Comment by compsciphd

Google leadership failed in chat because they forgot the most important thing. Metcalf's law. the value of a network is scales to the square of the number of users.

when they wanted to create new chat apps, they had a choice. do we force all of our users to move to the new app or do we figure out a way to bridge the apps. They chose to force users to move.

The problem is, when you force people to move, you also give them the chance to leave and try new things. Instead of figuring out how to make the new chat app more valuable to users it was meant to appeal to by giving them access to google's entire chat userbase without forcing anything on those users, they killed their existing user base on the hope of forcing them to move to the new app. They didn't and now google's an afterthought in the chat space.

They did the same thing with google+ in general. They had a community of committed users sharing data with each other and commenting on stories on google reader. Instead of figuring out how to leverage that user base to contribute "content" to google+ and users that would prefer to use this new interface, and thereby make that new interface more valuable, they killed google reader in an attempt to force those users to migrate to google+. They didn't and went elsewhere.

Google has repeatedly made the mistake of forcing their users to migrate from what they were used to, and every time they do they open the gates for those users to migrate outside of google.

Facebook has learned this lesson relatively well. They don't force users to migrate to Instagram/facebook or whatsapp/messenger. In the Instagram / facebook case they seem to be improving the ability of users to use their Instagram account to add content to facebook (though not in the reverse). While in the whatsapp/messenger case, they haven't forced anyone to migrate, but they also haven't had any interoperability. One would think the apps would have even more value if they could communicate with each other.