Googlers are like toddlers with all the toys in the world: they quickly get bored and move on.
I'm reminded of Paul Graham's essays about this and payments ticks two of the major themes: it's both unsexy and it's a schlep. And that's why Google won't succeed in this space.
Apple uniquely seems to have maintained the ability to tackle these problems. I remember when Apple Pay launched and was derided (here and elsewhere) but every few weeks there'd be another announcement where another group of financial institutions were brought in to the ecosystem. You keep plugging away at that, customers will start using it and after years of schlep you'll have mature payments infrastructure.
Google chat apps were a meme internally even when I was still there (2017). Deprecating Hangouts features, copying Slack, creating new orgs to make the same mistakes all over again (but hey, lots of people got promoted). It was a joke and still is.
And all they had to do was copy iMessage. That's it. Apple had the foresight, market power and wherewithal to push iMessage onto resistant network operators (who were all too happy to continue nickel-and-diming customers with massively profitable SMS charges long after any cost arguments had disappeared).
> Googlers are like toddlers with all the toys in the world: they quickly get bored and move on.
Wrong. Googlers are just like other normal humans and they respond to incentives presented to them. I worked at Google and observed their promo / bonus / compensation practices closely. The safest way to get big bucks was to launch something, invest some metric to measure something and make sure there is a lot of movement on that metric, repeat that N times in your promo packet and get your peers to do the same in their peer reviews, get promoted and immediately jump to the next sexy project.
Maintaining an existing service wasn't considered important early on. Then it started getting lip service. After a few years, it started getting some token awards every quarter or so. Finally, some smart VPs even started promoting 1-2 maintainers just to make a statement and have those counter-examples in their arsenal in case someone brought up the incentives for maintaining existing products. But the vast majority of promotions still went to launches.
My 2c is that something else is contributing to this problem at Google. Search advertising by far dominates revenue so that pretty much everything else is a "rounding error". So projects that aren't part of, or very tightly related to, search advertising are easy to fuck up without really any significant consequences to Google.
I mean, have millions of pissed off users when you're a startup and you're probably toast. Have millions of pissed off users at Google, and as long as they are still using Google search, and viewing webpages where Google ads are displayed, and it probably doesn't matter, at least in the short term.
> So projects that aren't part of, or very tightly related to, search advertising are easy to fuck up without really any significant consequences to Google.
Not only that, but Google monetarily incentivizes frequent product (re)launches - it's the quickest way of getting a promotion and/or more bonuses, but maintaining an old product does nothing for your career or your team (unless you're Search). At some point, I assume the Google brand will lose enough goodwill that someone in leadership will finally address this.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Googler, but information on how Google measures performance and promotes staff is pretty much public information now.
From what I've heard the problem is still the same promo culture.
When people see their peers getting promoted and earning more money by showing "leadership" and "launch"ing some new project vs. optimizing for end user happiness then this will be the outcome.
Changing culture is very hard because all the people who decide on the employees promotion are those who hacked their way up. So it probably will never change
I'm reminded of Paul Graham's essays about this and payments ticks two of the major themes: it's both unsexy and it's a schlep. And that's why Google won't succeed in this space.
Apple uniquely seems to have maintained the ability to tackle these problems. I remember when Apple Pay launched and was derided (here and elsewhere) but every few weeks there'd be another announcement where another group of financial institutions were brought in to the ecosystem. You keep plugging away at that, customers will start using it and after years of schlep you'll have mature payments infrastructure.
Google chat apps were a meme internally even when I was still there (2017). Deprecating Hangouts features, copying Slack, creating new orgs to make the same mistakes all over again (but hey, lots of people got promoted). It was a joke and still is.
And all they had to do was copy iMessage. That's it. Apple had the foresight, market power and wherewithal to push iMessage onto resistant network operators (who were all too happy to continue nickel-and-diming customers with massively profitable SMS charges long after any cost arguments had disappeared).