[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangout...
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Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?
Several years ago, from within Gmail, I could: * Make a phone call
* Send an SMS * Send a Google chat * Start a video call with my
parents Now, all of this has been split up, and to start a video
call, I have to start a video and _send an email_ inviting someone.
SMS has been split up into a separate web app that won 't work
without my phone being present. How did it come to pass that they
took an easy, integrated system and mangled it so badly? I mean, it
wasn't perfect, but it mostly just worked, and was easy to use.
Author : davidw
Score : 100 points
Date : 2021-09-19 16:01 UTC (7 hours ago)
| mikebonnell wrote:
| Are you sure you don't have Meet and Chat turned off within
| Gmail? If I go to Setting -> Chat and Meet within Gmail, I can
| have chats within Gmail. Meet still does send an invite/give me a
| link to copy, but I can paste into the chat and away we go in a
| new tab. (Former Googler)
| obarthelemy wrote:
| I think it's - corporate ADHD. Managers whose project succeed are
| rewarded away, and the project flounders, until another bright
| young thing starts again... from scratch because ego
|
| - Google is all about algorithms not users, and messaging is
| mostly about listening to users and iterating. Google has thrown
| away... 5 installed bases of users ?
|
| - OEM politics: Google must constantly negotiate what is theirs
| and what is the OEMs'. OEMs want as much as they can, and that
| means messaging. It took iMessage becoming such a forte on
| Apple's side for OEMs to back off on Messaging and allow a single
| Android platform.
|
| - ditto carriers.
|
| - Apple is a spoilsport. Whatever Google do, on iOS it'll never
| be default, nor even as integrated as, iMessage. Knowing you
| won't really have access to the juiciest 50% of the US market is
| a bummer, even if you still can reach 80% globally.
|
| Who cares anyway ? Android allows one to use whichever app as
| default, just pick one. I actually removed Messages because it's
| idiotic and won't display a full text in the Notification, hence
| cuts off credit card confirmation codes, hence prevents me from
| buying anything from my phone. Idiots.
| netsec_burn wrote:
| I believe the reason is that there are incentives internally to
| create new products rather than maintaining existing ones.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| The experience to setup and use was so confusing
| davidw wrote:
| It wasn't, really. You had a Gmail account, and you could
| call/chat/sms/video call your contacts from within it.
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| I think part of the motivation is to provide standalone apps
| for people that _don 't_ have gmail accounts because they're
| using hotmail/yahoo/some overseas equivalent.
|
| Like you say, the old experience was great _if you use
| gmail_. Now the new split out messages thing is annoying for
| gmail users, but not tied to a google account. I think their
| strategy is to break things up into individual lowest common
| denominator services (like whatsapp), instead of having
| something that is pretty good at several things, but not the
| dominant product for any of them.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Having talked about similar questions with friends who
| work/worked at Google, you need to first ask "How do people get
| promoted at Google?" The answer to that (by launching new things
| that get abandoned soon after rather than improving/fixing
| existing things) answers your question and many others like it.
| habosa wrote:
| Everyone at Google says this. It's not true. Of course it
| contributes to the problem, but trust me a broken messaging
| strategy doesn't naturally arise from Software Engineers trying
| to get incremental promotions.
|
| It comes from two parts of google that are totally broken and
| don't know it:
|
| 1) Product Management 2) Legal
|
| The PMs are running from meeting to meeting trying to please
| execs and not doing anything that looks like sophisticated
| product development. Each team has their own broken process and
| crappy dashboards. I can't even describe how irrational and
| broken the process for making product decisions is.
|
| Then there are the lawyers. If you even think about doing
| something interesting or original they will say No and that's
| the end of that. They're shockingly risk averse. Even if every
| single competitor is doing a thing, you almost definitely can't
| do that thing at Google. My team was BARELY allowed to know how
| many users we had! And we certainly couldn't know anything
| about them. Because Legal.
| rlewkov wrote:
| this >> " trying to please execs"
| tylerrobinson wrote:
| This is interesting. As a non-Google PM, whenever I face
| legal or compliance-related pushback on what I think are fair
| uses of data and reasonable risks, I think to myself, There
| is no way I'd be facing this constraint at <big company>! But
| perhaps that's been a bad assumption.
