<story><title>Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?</title><text>Several years ago, from within Gmail, I could:&lt;p&gt;* Make a phone call&lt;p&gt;* Send an SMS&lt;p&gt;* Send a Google chat&lt;p&gt;* Start a video call with my parents&lt;p&gt;Now, all of this has been split up, and to start  a video call, I have to start a video and &lt;i&gt;send an email&lt;/i&gt; inviting someone. SMS has been split up into a separate web app that won&amp;#x27;t work without my phone being present.&lt;p&gt;How did it come to pass that they took an easy, integrated system and mangled it so badly? I mean, it wasn&amp;#x27;t perfect, but it mostly just worked, and was easy to use.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>amelius</author><text>And there&amp;#x27;s never another employee saying: wait a second, that&amp;#x27;s not a good idea ...?</text></item><item><author>mdorazio</author><text>Having talked about similar questions with friends who work&amp;#x2F;worked at Google, you need to first ask &amp;quot;How do people get promoted at Google?&amp;quot;  The answer to that (by launching new things that get abandoned soon after rather than improving&amp;#x2F;fixing existing things) answers your question and many others like it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FinanceAnon</author><text>If many managers are onboard with an idea, one engineer saying &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#x27;t have much weight. Also, if you keep saying &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; to things, you might be perceived as &amp;quot;negative&amp;quot; and it might come up in performance reviews. And it&amp;#x27;s often difficult to predict if an idea will work or not - a lot of it comes down to execution and future politics.&lt;p&gt;So, as an engineer, it&amp;#x27;s probably better to jump on the bandwagon with everyone else, and try to get a promotion from it. It&amp;#x27;s stupid, but it&amp;#x27;s how it works. You will not progress within a company by saying &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;, even if you are right and it stops a bad project.&lt;p&gt;(I&amp;#x27;ve never worked for google, but did work in a large software corporation)</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: How did Google botch messaging/video/hangouts so badly?</title><text>Several years ago, from within Gmail, I could:&lt;p&gt;* Make a phone call&lt;p&gt;* Send an SMS&lt;p&gt;* Send a Google chat&lt;p&gt;* Start a video call with my parents&lt;p&gt;Now, all of this has been split up, and to start  a video call, I have to start a video and &lt;i&gt;send an email&lt;/i&gt; inviting someone. SMS has been split up into a separate web app that won&amp;#x27;t work without my phone being present.&lt;p&gt;How did it come to pass that they took an easy, integrated system and mangled it so badly? I mean, it wasn&amp;#x27;t perfect, but it mostly just worked, and was easy to use.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>amelius</author><text>And there&amp;#x27;s never another employee saying: wait a second, that&amp;#x27;s not a good idea ...?</text></item><item><author>mdorazio</author><text>Having talked about similar questions with friends who work&amp;#x2F;worked at Google, you need to first ask &amp;quot;How do people get promoted at Google?&amp;quot;  The answer to that (by launching new things that get abandoned soon after rather than improving&amp;#x2F;fixing existing things) answers your question and many others like it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davidw</author><text>As per my comment below, it&amp;#x27;s not just stagnation - I was ok with where they were 5 years ago - it&amp;#x27;s that they&amp;#x27;ve made an active effort to degrade the experience. Instead of clicking once in Gmail to start a video call, there is now some janky system where it starts a &amp;#x27;meet&amp;#x27; and sends my mom an email asking her to join it. An email! When both of us are sitting there with Gmail open.</text></comment>