Or is the promotion/churn cycle so high that nobody at all cares anymore?
Capitalism doesn't measure itself in "embarassement" or your opinion, it measures via cold hard cash. And Google has been making boatloads of it year after year after year.
Until that changes, a C-suite won't self reflect. They're "winning", aren't they?
It's not just the CEO's that can't hear anything over the record breaking profit. It's all of society.
As much as I like to shit on gen-z, one great thing they have going for them is awareness and understanding at levels that were unobtainable for my generation, and it's trickling _up_ to the older generation.
A good example: My generation always ended discussions of counter-productive change with "Well, that's progress!". Gen-z are asking "progress towards _what_?". People are waking up to the fact that common accepted "wisdom" can be questioned.
Sure, there are some very smart and aware gen-zs, just as there have been in every generation. But on average they are as ignorant as anyone else, with maybe a bigger than average bias for apathy.
Obviously we are not better than anyone else, and everyone is different.
LoL, this is what I'm talking about, by the way :D
Also, it makes us older folks uncomfortable in a perplexed sort of way. I mean, it's good, but ... we don't understand your understanding.
That’s why competition law enforcement matters.
It is easy to confuse them all, considering those apps got renamed often. By my count, there were four different apps called Hangouts (!), some existing at the same time:
(1) The original Google Hangouts, which replaced Google Talk.
(2) Google+ Hangouts, which was video only. Google+ also had a text messaging app called Huddle.
(3) Google Hangouts Meet, a video chat aimed mostly at the workplace. By the time it was launched Google+ was dead and buried. The “hangouts” was later dropped, making it just “Google Meet”.
(4) Google Hangouts Chat, the equivalent text chat device. They also dropped the word “hangout” from the name, but it was launched as “Hangouts”.
https://developers.google.com/business-communications/busine...
I can't bring myself to care enough about whether whatever was in Docs is still going or not. We both know how it will eventually end up even if it is still going.
Every time there's a leadership shuffle you'll notice products get left behind and eventually retired.
This was especially true in the early-ish days of Google. https://killedbygoogle.com/
There's actual competition.
Competition because, let's be honest, nation states are pushing their own internet apps where they are pushing propaganda (We're winning, Zelensky bad), instead of having "BUY THIS CRAP" every second post. And they often actually put some effort into it ("Zelensky bad, because of complicated historical/economic/... argument that we'll describe in 10 posts, 2 pages each, that you'll probably learn something from" [1][2][3] or "China is a great place to live. Don't mind all the people leaving, even leaving to fight for Putin because that's an actual improvement over China's rural cities' conditions or the many fuckups (how many times have all the fish in the Yantze suddenly died this year? I think we're already at double digits). China is the future!", because, like most governments, both the Russian and Chinese government are full of old, educated people)
Not that the propaganda isn't getting worse too. Just look at rt.com's frontpage today vs 10 years ago.
And they actually sound a lot less cringy than Musk does.
[1] https://www.rt.com/russia/618284-what-russian-generals-are-r... [2] https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/618333-joseph-brodsky-nobel-e... [3] https://www.rt.com/business/616820-uae-ai-company-expanding-...
Surely this is a misunderstanding. How do “all the fish” in a given river die once, let alone over ten times in a single year? Where did you get that information?
They do this to give you an incentive to look for alternatives which you can run yourself. Jitsi Meet for video conferences, XMPP + WebRTC for video calling, something like Nextcloud Talk (i.e. Spreed) for both, etc.
These apps are pretty low hanging fruit and not as involved as one like google maps or ms excel, which cannot be easily replaced.
So person X releases the new app, gets promoted, leaves it behind and of course the “next guy” also wants to leave a mark and therefore creates his own.
Its basically a similar reason why a new JS framework gets released every month.
Google and Microsoft mishandled chat so badly they basically handed Apple and WhatsApp the crown in the consumer space.
Does Meet/Teams even compete with iMessage? They seem to be in competition with FaceTime.
Regardless, Apple still shows green bubbles for WhatsApp users and still offers no way to integrate with the e2ee scheme (and therefore reach blue-bubble status) despite WhatsApp also implementing e2ee. The anti-competitive argument is sound regardless of how shit Google Meet is.
Google doesn’t seem to have any control over or change in its internal politics and “promotion led new projects” culture (which later get replaced by the same tricks they employed).
If you were to ask someone, even people in Google, which app is Google’s official messaging app, they’d have a tough time figuring it out. It changes by seasons.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...
melodyogonna•8mo ago
izacus•8mo ago