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Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

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Re: Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

#51

Post by pledess »

tylerrobinson wrote: post #29
habosa wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 look…

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 ! But perhaps that’s been a bad assumption.

Here are comments from a former Google VP about legal concerns during Hangouts engineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2mD7_nGPA4&t=652s

Re: Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

#52

Post by setr »

bugBunny wrote: post #39
H8crilA wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just Search, YouTube has very good earnings too. But yes, almost all ads, at really fucking good margins.

They did not build YouTube by their knowledge, they acquired competition company. They had Google videos back at that time.

Pretty much all innovation large companies do is through acquisition. It’s much faster and risk-free than doing it yourself, from scratch.

Re: Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

#53

Post by MattJ100 »

vadfa wrote: post #42
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Given that as of today xmpp practically doesn't interoperate with anything, well...

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.

Re: Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

#54

Post by johnchristopher »

enos_feedler wrote: post #30
habosa wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 look…

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 (i…

Which current (or recently released) things have a mandate from the top at Google at the moment ?

Re: Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

#55

Post by enos_feedler »

johnchristopher wrote: post #54
enos_feedler wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (i…

Which current (or recently released) things have a mandate from the top at Google at the moment ?

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.

Re: Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

#56

Post by tacostakohashi »

davidw wrote: post #14
princevegeta89 wrote: post #5

The experience to setup and use was so confusing

It wasn't, really. You had a Gmail account, and you could call/chat/sms/video call your contacts from within it.

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.

Re: Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

#57

Post by criddell »

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.

Re: Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

#58

Post by UncleMeat »

mdorazio wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

#59

Post by johnchristopher »

enos_feedler wrote: post #55
johnchristopher wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which current (or recently released) things have a mandate from the top at Google at the moment ?

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.

So, it's B2b? No B2C or things like Gmail anymore? All I can think of rn is stadia.

Re: Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?

#60

Post by zaik »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #49
vadfa wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that as of today xmpp practically doesn't interoperate with anything, well...

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?

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

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