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Google Just Can't Get the Message (phandroid.com)
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.
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.
They are calling the new system "Chat and Meet"? Seriously?
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.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You heard it here first. And since Microsoft chromified edge, they will adopt a Google service for skype.
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 merely following the old trail of the other corporate cancers. (I still think the most plausible solution approach lies in pro-freedom anti-greedom rules of the road (including tax policies).)
By the way, it isn't limited to business. It also applies to universities, and I think I have experience with schools at both ends of the spectrum (as well as a few in the middle). In the academic context it maps to whether they are teaching big thoughts or obedience.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I was under the impression that the future of messaging apps on smart phones was going to be that the end user chooses a client to work with an open protocol. Similar to IRC, but optimized for LTE.
weren't they also social messaging something or another? What happened to those?
News titles are so pointed and dumb nowadays...
They deserve it.
Corporatism != Free Market
That was GV before Google screwed it up.
GV hasn't worked correctly for a few years in Chromium. I've had to get to the Legacy version every time.
I never understood why Google wanted it, unless they were using all the free voice calls to train their speech-to-text tools. I hate to say this but I got an email translated to text yesterday that was completely wrong. It was one of those that you want to forward to the other person for a laugh.
Never heard of a meat market... its where all the chics r. :P
[($)]
Do something good for humanity. We have many problems that need solutions... and our minds are focused on social media... wtf.
[($)]
Granted I don't use Google for anything after getting rid of GMail but I've never heard of these nor has anyone else. I I don't know anyone who actually uses Hangouts.
Said it before, Google's problem is Google (and Alphabet).
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 Google: Buy on of the more popular messaging services. That's what FB did, right?
Google's inability of one of the world's richest company's inability to execute messaging on a platform it owns?
What the fuck?
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.
You got me there...
Google's inability, even as one of the world's richest companies, to execute messaging on a platform it owns.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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 what to do and constantly migrated out of their digital homes.
Imagine for a moment if Google did a service called "Google House" and forced people to move to unfamiliar homes on a semi regular basis. This really is not that far a stretch from forcing users to leave a familiar interface and forcing them into a new one that often does not have the same functionality that the old one did. Imagine if "Google House" forced you to move into a home without a washer and dryer or without enough room for your king sized bed?
What Google does not realize is that this constant reinventing of the wheel is not making them money, It's not getting more users for them and all it's really accomplishing is letting their team of nerds masturbate their text editors and jizz useless code onto their servers that they will eventually throw away when they piss off the users who refuse to use it anymore.
They did this with Picasa to me. I had a massive Gallery and they forced the migration onto Photos and was nice enough to use my own storage which I paid them for to do it. Then they disabled the ability to upload new photos and provided their photos product which did not have the same functionality that Picasa did. Then of course because they can't secure Google + they are shutting the whole mess of it all down.
What Google accomplished was that I won't use any of their products anymore. I won't touch any of their home automation products with a 10 foot pole nor am I interested in any of their products in the future. When they get around to fucking over more users like this they will soon earn a reputation similar to Microsofts where people avoid them out of course whenever they can.
I assume that is most of us that use google stuff...
Bleh.
Seriously, I just wonder who posts these "stories", but even more, I wonder why.
Is there seriously nothing more important right now?
Is there a silicon valley equivalent of "get a life"?
Google sees threats such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and so on and responds. Enter Google Plus. Enter Hangouts. They are not well thought out and are a knee jerk reaction. It is expected, because there is a link in gmail about them, that folks will hop on board.
Take google local as an example? A response to Yelp and Facebook adding place support. Still canâ(TM)t handle merging a multiple location business into one news feed. Still offers no useful interaction with followers.
Google needs to plan products or theyâ(TM)ll just be search and gmail, and itâ(TM)s only a matter of time before something better comes around with Bing getting better and better and Yandex and Baidu supporting more English results (gearing up?)
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
I have to admit I don't keep such a close eye on Google or what they do internally. I have no idea what 3/4 of the products named in the summary even are or what they do. Given that the summary is all about how most of them are going away (or already have), I'm *happy* I don't pay attention to whatever the fuck Google is doing. Sounds like they can't commit to anything.
Google could stop existing tomorrow morning and it would probably be for the best. And they should take Facebook and Twitter along with them.
what's sad is that so many of those failures are due to having too many products that people can't be bothered to try
my non-tech wife does not know what Hangouts is but she knows what Messages is, and she doesn't even want that, because she already has an SMS app built into the phone, also made by Google, just older, but it works.
dominating markets by making cool stuff with cool names doesn't work as well anymore, particularly in this space of messaging.
their only hope is to do what Microsoft did, leverage their OS to force new experiences on people that they don't want in order to teach them what a better tomorrow looks like
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The simple solution is for people to just use tox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol)
It is fully encrypted P2P protocol which means that nobody can spy on it and nobody can kill off the service. It also supports messages, video chat and phone calls.
There is a native Linux client, Windows client, Android client, IOS client, web-based client, even console client:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol)#Clients
So why do people keep using spyware services when there is something like tox available?
WhatsApp is straight out.
WhatsApp, for example, is nothing more that stolen code from a open-source XMPP client, with a "encryption" wrapper around it, to deliberately make it incompatible with anything else. At first, the "encryption" was such a trivial joke, that that was really the only reason it was there. Nowadays it uses the same encryption as Signal, but there's no point, given that it’s Facebook code talking to Facebook servers through it.
