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.

Comments

Re:Here's my theory explaining Google's ineptness.

[swillden]

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.