π

Google and Its Messaging Solutions

Show Sidebar

Google has quite of a story when it comes to services and apps for messaging:

Somebody could say that this is what you get when people get promoted when they "ship something to the customer" totally neglecting whether or not this "something" has meaning, value or other positive aspects. This is a general cultural issue of the Silicon Valley.

Google was on the right track in my opinion when they worked on Google Wave. It was planned as a federated open protocol with open source code published. This way, each company, organization or community was able to set up their own instance that talked to all other instances. Just like the email infrastructure.

For the first time, I thought that this had the potential to replace business email services in the long run. The technology involved was awesome and highly collaborative work was extremely well supported. In this direction, I've never seen anything better ever since.

Then Google discontinued the development out of the blue and moved the code to the Apache Foundation. It entered a slow but steady death road until it was finally declared dead in 2018.

There are no specific descriptions on the new stuff Google is going to release. My prediction is that this is going to be either dead on arrival or a bit later or it is going to be a niche product for some time.

Considering the market power of Google, the whole story is a declaration of failure.

2022-06-08: The German heise news features a nice article on the latest sundowns of Google message services which is fun to read. The list can now be extended by:

If anybody is telling me about a brand new chat service by Google, I'll just laugh hysterically while going away.

2023-11-10: Yet another bunch of message services from this Mastodon message based on arstechnica:

Comment via email (persistent) or via Disqus (ephemeral) comments below: