users isn't "successful". Successful products have 10E8 to 10E9 users. The most impactful, and therefore most promotable, thing you can do is to launch an entirely new product that becomes successful -- though to be clear people are highly rewarded for doing less visible impactful things, such as building internal infrastructure.

      This creates a very unusual company dynamic, very different from the typical corporate hierarchy. It's designed to harness the brainpower of the large and very bright staff not only to figure out how to build the technology, but also to decide what to build. Promising projects that have potential for great impact find it very easy to hire lots of talented engineers. Projects that are failing, or even just stagnating, find their staff drifting away as people seek more impactful work.

      There are top-down, hierarchical decisions. Upper management does give direction, and perhaps the most powerful lever they wield is headcount allocation. But successful -- or just promising -- projects find it easy to grow their headcount allocation. One of the strongest signals a team can give to the next layer up is that there are lots of engineers who would like to join it. That's not the only decisionmaking criterion, but it's a powerful one. The mere fact that many people want to work on something is considered a good indicator that that thing is important and worth working on, because if it weren't likely to be impactful why would so many impact-seeking engineers want to work on it?

      Throughout most of the company, most of the time, this non-hierarchical, bottom-up structure works very well. The most talented people do seek out the most impactful projects, both because it gives them the best shot at promotion and because it maximizes the odds that they're doing something of benefit for humanity (and, yes, there is a lot of that sort of altruistic sentiment at Google, and it's not feigned or faked). In fact, many of Google's biggest failures were caused when management didn't allow this "natural" self-allocation of talent but instead used arbitrary incentives to drive specific employee behaviors.

      But there are some clearly pathological cases as well, and messaging seems to be the most obvious. I think that people look at messaging and think "This is a simple problem, and if we can solve it well we have a chance to build something that most of humanity uses on a daily basis". It looks easy, and incredibly impactful (per the toothbrush metric), so projects get spun up and attract lots of engineering staff. But while it's easy to build a chat tool, getting hundreds of millions of people to decide to use it is not so easy, so projects stagnate, staff leaves to do other stuff and eventually the project gets shut down because the handful of die-hards who are left to maintain it get overwhelmed and can't keep up.

      So no "mole", no deliberate sabotage. Just a very unusual organization structure with some unusual failure modes.

    • Google has a mole within its decision making hierarchy. A mole perhaps "planted", "bought" or "compromised" by one of its rivals.

      Conquest's Third Law: The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

      Big organizations act that way even when they're not actually controlled by such a cabal. It's principal-agent problems all the way down.

  • is too many choices.

    There really only should be 2 Google messaging platforms.

    1) Personal.

    2) Enterprise.

    They could even share the same software.

    Trying to support/build/update more than a couple of platforms is really only some kind of programmer welfare.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      On top of so many choices every other year they will drop half of these platforms. So why would anyone want to get invested in any of these just for them to get shut down and have to migrate to the next temporary platform.

    • That is where they are going isn't it? Google Messages is the personal one and Hangouts Chat is the enterprise one.

      Google Phone is separate for voice calling as it should be because that is a completely different activity. Google Duo / Hangouts Meet is separate for video calling as it should be because that is a completely different activity.

      The only anomaly seems to be the issue with Google Voice. I guess it just doesn't integrate well with the phone and has to have its own message client. Perhaps they'll

  • All they had to do was enhance gchat, a lot. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AbRASiON ( 589899 ) * on Sunday December 09, 2018 @04:07PM (#57776248) Journal

    Anyone with a Google account had gchat, allow non Google customers to have some kind of access to it through sign ups.

    With work, it could have done all we wanted, considering the age of gchat and Google's original talent pool, it could have been as good as what's app, iMessage, Skype, or practically anything you can think of, combined.

    They had the market at one point. Practically everyone I knew and know, used gchat, long before it was even common to be available on a chat service all day (what's app, Facebook Messenger)

    I'm sure we've all posted this, we've all seen others whine about it.

    I still am surprised EVERY time a new Google article comes up about messaging.
    With the resources, the user base and the ability to "force us" on to a product as Google account holders,
    I don't think I've ever heard of a company drop the ball this badly. Over and over and over and over again.

    I'm normally averse to firing people for mistakes, since they've now learnt a lesson, so they (should) improve. In this case though, several people should be entirely fired, very very much and potentially never let near such roles again.

    Clusterf....

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It was a ubiquitous text chat. It was exactly what I wanted. And Google killed it.

    • Seems like it was the same as hangouts, gplus, and maybe a few other names.

      Google's problem, as I see it, is that I would never trust them to keep something going. They have a reasonable successful product, but feel the need to warp it into something else or just plain kill it off. Why take the risk switching to something you know will likely get killed off in a few years, forcing you to switch again?

  • Codenames over functaionlity (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Google loves their product names as much as they love themselves and cashing advertising checks. This is their biggest problem.

    They not only completely rebrand products but they at the same time force users to completely migrate to new services on a pretty regular basis. Not everyone wants to migrate but in typical arrogant Google style a politely worded FU is the best you are going to get out of them. Google really does not comprehend that their users don't like to be constantly pushed around and told w

  • It's time to abandon proprietary IM services and start using Matrix [matrix.org]. The most popular client/server is Riot [riot.im] but you can run your own server and use different clients if you like.

    Unlike all the different services competing in this space, Matrix is objectively the best [twitter.com]. One of the biggest reasons is that it is federated. Like Google Talk was when it was a proper XMPP server back in the day.

    Don't fall for another big on hype low on substance service like Signal, which is just as centralized as Hangouts and cou

  • How to do a message app (Score:3)

    by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Sunday December 09, 2018 @06:53PM (#57776920) Journal
    Look back at what yahoo had.
    A way of seeing who was online on a GUI.
    The ability to text chat. Use a mic and webcam.

    People just need to be able to see their friends online and communicate with them.
    Typing is fine. A mic and webcam for voice and video support.

  • General Google slack (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Sunday December 09, 2018 @07:39PM (#57777160) Journal

    Google themselves seemed ready to settle

    Lack of competition? Google Maps is also going to shit. They have all these pop-up panels that block the map itself, and no "X" in the corner or equivalent to close them. It's often not even spam panels, it's just shit in your way, like somebody at Google is being paid by panel quantity and graded on their hard-to-close-ness. I've been turning to Bing Maps, gulp.

  • Totally confused (Score:3, Insightful)

    by prisoner-of-enigma ( 535770 ) on Sunday December 09, 2018 @08:50PM (#57777408) Homepage

    I can't understand why Google is spamming us with all these permutations of what should be a simple concept: messaging with integrated voice and video chat. Hangouts does that just fine right now. Why get rid of it?

    I looked at Allo and Duo and was thoroughly underwhelmed. There's nothing they do that Hangouts doesn't already do. What possible incentive would I have to switch to some other messaging app that requires everyone I chat with to switch to the same app?

  • Bring back Google Talk (Score:4, Insightful)

    by trawg ( 308495 ) on Monday December 10, 2018 @12:40AM (#57777972) Homepage

    Google could possibly still win the messaging wars by bringing back Google Talk. This was the perfect messaging application - for users. It was simple, lightweight, native clients, supported simple chat, voice, etc (even video but maybe with a plugin?). Almost everyone I knew used it, even my low-tech family members, because it was simple and everyone had it.

    Hangouts started the exodus; I found it annoying, confusing and bloated and I assume all my family and friends did too, because they dropped it almost immediately. We moved to Whatsapp which is nice and simple and really awesome to use, if you can get past the Facebook connection - which is hard :(

    I think Google can still win here by at least /trying/ to not lose, which is the opposite of what they're doing at the moment. Hangouts, Allo, etc - they've just made a huge mess of everything. Even if they can't figure out how to monetise a nice, simple, E2E-encrypted messaging application with ads, they can claw back important marketshare from competition. But I can't see it happening.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      gTalk and gChat before it were likely killed because of XMPP. You could at one point use any sip client even to make voice calls (including secure). That goes quite against Googles efforts at mining you.

      I suspect many would be surprised to know the protocols used in large corporate environments that aren't IT startups. They are still dominated by Cisco, Avaya, and even older Nortel (BCM, M1, etc) hardware. Some of those speak SIP if you pay the license. They aren't going anywhere because those techn

  • Here is why I use Google Hangouts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by linuxguy ( 98493 ) on Monday December 10, 2018 @01:42AM (#57778210) Homepage

    Google Hangouts:

    1. It works on the phone and all of my computers.
    2. Doesn't need a phone number.
    3. I can voice/video chat, if I want to.
    4. I can share screens.

    What other chat tool does all of these?

    • Don't forget group chat that you can easily opt out of by choosing "leave this hangout."

      Next time someone adds my Voice number to another damn group text I can never opt out of without blocking the actual people might be the last damn time.

    • Wire.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by q4Fry ( 1322209 )

      As I understand it, Slack handles all these cases. Do not take this as a recommendation, though.

  • sms works just fine, and is almost always unlimited & free.
    otherwise, let google fail and perhaps a cool alternative can pick up where they leave a hole.
    maybe even an open protocol or app could rise to the occasion, that would be awesome.

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