Google’s 16 years of messenger wheel-spinning has allowed products from more focused companies to pass it by. Embarrassingly, nearly all of these products are much younger than Google’s messaging efforts. Consider competitors like WhatsApp (12 years old), Facebook Messenger (nine years old), iMessage (nine years old), and Slack (eight years old)—Google Talk even had video chat four years before Zoom was a thing.
Currently, you would probably rank Google’s offerings behind every other big-tech competitor. A lack of any kind of top-down messaging leadership at Google has led to a decade and a half of messaging purgatory, with Google both unable to leave the space altogether and unable to commit to a single product. While companies like Facebook and Salesforce invest tens of billions of dollars into a lone messaging app, Google seems content only to spin up an innumerable number of under-funded, unstable side projects led by job-hopping project managers.
Because no single company has ever failed at something this badly, for this long, with this many different products (and because it has barely been a month since the rollout of Google Chat), the time has come to outline the history of Google messaging. Prepare yourselves, dear readers, for a non-stop rollercoaster of new product launches, neglected established products, unexpected shut-downs, and legions of confused, frustrated, and exiled users.
In the beginning, there was Google Talk, and things were good…
#technology #Google #messengers
to be fair, Google talk worked alright for some time, but quickly fell behind in the race since it was never a priority
Yep it was still open too and interfaced with XMPP and others…
I just don’t really get why Google tries to tap into the instant messenger market as the userbase is hooked elsewhere. Especially considering how they have a bad track record of so many failed messenger apps. The company can either give up or learn from its past mistakes, but the latter is yet to happen.
I really wish we had a proper acknowledged open standard for messaging like we have for e-mail. Then any client app can be developed, but we can all interconnect and communicate from anywhere. Yes we have XMPP but it never seems to have taken off as a standard for everyone.
I don’t see it happening any time soon.
Yep it is certainly not going to be coming from Google, Facebook, etc. Problem is the “smaller” players who do embrace say XMPP and similar, are there, but there is no tipping point approaching. Us, in the global context, can actually sway these things by making the right choices, and choosing to use the open players… But that has also not happened as the vast masses are locked-in by themselves to those walled gardens. So yes, it’s a big Catch-22, and not going anywhere ;-)
Matrix seems to be adopted very well by some communities, especially in the tech world. I reduced my messaging apps from WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Threema, Discord, IRC, Slack and Wire to just Signal, Discord and Matrix.
That was quite a time warp into the past. I count 20+ failed services, and they couldn’t commit to one, and just make it better.
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Yep it’s really sad. Challenge for me the other day, was just realizing I had no clue which was Google’s “current” chat app…
Nailed it: “This is how it always works with Google chat services. The ones that don’t get shut down eventually are abandoned and left to rot. Users get frustrated with the lack of continual development and old clients and slowly migrate to other services. Eventually, a new Google team comes along with plans to reboot everything.”
Why, Google, why?
The Google corporation is a convoluted mess indeed: Google Voice was an acquisition and created its own team. Wave was a new project started by the Google Maps founders. Google Buzz was from the Gmail team.
old habits die hard https://killedbygoogle.com
I always find this website redundant. Most ideas fail. It would make sense that big companies want to keep their new ideas going, since they don’t have to worry about funding to see it through. So it makes sense that Google would have a bunch of products that failed.
yeah but they killed products which didn’t fail as well. They should’ve open sourced some of it at least. Especially their social networks (Google+, Orkut) were pretty innovative and useful. Some features of the cancelled products were used by competitors and the users liked that.
