![]() A competitor emerges-iMessage has entered the chat.Google+ Huddle/Messenger-I guess we should have some kind of DM function.Google+ Hangouts video chat-The first Hangouts.The Google+ Era (2011)-Google's social panic.Slide’s Disco (2011)-An independent app escapes the Googleplex.Google Buzz (2010)-The non-consensual social network.Nobody knew what Wave was for or how to use it.Google Wave (2009)-An email killer from the future. ![]() Google Voice (2009)-SMS and Phone calls get a dose of the Internet.Google Talk ran Android's entire push notification system.Google Talk (2005)-Google's first chat service, built on open protocols.Prepare yourselves, dear readers, for a non-stop rollercoaster of new product launches, neglected established products, unexpected shut-downs, and legions of confused, frustrated, and exiled users. While companies like Facebook and Salesforce invest tens of billions of dollars into a lone messaging app, Google seems content only to spin up an innumerable number of under-funded, unstable side projects led by job-hopping project managers. There have been periods when Google briefly produced a good messaging solution, but the constant shutdowns, focus-shifting, and sabotage of established products have stopped Google from carrying much of these user bases-or user goodwill-forward into the present day.īecause no single company has ever failed at something this badly, for this long, with this many different products (and because it has barely been a month since the rollout of Google Chat), the time has come to outline the history of Google messaging. But you only have until next year to download your old Hangouts data, so don't delay.Currently, you would probably rank Google's offerings behind every other big-tech competitor. A lack of any kind of top-down messaging leadership at Google has led to a decade and a half of messaging purgatory, with Google both unable to leave the space altogether and unable to commit to a single product. If you're on Google Workspace, you're already using Chat. That underbelly of the tech world aside, however, there's no question that Google Chat is a great service with plenty of features, from an idle status to the ability to create personal tasks from any message. In reality, there's a good case to be made that maintaining services or code is actually more important than creating new ones. ![]() The implication is that more code is better, a thought process that prioritizes creation over the act of maintenance. If true, this is a tech culture failing that's not dissimilar from the logic behind one story that emerged last week during the Twitter takeover: Engineers were asked to print out their last 30 to 60 days of code to show Elon Musk. Hint: It has to do with chasing promotions. Google insiders explain why Google launches many products and then abandons them. But there may be a less flattering explanation for why Google has so many different and often slightly redundant services and tools: A corporate culture that rewards “move the needle” launches more than maintaining them. The switch gives business and personal users the same service and functionality, keeping everyone on the same page. ![]() Google's business-focused services were the first to migrate, with Google Chat available for messaging, Google Meet for video conferencing, and Google Workspace (which was previously “G Suite,” which was previously “Google Apps for Work,” which was previously “Google Apps for Your Domain”) to bundle them together. The switch from Hangouts to Chat has been in the works since October 2019. After that, it'll be gone forever, in yet another example of the inevitable “link rot” style loss of data that constitutes life on the internet. Access to the Hangouts Chrome extension was also revoked.Įven now, all the chat history that you might have tied up with Hangouts over the years can still be recovered, but there's a deadline for saving it as well: Google Takeout will let users download their data up until January 1st, 2023. ![]() By mid-year, users lost access to the Hangouts mobile app, and were guided to upgrade to Chat, either within Gmail or via the separate app. ![]()
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