| bombcar wrote:
| If the big company has a cash cow, legal does everything to
| protect the cow.
|
| If the big company is hurting, legal works to find ways to
| justify everything and anything.
| e9 wrote:
| Bad assumption. I worked for Snap and anything that goes
| out has to be reviewed and signed off by legal. Don't even
| get me started on looking at data. For some data requests,
| Directors had to be involved and I had to justify to them
| to give me access for couple hours to some piece of data.
|
| I also worked for FB and it's not as strict as Snap but
| similar.
| pledess wrote:
| Here are comments from a former Google VP about legal
| concerns during Hangouts engineering:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2mD7_nGPA4&t=652s
| enos_feedler wrote:
| There is a Village Global podcast episode where Eric Schmidt
| is asked this question [1]. He basically says that leadership
| did not "get" messaging platforms. I think of this as similar
| to how RIM/blackberry did not "get" the iphone. Nor did Steve
| Ballmer. It's equivalent in screwup magnitude to Microsoft
| not getting mobile. This requires massive leadership
| oversight.
|
| Now, having worked at Google during these times (including
| the Allo launch where the team went around Google trying to
| rally the troops on why it was going to work), I can say that
| the PM structure at Google meant that a ground up led effort
| to build a competitive messaging platform just wouldn't
| happen. PMs basically rotate products every few years and
| nobody really has passion for the thing they are working on
| it. Its a very mechanical role oriented around features,
| roadmaps, growth bookkeeping etc. None of these things would
| yield a competitive messaging platform without a mandate from
| the top.
|
| Now why was there no mandate from the top? Well, I think that
| leadership was confident that Google already had what it
| needed to build messaging into their dominant platforms.
| Between youtube and Android it felt like that if the
| competition in messaging were to grow in feature set, it
| would become more like these platforms (facebook turning into
| youtube with video, etc). Google could then add messaging and
| meet them at some point in the future. Schmidt also
| references youtube as a messaging/social platform in the
| podcast episode.
|
| [1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/village-globals-
| ventur...
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Which current (or recently released) things have a mandate
| from the top at Google at the moment ?
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Cloud. GCP must compete on the same level as AWS and
| Azure. You can reverse engineer this by looking at the
| knobs "the top" has to make something happen. Staffing,
| money, acquisitions, etc.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| So, it's B2b? No B2C or things like Gmail anymore? All I
| can think of rn is stadia.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Schmidt also references youtube as a messaging/social
| platform in the podcast episode.
|
| I've heard that from other people at Google as well. But
| the fact that YouTube isn't a messaging/social app in any
| significant way is part of why I stick with it. I wonder if
| I'm not the only one.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| It's true but not because they haven't tried. I remember
| they had some feature to share a video with your direct
| contacts/friends and open up a chat to talk about it.
|
| I think this just goes to show it isn't as easy as they
| thought it was. I am sure Microsoft leadership thought it
| would be easy to turn a dominant consumer computing
| platform (windows) into a dominant mobile platform. I
| mean it is true that we are seeing a convergence to some
| degree with ios/ipad/macos. The thing is it doesn't
| happen as fast as needed for the competition to
| captialize on it. Facebook might eventually look like
| youtube. However, by the time it happens there will
| nothing left for youtube to gain. The market will be
| cooked.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| i am conflating social network and messaging platform
| here which are too distinct things. Just trying to make a
| point about how easy it is to have irrational confidence
| in using the thing your successful in to gain success
| somewhere adjacent.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| If youtube did start growing the messaging/social
| features you like, how would you remove yourself from it?
| thats where the videos are.
| JohnFen wrote:
| If they were intrusive, I'd just stop using it. The
| internet is full to the brim of videos from other
| platforms. YouTube isn't the only game in town. I use it
| mostly because it's convenient. If it became much less
| convenient (and, honestly, they've made a number of
| "enhancements" lately that have made it a bit less
| convenient), the cost/benefit ratio would no longer be
| favorable.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| This is a meme. Yes, you need to change something about the
| state of the world but that change absolutely does not need to
| be launching a product. I work in the Core organization, which
| builds tooling for the rest of the company. My org within that
| has among the highest promotion rates (even to high levels) in
| the company and the _primary_ thing we focus on is the sort of
| grungy "keep everything functioning" work that everybody says
| is anathema to promotions.
