Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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 that doesn't respond to polite requests. And you have to practically serve them a cease and desist just to get them to stop send you ads or something. It is kind of silly, really and a huge waste.
Do something good for humanity. We have many problems that need solutions... and our minds are focused on social media... wtf.
[($)]
We already have an open protocol: XMPP. Everyone, including Google, turned away from it for some reason.
The other open protocol that is specific to phones is SMS, which is still the most popular way of communicating in some countries (those where SMS is cheap and reliable).
The reason was, other people were using it, and if the communication is standard then nobody will accept advertisements.
Breaking inter-operation is the only way to force people to use a walled app, and a walled app is the only way to push advertisements.
That's why they convinced people to stop using email, and then they convinced people to use an app instead of TXT. Even though the app only works on a phone.
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 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.
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 the whole cycle to begin anew when some person or team craps out a new product.
The only real lesson in any of this is not to use one of these products or services to begin with because eventually Google will dick with it in ways that ruin what made it useful in the first place and if you're still using it after that point, they'll only drop support for it later and leave you in a lurch if you were depending on it for anything important.
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.)
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"
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.
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
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.
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?
> So why do people keep using spyware services when there is something like tox available?
I'd love an encrypted chat client, but there's a trade-off between security and convenience that people who make encrypted chat applications aren't willing to acknowledge. I'd never heard of Tox before, but I see it's no exception. It features "perfect forward secrecy," which is great if you're a spy trying to hide from the NSA, but not so great if you just want to send a message to a friend whose chat client isn't presently online.
Look at every popular chat application and there are some common features to all of them: You can send messages to friends who aren't online. You can have the application open on your PC and on your phone and messages sent to you will be received on both devices. You can have it open on your PC and closed on your phone, receive messages on your PC, then later open it on your phone and see those messages that were sent to your PC. You and a bunch of friends can join a group and send messages that are sent to everyone in the group. This is all just common functionality that everyone expects from every chat application.
Security is just one feature of a chat application. Just because it might be the only feature you care about doesn't mean that other people are willing to give up every other feature just to get security. If they have nothing to hide, those other features are far more valuable than encryption.