Everyone, including Google, just copied that crime scheme.
They mostly "excuse" it with XMPP's inherent inability to function when the receiving device isn't constantly running and having have a listening port open. And them having to add a custom solution for it to work on mobile phones.
Except that Signal's Moxie Marlinspike* has solved that and made it both a standard and a built-in extension of current XMPP.
Yet you still don't see anyone caring one bit about interoperability. Typical business leeches.
Oh well, at least I run my own federating Signal server and fork for our company now...
_ _ _
(* Maybe because Marlinspike really really isn't a nice fella to interact with. His social skills are sometimes unacceptable, not exactly like Linus’s, which at least were open and honest, but comparatively problematic. Which is unfortunate, given that he's quite a skilled programmer. I guess it comes with the job.)
It's time to abandon proprietary IM services and start using Matrix. The most popular client/server is Riot 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. 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 could one day be ruined just as Google Talk/Hangouts was.
Use something that is fully open source, fully federated, and built to last. Use Matrix.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Who in their right mind is going to invest time and effort into any new Google offering when Google has a long track record of blowing up their new products a few years after introducing them.
How long is the laundry list of previous Google offerings that have just gone up in smoke because Google just gave up on them?
For that matter, apart from their search engine (their core business) and the other companies they acquired (like YouTube), have there been any other successful new products from Google?
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.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Well, I'll keep using watsapp and Telegram, because they don't disappear every two years or so.
Well, that's just stupid.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
You going to pay for it?
yeah because text IMing uses so much bandwidth
It uses more than zero. If you pay for zero, you get zero.
that mobile telco's and ISPs couldn't possible provide that as part of baseline service.
For one thing, they don't. T-Mobile's baseline cellular service ($3 per month) includes 30 minutes or texts and 0 MB/mo of client data. For another thing, accounting for bandwidth on the client side is not enough; you also have to account for bandwidth on the server side in order to allow two NATted users to communicate or two users to communicate if one happens to be offline at a given moment.
I just tried to sign up for Telegram through web.telegram.org using Firefox on Linux, but I got an error message after I entered my home phone number:
I tried the same on the web using the default web browser on and Android device, and after sticking on "Generating keys..." for a minute, it gave me the same error. What steps should I take to correct this error?
And haven't ever used any of the others.
I don't get it. Why so much redundancy? And how would they ever monetise it.
With WhatsApp the direction is clear. They'll shovel ads down your throat as status updates which can't be cleared.
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?
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
we all know what you said is nigger
Failed messages or messages sent to offline contacts are automatically rescheduled for delivery the next time the recipient comes online.
Can the message be delivered once the recipient comes online even if the sender has since gone offline? Or must both be online at once? If the latter, then rescheduling for delivery doesn't help Alice send a message to a group including Bob if Alice and Bob are rarely online at the same time because they live in different time zones. Or would Alice just see a view of the group minus Bob and Bob one minus Alice?
In addition, you didn't mention how you plan to handle network address translation (NAT). Even if Alice and Bob are online at once, if they are both behind an ISP-controlled NAT, establishing a TCP connection from Alice to Bob or vice versa is unlikely to be possible, causing messages between the two to remain "rescheduled for delivery" state forever unless there is some server that can listen for incoming connections from both participants and forward messages from one connection to the other.
It depends on the plan. The unlimited plan you describe charges more for one month than I pay for cellular service in a year on my pay-per-minute plan. In order for someone on a $3 per month pay-per-minute plan to make room in his budget to upgrade to a $60 per month plan, he'd probably need to cancel home wired Internet. Using cellular Internet as a substitute for home wired Internet is practical only if the $60 per month plan includes unlimited use of the phone as a hotspot, or at least 50 GB of hotspot use per month. Does it? If so, what U.S. carrier?
includes 30 minutes or texts
So then they do provide you with that service.
Not at the desired volume at an affordable price. In order to shift all my instant messaging from IP to SMS, I'd need to pay a lot more per month to my cellular carrier than I currently do.
The hard part about installing yet another native Android app is figuring out what app to uninstall to make room, as not every app allows itself to be installed to the SD card. So I tried installing the app on a different device, a Galaxy Tab A 8" tablet, and got "Telegram will call you in 2 minutes". I was pleasantly surprised at this, as not a lot of services are capable of falling back to a voice call should SMS fail. (Google can, but Twitter can't.)
What would be the most practical way for someone who owns only desktop and laptop computers, not an iPhone, Android phone, iPad, or Android tablet, to use Telegram?
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?
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.
That's too bad for you then. Most people are connected all of the time.
I see this "I got mine" mentality as part of what's wrong with software publishers' behavior.
My ISP doesn't do that nor have I ever heard of a legitimate ISP ever doing that.
Last I checked, all home ISPs in Myanmar used CGNAT according to Bert64, because there just aren't enough IPv4 addresses to go around. So do 90 percent of mobile ISPs in Europe.
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?
Now that's impressive!
I would also add Google Voice to the list of products Google had tried to kill. Then at the last moment, Google resurrected Voice from the ash pit. Google has an obvious history of producing multiple versions of the same product/service, and then waiting to see which ones succeed. But some of Google's decisions, like trying to kill Google Voice, and the feature set of Google Allo, seem to completely ignore what users really want.
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.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.