|
| It is no secret that Google's product strategy is a mess. But
| I'm not convinced this is caused by the promo process. For
| communications strategy I think it is instead the following:
|
| 1. Messy code stacks make surviving tool deprecation a problem.
|
| 2. Google seems to be bad at staffing for proactive protection
| against maintenance work. If a product is working, staffing
| dwindles to match the maintenance load. But if suddenly a huge
| mandate comes along like a stack switch, it is not easy to get
| the heads you need to handle that spike in maintenance.
| Instead, the product gets triaged or dies.
|
| 3. It is really hard to push past 1B users of anything, and
| growing populations outside of the US and Europe are not
| desktop focuses, encouraging a "mobile first" solution that
| leaves desktop integration in the dust.
| amelius wrote:
| And there's never another employee saying: wait a second,
| that's not a good idea ...?
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _And there 's never another employee saying: wait a
| second, that's not a good idea ...?_"
|
| In any engineering organization, one can find people saying "
| _wait a second, that 's not a good idea_" to pretty much
| anything.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| That would require you to pretend that Google listens to devs
| more than the MBAs they work for. Nothing says "market
| expertise" like having a sheet of paper that proves you once
| completed a class project to write a business plan.
| FinanceAnon wrote:
| If many managers are onboard with an idea, one engineer
| saying "no" doesn't have much weight. Also, if you keep
| saying "no" to things, you might be perceived as "negative"
| and it might come up in performance reviews. And it's often
| difficult to predict if an idea will work or not - a lot of
| it comes down to execution and future politics.
|
| So, as an engineer, it's probably better to jump on the
| bandwagon with everyone else, and try to get a promotion from
| it. It's stupid, but it's how it works. You will not progress
| within a company by saying "no", even if you are right and it
| stops a bad project.
|
| (I've never worked for google, but did work in a large
| software corporation)
| JohnFen wrote:
| > (I've never worked for google, but did work in a large
| software corporation)
|
| I wouldn't work for Google, but have worked at a couple of
| very large software companies and this echoes my
| experiences with them.
|
| It's one of the reasons that I prefer not working for large
| software companies -- people there tend to be more
| concerned with their own career than the products they work
| on.
| davidw wrote:
| As per my comment below, it's not just stagnation - I was ok
| with where they were 5 years ago - it's that they've made an
| active effort to degrade the experience. Instead of clicking
| once in Gmail to start a video call, there is now some janky
| system where it starts a 'meet' and sends my mom an email
| asking her to join it. An email! When both of us are sitting
| there with Gmail open.
| infogulch wrote:
| Which seems to be a reasonable human decision -- do you want
| to be the person that blocked your colleague from getting a
| promotion?
| criddell wrote:
| I've always wondered why they didn't just clone Apple Messages?
| Instead, they've done this seemingly random walk though the space
| and accomplished very little. Is it because Apple supports
| Messages through hardware sales and Google requires an
| advertising model?
|
| And things like non-encrypted RCS seems downright negligent. I
| don't know how anybody at Google working on this stuff can be
| proud of what they do. From the outside, it's a mess and I'd be
| surprised if internally things look much better.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| I can't understand why they ditched XMPP for corporative Google
| accounts. Our uni uses Google services but for their stupid chat
| I have to keep a Hangouts tab opened because most XMPP clients
| won't work with it.
| mrweasel wrote:
| While I don't know, I have a guess: Google loves building
| infrastructure, and they're pretty good at it. XMPP wasn't
| build in-house, and writing a replacement protocol was
| something Google could do.
|
| What Google absolutely suck at is UI and native applications
| (at least on the desktop). It's also why their products keep
| failing. Seriously how hard would it be to build native clients
| or open the protocol and have it integrated into libpurple. I
| find it extremely hard to comprehend why Google don't just hire
| five of the worlds best macOS developer, five Windows
| developers and five for Linux/BSD and just let them build
| fantastic clients that integrates into each platform and
| provide the very best chat experience.
