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Does Gmail want to be instant messaging? New UI experiment says “yes”
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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Instant Messaging, in particular, has been a series of failures of both vision and design by Google.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-of-instability-the-history-of-google-messaging-apps/
The golden opportunity was when Hangouts was the default SMS app on Android. The same technique has been very successful for Apple.
I still can't understand why they killed hangouts
At the point they killed it, I do. It was an also-ran in the space with no strategy for growth. What I don't understand is why they caved to pressure from carriers for an SMS-only app as mentioned in the article, or why they keep trying to launch new chat apps that offer no unique value proposition.
It just doesn't make sense, it worked almost identically to apples iMessage when the person was also on Android, integrated nicely with Google Voice, had a web interface and they could have just implemented RCS, instead they made allo/duo, killed those off and now we have messages, which is fine but is just sms and RCS... Just seemed like such a waste of effort to do all of that when you already had a working product with integrations already built out.
Google is infamous for allowing valuable products to wither and die for no externally apparent reason. Hangouts, more than most was a major strategic error in my opinion.
Of course if they hadn't screwed it up third-party messaging options might be even less popular, and that would be unfortunate.