Google is killing off a messaging service! This one is the odd “Google Business Messaging” service—basically an instant messaging client that is built into Google Maps. If you looked up a participating business in Google Maps or Google Search on a phone, the main row of buttons in the place card would read something like “Call,” “Chat,” “Directions,” and “Website.” That “Chat” button is the service we’re talking about. It would launch a full messaging interface inside the Google Maps app, and businesses were expected to use it for customer service purposes. Google’s deeply dysfunctional messaging strategy might lead people to joke about a theoretical “Google Maps Messaging” service, but it already exists and has existed for years, and now it’s being shut down.
↫ Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica
When it comes to Google, it’s often hard to distinguish meme from reality.
Google’s Messaging strategy has always reminded me of those refrigerator magnet words, where they string a few words together then add “Messaging” to it.
What Google has always lacked is someone with vision in the leadership position and that is why they stumble so many times.
That’s absolutely not what Google’s problem is. They are an advertising company, and literally every single thing they’ve done for the entire time they’ve been around can be explained by understanding what they see as their core business, and how they compete. If someone comes up with an alternative to their search results driven ad revenue (which absolutely does route traffic to sites that use their own ad platform more than others, and has since the beginning), then they throw money at creating (or buying) a just good enough competitor to try and undermine the alternative. See Google Maps (to destroy Yahoo Maps). Android, to compete with iOS, which they saw as trying to obsolete the web, through the threat of their native apps and Apple’s app ad exclusivity. Google Circles to compete with Facebook. That horrible things they had to compete with Twitter (I don’t remember what it was called.) Google Cloud Platform to compete with AWS. Today we have Gemini to compete with OpenAI – not because it’s necessary, or better, but because OpenAI’s ChatGPT represents a threat to their ad model (as well as human existence). So Google also has what the new hotness has. Different decade, same Google.
They make (or buy) these platforms to salt the earth, and make it harder for anyone to disrupt their own ad business. It’s pure base. competition. That’s it. That’s why their products often suck, and often fail. It’s not a vision problem, they are looking at something else entirely.
while what you say is true they still have a vision problem. And their AI efforts began before OpenAI was founded.
I didn’t know it existed, LOL.
I used it abroad (developing countries) to interact with businesses who otherwise lack communication capabilities. I am sad to see it gone.