| notatoad wrote:
| IIRC they were pretty up-front about why they dropped XMPP -
| most of the clients connecting over XMPP were spammers, and
| there were few enough legitimate users connecting over third-
| party clients that it made more sense to drop XMPP support than
| build spam-blocking solutions.
| vadfa wrote:
| Everybody I know moved on from XMPP years ago. Google and
| Facebook dropping their support was indeed big part of it. But
| all in all centralised protocols have proven to be easier, more
| stable and simply better. Want to roll out a new feature? No
| need to sit down with a committee for years or wait for all 3rd
| party clients to keep up: you just implement the feature
| yourself.
|
| Wait... what was the question?
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > But all in all centralised protocols have proven to be
| easier, more stable and simply better.
|
| Show me a centralised protocol that is better at
| interoperability between various services?
| vadfa wrote:
| Given that as of today xmpp practically doesn't
| interoperate with anything, well...
| MattJ100 wrote:
| There are at least hundreds of implementations of XMPP
| that are interoperable (at 5-6 actively developed server
| implementations, many more libraries and many client
| applications). There are at least hundreds of thousands
| deployed XMPP services.
|
| In addition XMPP can be linked with other
| protocols/networks via bridges/gateways. Some examples:
|
| - Spectrum: XMPP gateway project based on libpurple
| (support for many protocols): https://spectrum.im/
|
| - WhatsApp bridge: https://git.eta.st/eta/whatsxmpp
|
| - Telegram bridge: https://github.com/codingteam/emulsion
|
| - Signal bridge: https://gitlab.com/nicocool84/slidge/
| (replacement of
| https://gitlab.com/nicocool84/spectrum2_signald/ )
|
| Given such a diverse ecosystem of open-source and
| proprietary implementations, I'd say XMPP is one of the
| best examples of widespread protocol interoperability
| that there is.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| What do you mean, 'xmpp practically doesn't interoperate
| with anything'?!
|
| Dozens of thousands of xmpp servers interoperate and
| deliver messages to each other. Or do you expect it to
| interoperate with Telegram? What next would you expect,
| UDP <--> ICMP interoperability?
| zaik wrote:
| There are in fact transports for Telegram on the XMPP
| network.
|
| https://jabber.hot-chilli.net/server-
| specifications/#Transpo...
|
| https://www.jabbim.com/home.html
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I don't consider transports as a kind of
| interoperability. From Telegram's point of view it's just
| 2 telegram accounts talking to each other. Wherever else
| this data is sent is not that important.
|
| Moreover, I came to a conclusion that reliance on
| transports reinforces the network effect of external
| services and weakens XMPP's network effect. Do not use
| them.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Because at that time WhatsApp rose to huge popularity, was
| bought by Facebook and all of a sudden Google wanted their own
| walled garden clone.
| bitcuration wrote:
| The truth is, other than search engine advertising, google
| doesn't know how to make money.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Close, but not quite. The only thing Google knows how to do is
| make dirt-cheap large-scale computers and hire people. Then
| they let the people do whatever they want with the giant cloud,
| because the marginal cost is nothing.
|
| So, the reason that gchat etc keep appearing and disappearing
| is because there never was a plan for it in the first place.
| One or a few engineers just threw it together at some point and
| there it was. Nobody truly owned it, it wasn't strategic. The
| churn is just a superficial symptom of the bottom-up product
| management style.
|
| There are tons of Google products and features that were thrown
| together by individuals or pairs of people over a weekend and
| then subsequently got launched to the public. That this is
| possible is pretty neat, but that the products might not be
| durable is a downside.
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| > There are tons of Google products and features that were
| thrown together by individuals or pairs of people over a
| weekend and then subsequently got launched to the public.
|
| Do you have concrete examples?
| jeffbee wrote:
| I can think of two right of the top of my head, that were
| monograph side projects that got launched: Google Keep, and
| the comment system of Google Docs, which you can think of
| as maybe another chat system or social network.
| H8crilA wrote:
| It's not just Search, YouTube has very good earnings too. But
| yes, almost all ads, at really fucking good margins.
| bugBunny wrote:
| They did not build YouTube by their knowledge, they acquired
| competition company. They had Google videos back at that
| time.
| setr wrote:
| Pretty much all innovation large companies do is through
| acquisition. It's much faster and risk-free than doing it
| yourself, from scratch.
| pydry wrote:
| They came up with Google Glass and Google Wave by
| themselves :)
| indymike wrote:
| > How did it come to pass that they took an easy, integrated
| system and mangled it so badly?
|
| I think each of these things were part of gmail at different
| times.
|
| Google talk (their original chat that competed with Yahoo
| messenger) was and sorta still is there even though the talk
| product is something else now.
|
| Google voice was required for SMS. It sorta worked from gmail,
| for a while.
|
| Then they tried to merge all the things into hangouts and it was
| kind of really nice for a few months...
|
| Then they tried Duo, Allo, Hangouts, and Google Chat (which is a
| slack work-a-likiesh thing) and I quite keeping track :-)
| jeffbee wrote:
| Google Voice was not required for SMS from gmail. You used to
| just be able to "chat" with any phone number from within the
| gmail web frontend. It cost a dime, but your dime was refunded
| if the other party responded, as an anti-spam measure.
|
| It was also formerly possible to make a voice call to any phone
| from the gmail web frontend, no Google Voice account required.
| _Now_ you need Google Voice to do this (not Google Fi!).
| davidw wrote:
| For a while, it worked really well. I lived in Italy and had a
| Google Voice number from Oregon, and I could just make US calls
| for free from within Gmail and it didn't just work ok, it was
| pretty good. I could also place video calls to people who were
| contacts right there in Gmail with one click, and it worked
| well too.
|
| It's not that their system has stagnated - they've actively
| made it much worse and more difficult to use.
| boulos wrote:
| Disclosure: I used to work for Google.
|
| The chat and video call are in the same place again (both on the
| web and on mobile). The little TV symbol in Chat, invites someone
| to a video call.
|
| I personally don't love the WeChat-style "make the GMail app into
| your all in one comms app", but I get that some people do.
|
| The last part is that SMS and _phone_ calls were in a separate
| universe and mostly focused on Android.
|
| Roughly at the scale of any mega company, it isn't one company:
| it's several that have the same funding and ease of transfer
| (people, resources, etc.) but not necessarily coordination. To
| wit, there are multiple "CEOs" (YouTube, Cloud, etc.) so I really
| do encourage folks to think of "Google" as like a dozen companies
| (Search/Ads, YouTube, Cloud, Geo, ...).
| pre wrote:
| Presumably they make more money with the user-hostile version and
| the user isn't paying so...
| matv wrote:
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...
| mdasen wrote:
| I'd guess that it's a combination of things, but I think what
| sticks out to me is that a) they probably hit a plateau and felt
| like they needed to do something to break out of that (and didn't
| really have a good idea so they started "mixing things up"); and
| b) messaging seems like a product that everyone wants to solve,
| but doesn't necessarily offer amazing monetary returns.
|
| I loved GChat. It was simple. I could use Pidgin or Adium or any
| number of third-party clients. It did what I needed. However, I'm
| guessing at some point, they were working on and maintaining a
| product that didn't really have the metrics that they were
| looking for. Growth probably slowed a lot once so many people
| were using it (so the honeymoon phase of "we'll figure out the
| money and strategy later" was over). Likewise, one of the great
| things about GChat was that it felt so un-monetized. There were
| no ads or anything. Compared to the alternatives of the day like
| AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc. it just felt like this easy, clean, simple
| messenger that worked without distractions.
|
| When you're a company worth so many billions (now nearly two
| trillion), why are you putting engineering time into something
| that seems to have little growth and little money? Shouldn't you
| re-task those engineers to projects that might be _the next big
| thing?_ I know that in a certain light companies can hire more
| people, but the hiring pool isn 't infinite and you can only grow
| your staff so quickly without things becoming chaotic (you want
| enough veteran staff members around to mentor new people who
| don't know what is going on with the giant systems that are
| created in such a large company).
