81–90 of 96 posts
It's just not messaging / video / hangouts, Google "botched" their Pay app too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281259
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…
This allows Google to be lazy about product-market fit and avoid asking the hard questions like "is this thing really better than the alternative" and "what's the ROI for people who adopt this".
I worked on what I'd consider a failed product, and there was no explicit acknowledgement of that fact ever, we just waited 3 years and quietly turned it off. A more drawn-out version of the same thing happened with Google Plus. There was never anything like a "product postmortem".
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Close, but not quite. The only thing Google knows how to do is make dirt-cheap large-scale computers and hire people. Then they let the people do whatever they want with the giant cloud, because the marginal cost is nothing. So, the reason that gchat etc keep appearing and disappearing is because there never was a plan for it in the first place. One or a few engineers just threw it together at some point and there it…
> There are tons of Google products and features that were thrown together by individuals or pairs of people over a weekend and then subsequently got launched to the public. Do you have concrete examples?
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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 protoco…
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And there's never another employee saying: wait a second, that's not a good idea ...?
> " And there's never another employee saying: wait a second, that's not a good idea ...? " In any engineering organization, one can find people saying " wait a second, that's not a good idea " to pretty much anything.
I'd guess that it's a combination of things, but I think what sticks out to me is that a) they probably hit a plateau and felt like they needed to do something to break out of that (and didn't really have a good idea so they started "mixing things up"); and b) messaging seems like a product that everyone wants to solve, but doesn't necessarily offer amazing monetary returns. I loved GChat. It was simple. I could use…
I miss the days of AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GChat. I have lost contact with a lot of people after all of those died off.
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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…
How many PMs does Core have compared to other PAs? The problem isn’t really with SWEs but with the entire incentive structure of PMs and the product management chain. They in turn are able to get more SWE headcount for these unfruitful ventures and end up failing upwards.
At the very least, I think it is clear that Google’s product failings are not just a result of the promo system.
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> Schmidt also references youtube as a messaging/social platform in the podcast episode. I've heard that from other people at Google as well. But the fact that YouTube isn't a messaging/social app in any significant way is part of why I stick with it. I wonder if I'm not the only one.
If youtube did start growing the messaging/social features you like, how would you remove yourself from it? thats where the videos are.
But I think the reason why Google didn't keep it is because there is no way to insert ads into it.
This is the main part about Google that we have to understand - Google is an ads distribution company. Like a billboard company or the company that plasters ads on bus stands & public benches. Any product they have will have a place to serve ads.
Serving ads in Gmail was a bad idea, but they have a nice user base. So, now they are offering it as a service that you pay for. I hope they come back to that.
Your google id needs to be used as an id instead of relying on mobile phone numbers.
I hope they bring back G Talk.
The issue with meet is the hassle of sharing the code with everyone. They should just have the option of a friends list.
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If youtube did start growing the messaging/social features you like, how would you remove yourself from it? thats where the videos are.
If they were intrusive, I'd just stop using it. The internet is full to the brim of videos from other platforms. YouTube isn't the only game in town. I use it mostly because it's convenient. If it became much less convenient (and, honestly, they've made a number of "enhancements" lately that have made it a bit less convenient), the cost/benefit ratio would no longer be favorable.