On August 24, 2005, Google introduced the world to its very first instant messaging platform known as Google Talk. Due to the fact that this corporation has been in the messaging business for 16 years, it can be deduced that Google has been manufacturing messaging clients for longer than some of its competitors have been in business. You can’t say that Google has a dominant or even stable instant messaging platform today because of the practically continual strategy changes that have occurred over the past fifteen years, the introduction of competitor products, and internal sabotage.
Because Google has spent the past 16 years reinventing the messenger wheel, more focused companies have been able to release products that compete with Google’s offerings. It’s very embarrassing to note that almost all of these products are far younger than Google’s many messaging initiatives. Take into consideration some of Zoom’s competitors, such as WhatsApp (12 years old), Facebook Messenger (9 years old), iMessage (9 years old), and Slack (8 years old). Google Talk even featured video chat 4 years before Zoom became a reality.
You would probably rank Google’s offerings lower than those of any other major technology competitor at the moment. Due to the absence of any type of top-down messaging leadership at Google, the company has been stuck in messaging limbo for the past decade and a half, unable to abandon the market entirely and unwilling to commit to a single product. While other companies, such as Facebook and Salesforce, pour tens of billions of dollars into a single messaging app, Google appears content to do nothing more than spin up an innumerable number of side projects that are either under-funded or unstable and are led by project managers who frequently switch jobs. There have been periods of time when Google momentarily created a successful message solution; however, the company’s consistent shutdowns, focus-shifting, and sabotage of established products have prevented it from taking a large portion of these user bases or user goodwill forward into the present day.
Because no one corporation has ever failed at something this horribly, for this long, with this many distinct products, the moment has come to sketch the history of Google messaging. This is because it has barely been a month since the release of Google Chat. Dear readers, please brace yourselves for a never-ending rollercoaster of new product launches, neglected established product updates, unexpected product shut-downs, and legions of bewildered, frustrated, and exiled people.