|
| To me, messaging feels like a product that everyone wants to
| solve because it's cool, but people haven't really figured out
| hoe to monetize it well. I think Facebook wants messaging to
| reinforce its ecosystem and fend off rivals more than anything.
| Apple really likes iMessage because consumers seem to be really
| into iMessage and it seems to create a positive feedback loop to
| get people to buy iPhones (I'm an iPhone user and I don't get
| what's so great about iMessage, but people are really passionate
| about it). What does Google get out of messaging? What does
| Signal get out of it? Signal and Telegram have both been looking
| for business models and they've looked into cryptocurrency, but
| I'd argue that neither has really found a business model.
|
| The messaging apps that seem to have found business models are
| the ones that aren't general chat/text replacements, but
| community chat systems like Discord and Slack. Microsoft's
| efforts with Teams and the new Google Hangouts Chat/Meet
| enterprise Slack clone show that Microsoft and Google see a Slack
| competitor as where the money is in messaging. It's easy to get a
| company to give you $5-25/mo per user when they're spending
| $5,000-50,000 per month on that user already (not just salary,
| but benefits, office space, equipment, etc).
|
| I think the real problem is that there's little money to be made
| in the old Gmail/GChat messaging. So, in comes some project
| manager that wants to make their bones solving a potentially
| large market in messaging and they don't have any wonderful
| ideas, but they're hoping that if they move enough things around
| and rebrand enough things they can cherry-pick some metrics and
| show how genius they are and why they deserve a big promotion.
| You don't get recognition and promotions for keeping a ship
| steady in calm seas. Combine that with a product that doesn't
| seem to meet expectations for return on engineering investment
| and why should Google keep investing in this?
|
| If we look at the companies that have succeeded, they're not
| general messaging apps and they're usually aimed at taking
| advantage of an enterprise play - with a generous enough free
| tier that home people can play with it. I think Google didn't
| want to continue offering a general purpose messenger that didn't
| have a path to profitable growth. They also didn't want to
| abandon messaging. So they kept shaking things up trying to find
| product market fit - profitable fit, not just something that free
| users enjoyed without something in it for Google.
| miked85 wrote:
| I miss the days of AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GChat. I have lost contact
| with a lot of people after all of those died off.
| noah670 wrote:
| The real question is what newer products have managed to stick
| around at Google?
| imbnwa wrote:
| It all went downhill once they shuttered Google Reader
| bitcuration wrote:
| Gmail has. Knock on the wood.
| vaseem wrote:
| Actually it hasn't. Ever get annoyed whether your email is in
| primary, updates, promotions or social.
|
| Previously I had rules, almost all marketing went to labels
| or trash. Is it just me or have the rules become
| inconsistent?
| mrweasel wrote:
| I think I might be in the minority.I never use Gmail
| (GSuite, at work) via the browser, but I still use Gmail,
| it's just via IMAP or "native" Gmail integration.
|
| I was never blown away by the user interface, but many rely
| on the gmail interface to manage their emails effectively.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't use GMail for my personal use, but my work used
| GMail, and that's what I did with that. Google's actual
| interface is not one that I enjoy.
|
| Later, we switched to O365 and so use Microsoft for
| email. I still use IMAP for that, because the Outlook
| interface is not one that I enjoy.
| dhosek wrote:
| Me too. I have one account that I use for my
| fiction/poetry submissions that I'll log into via the web
| interface when I get a response because Apple Mail
| doesn't have a way to be able to apply multiple tags to a
| message and I tag each response with the journal, the
| submission and whether it's a rejection or acceptance
| (plus a star if there's specific feedback). Other than
| that, all my mail access is through Apple Mail either on
| my Mac or on my phone.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You can disable the categories if you care.
|
| See it is another symptom of the bottom-up product
| strategy. Categorization was a key feature of Inbox (by
| Gmail (by Apps (by Google (by Alphabet)))). After they
| killed Inbox they wrecked the categorization bundling, too.
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