Google powers up latest app it'll cancel in two years: Hangouts Chat Google has moved its Slack rival out of beta and into general availability. The Mountain View advertising house this week formally released Hangouts Chat, the chat-and-collaboration platform thing it teased around this time last year. The system was previously limited to organizations enrolled in Google's Early Adopter Program …
It'll be replaced by something else from Google next year.
Coming in 2019: Google-built Hangouts competitor
Coming in 2020: Google-built Hangouts competitor
Coming in 2021: Google-built Hangouts competitor
Coming in 2022: Google-built Hangouts competitor
Google - Master of fracturing and splitting their own userbase. They've even built a competitor to Android to destroy their OS Monopoly (Fuschia)
They don't care about Android, they care about advertising. If they split Android's market share with another OS but it doesn't damage the overall share they get the same advertising revenue and a get out of jail free card when the EU etc. wants to go after them for a smartphone OS monopoly.
Why haven't they created a competitor to Google search yet? Alphabet search? If you're going to hand your users to your competition might as well do it properly.
Note to Google: We don't need 50 different chat apps from you. Get a fucking clue and sort yourselves out. No one cares if you can "innovate" a new chat app every year. What about usability and consistency?
Apple has imessage and that's it. Everyone with an iphone can use it without worrying that next year Apple will remove features for Apple Chat/Text/iChat/iText. After 9 years in control of Android get your fucking act together! [End Rant]
"Google - Master of fracturing and splitting their own userbase."
This is actually a legit business tactic - I saw it while in a previous role. The idea is that the big company that owns the various potentially competing companies is using them to grab more dosh.
For example - say Alphabet brought out "Alphabet Search" to rival Google (as suggested elsewhere in this thread). Both will have slots where you can buy an advert.
In order to get maximum coverage, an advertising space buyer will buy slots on both Google and Alphabet Search... both of which are emptying into Alphabet's coffers.
But discontinuing your products all the time is not. When you discontinue a product, you force people to evaluate a replacement, and there is a possibility that they won't choose another Google product.
When I see a Google offering as a possibility, I immediately discount it and look elsewhere, because of their track record in discontinuing things.
Making fun of Hangouts? A-OK by me. Hate the thing. Making fun of Google product terminations/commitment issues? Ditto, although they still have a while to go before catching up with MS.
Fuschia - that's a bit of a disservice, innit? Fuchsia is partly conceived by the guys who did BeOS and that's quite a pedigree in my book.
Letting aside for a second Google's slurpiness, it's nice to see some experimentation in new OS. When it comes right down to it, you only have 2-3 main families right now:
Linux/BSD/macOS vs Windows. So, basically Microsoft's offerings and (very well done) offshoots of 70's Unix.
Dissing new OSs tryouts is like the folk who repeatedly claim we should have stopped designing system languages at C/C++.
I dunno about you, but I find the Go/Rust/Swift stuff are shaking that up in new and novel ways.
There's nothing wrong with trying out new from-scratch OS architectures. It's not my money anyway, so why not let Google have a go?
Aren't there enough chat apps already?
One presumes there are two pieces to the "app": the backend and the frontend. Presuming they don't manage to fubar the design and make it all proprietary and stuff, I presume someone could make a Purple/Pidgin plugin for it.
Of course, I haven't had occasion to fire up Pidgin in a year or more, once everyone else stopped using the various chat services.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
