TECH

Death of the undead announced Google Hangouts

It's November 1, 2022, and that means it's time to say goodbye to Google Hangouts for good. Since last July, the application had its death announced for today, and it was time to say goodbye.

When it was announced, Hangouts was Google's best, most ambitious and most popular messaging effort, and within days it had amassed 5 billion downloads. Its replacement, Google Chat, should already have all your messages and contacts imported automatically, but the new service is a mere shadow of the original Hangouts plan.

Hangouts' shutdown is the latest chapter in the mess that is Google's message history. Google Talk was launched 17 years ago and Google still doesn't have a competitive messaging platform. Part of the reason we're on Google's umpteenth messaging app is that there isn't a solid, and above all stable, home for messaging within Google.

The 2022 message schedule is a great example. The Google Workspace team created Google Chat – which is Google's business team creating a competitor for Slack – and there's Google Messages, a kind of competitor for Apple's iMessage, which apparently came from the Android team. . Is the team that creates Android more or less important than the team that creates Gmail and the rest of Google's applications? Both have their understandable reasons for pursuing their messages, but splitting the user base into two incompatible products makes it difficult for any project to gain traction. In addition to these two major projects, we also have Google Voice and several messaging services hosted in other applications, such as Google Photos and Google Pay.

It is true that Google has already tried to correct this situation, with Google+, which, as you can imagine, never came to fruition. In 2011, then Google CEO Larry Page decided that social was the future and launched the Google+ project across the company. The head of G+ received the title of "Senior Vice President", making him one of eight people who reported directly to Page, establishing Google+ as one of Google's main pillars. That division was supposed to take full ownership of the messages and launched its messaging project, Google+ Hangouts, two years later.

In other words, the death of Hangouts is just another chapter in Google's history, and many are yet to come.

mundophone