Last year Ars Technica published a long article on Google’s history of messaging apps, and it’s a fantastic, thorough takedown of Google’s utter ineptitude in the field.
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.
As someone who was excited about Google Talk, eventually won over by Hangouts, and gradually descended into jilted bitterness, it’s a cathartic article.
At this point, further stories on the topic just feed my schadenfreude.
