Ars Technica tackles the terrible history of Google Messaging

I frequently miss messages from folks who try to use Google's tools. Sometimes the messaging feature hidden in the sidebar of some of my Google apps comes to life and I suddenly get last year's desperate request for help from a friend!

Ah, Google.

Ars Technica walks us through an incredibly detailed analysis of the 15+ years of mistakes Google has been making in the messaging space.

Google's 16 years of messenger wheel-spinning has allowed products from more focused companies to pass it by. Embarrassingly, nearly all of these products are much younger than Google's messaging efforts. Consider competitors like WhatsApp (12 years old), Facebook Messenger (nine years old), iMessage (nine years old), and Slack (eight years old)—Google Talk even had video chat four years before Zoom was a thing.

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. 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.

A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps by Ron Amadeo