Gmail had its own real-time communication team. Hangouts was third, a real-time video chat product embedded in Google+. Talk was another, but it was based on an old standard that predated the advent of cloud computing. Google+ Messenger, a real-time communication platform that launched last year, was the first piece, but it only existed inside of Google+. The messaging experience was neither consistent or unified, and it wasn’t even easy to use.
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"There is a lot of code that existed that from a high-level point of view, if we just crunched it together, should’ve turned into one product," says Singhal. Google’s lack of a unified messaging platform became something of a mystery, since it seemed like Google had all the necessary pieces. "The notion of creating something that’s social and that’s always available wasn’t the same charter as we set out with when we created Talk." With Hangouts, Singhal says Google had to make the difficult decision to drop the very "open" XMPP standard that it helped pioneer. Talk, for example, was built to help enterprise users communicate better, Singhal says. As Singhal puts it, "When we started looking at the project we realized, and this sounds obvious in retrospect, that we built a lot of the communication products at Google without smartphones, without social networks in people’s lives." Google instead spent its time building out mobile apps like Gmail, Google Now, Google Drive, and Google+, allowing its early lead to evaporate. Google’s lack of a unified messaging platform became something of a mystery, since it seemed like Google had all the necessary pieces In April of this year, people sent more messages using chat apps than SMS while Google sat on the sidelines with its little-used Google+ Messenger app. BlackBerry Messenger drove millions to buy a BlackBerry, and in recent years tiny startups like WhatsApp and established players like Facebook have grown to process billions of messages a day. Since then, a new category of mobile messaging has emerged: always-on chat with rich media attachments like voice memos, read receipts, and group chats. In 2005, the company launched Talk, essentially the best experience in what was then the hottest category: instant messaging. Once upon a time, Google was at the forefront of the messaging game. It could be a core product that stands next to Search, Gmail, and Docs, acting as a key part of Google’s suite of services. Hangouts is more than just a way for Google to take on SMS. At the new “One Google,” major projects require deep collaboration across multiple teams. The story of Google Hangouts’ fractured development and eventual launch reveals quite a bit about how the company is changing from a place where tiny projects are initiated at random into one that’s being forced to organize and coordinate across products. It’s a fusion of Google’s strengths in cloud computing, search, and mobile. It spans Android, iOS, Chrome, and Gmail. Since then, Google’s fragmented messaging story has become Google’s behind-the-times messaging story with apps as diverse as iMessage, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger grabbing both the spotlight and the market share.īut today, the wait is over as Google introduces a new messaging platform it’s calling Hangouts. What he didn’t say was that Google had already been working on a solution for a year, and that the results of those efforts were still a year away. “I think we've done an incredibly poor job of servicing our users here.” When faced with a question about Google’s fragmented communication tools, director of real-time communications Nikhyl Singhal responded quickly and honestly, as if he’d prepared for the question. Google announced the Nexus Q, an exercise in over-produced gadgetry meant to stream music to your home theatre system.Īway from the spectacle, during a quiet “ fireside chat” for a product that was not receiving any major updates, Google admitted it had a serious messaging problem - or rather, a messaging app problem.
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Developers lined up to receive not one, but four free devices costing $300 or more. Skydivers equipped with futuristic glasses live-broadcasted their descent into the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco during last year’s Google I/O.
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