Enlarge / Take the Google Messaging quiz! Can you name all the icons?
Ron Amadeo
Google Talk, Google’s first-ever instant messaging platform, launched on August 24, 2005. This company has been in the messaging business for 16 years, meaning Google has been making messaging clients for longer than some of its rivals have existed. But thanks to a decade and a half of nearly constant strategy changes, competing product launches, and internal sabotage, you can’t say Google has a dominant or even stable instant messaging platform today.
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.
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Currently, you would probably rank Google’s offerings behind every other big-tech competitor. A lack of any kind of top-down messaging leadership at Google has led to a decade and a half of messaging purgatory, with Google both unable to leave the space altogether and unable to commit to a single product. While companies like Facebook and Salesforce invest tens of billions of dollars into a lone messaging app, Google seems content only to spin up an innumerable number of under-funded, unstable side projects led by job-hopping project managers. There have been periods when Google briefly produced a good messaging solution, but the constant shutdowns, focus-shifting, and sabotage of established products have stopped Google from carrying much of these user bases—or user goodwill—forward into the present day.
Because no single company has ever failed at something this badly, for this long, with this many different products (and because it has barely been a month since the rollout of Google Chat), the time has come to outline the history of Google messaging. Prepare yourselves, dear readers, for a non-stop rollercoaster of new product launches, neglected established products, unexpected shut-downs, and legions of confused, frustrated, and exiled users.
Table of Contents
Google Talk (2005)—Google’s first chat service, built on open protocols
Google Talk ran Android’s entire push notification system
The slow death of GTalk
Google Voice (2009)—SMS and Phone calls get a dose of the Internet
Google Wave (2009)—An email killer from the future
Nobody knew what Wave was for or how to use it
Google Buzz (2010)—The non-consensual social network
Slide’s Disco (2011)—An independent app escapes the Googleplex
The Google+ Era (2011)—Google’s social panic
Google+ Hangouts video chat—The first Hangouts
Google+ Huddle/Messenger—I guess we should have some kind of DM function
A competitor emerges—iMessage has entered the chat
One more competitor—WhatsApp is now worth $22 billion
Google Docs Editor Chat (2013)—Just like Gmail chat, but not integrated with anything
Google Hangouts (2013)—Google’s greatest messaging service
The death of Hangouts, unified Google messaging, and hope
Google Spaces (2016)—A messaging app for Google I/O 2016 attendees
Google Allo (2016)—Google’s dead-on-arrival WhatsApp clone
Allo’s legacy: The Google Assistant
Google Duo (2016)—A video companion app for… WhatsApp?
Google (Hangouts) Meet (2017)—Not Zoom
YouTube Messages (2017)—Yes, this was really a thing
Google (Hangouts) Chat (2018)—Part 1: Cloning Slack is actually a good idea
Google Maps Messages (2018)—Business messaging, now with the instability of Google
Google & RCS (2019)—So we found this dusty old messaging standard in a closet…
RCS is bad, and anyone who likes it should feel bad
Google Photos Messages (2019)—You get a messaging feature! And YOU! And you!
Google Stadia Messages (2020)—Two great tastes that taste great together
Google Pay Messages (2021)—We actually learned nothing from Google Allo
Google Assistant Messages (2021)—Text and voice chat, for families?
Google Phone Messaging (2021)—Isn’t this going a little too far?
Google Chat, Part 2 (2021)—No wait, this is actually a consumer app now!
Is anyone in charge at Google?
