
Analysis – Why Google is now a better competitor to Slack, WhatsApp and Zoom? - agaase19
https://cnc.substack.com/p/coming-together-of-googles-communication
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vikramkr
At this point, google can have all the features it wants, and their products
can be as amazing as anything, but I'm personally wary. If they established a
couple billion dollar endowment for their products to make sure it can't get
cancelled or created some sort of binding legal contract saying they wouldn't
dump it and cause chaos for everyone using it, that would be more meaningful.
I can count on slack and zoom to fight to keep their services alive since
that's their entire business. Facebook seems to have treated WhatsApp and
Instagram reasonably well so far. But I'm not in the mood to go through the
hassle of setting up yet another google chat service, convincing friends to
join (allo's gonna be great! This smart reply thing is so cool!) only to end
up seeing it cancelled so quickly.

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agaase19
Fair enough. I think, when it comes to messaging alone, Google has a steep
climb to make for sure. But I also think that they are trying to progress
towards their goal of ambient computing. They are trying to make sure they
control as many touch points as possible which enables them to better
integrate the software & hardware together to achieve things like voice
assistant interaction (e.g hey Google, send a message), AI integration (e.g
smart replies) and seamlessly using different Google products (quickly create
a doc in messages or chat). This is a long term vision though; companies may
happen over time which are better than Google at this.

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lowdose
Aren't they at the same time better than any other cloud provider to deliver
messaging with Firebase?

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jaimex2
The reputational baggage Google carries from decades of failed/killed
social/chat products is too big for anyone to take anything they release
seriously.

The only real question is will they kill Meet or Duo first?

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ponker
Like WhatsApp/Facebook and Zoom don’t have more reputations baggage?

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jaimex2
Not like Google. Google make some really neat stuff that people start using
only to have it killed for no reason - especially chat apps.

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foobar_
Can anyone tell me why large corps do this ? Compete with every new product or
buy companies instead of sticking to the core product. I like Slack and all
but if Slack started implementing Google Docs I would be surprised.

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vikramkr
Two things, ecosystem and diversification. For an ecosystem, build a suite of
products that all work together so you solve a complete set of problems and
lock customers in. Anyone can easily switch to a new video call provider, but
it's far harder to do that when that provider is linked to your email and your
calendar and so on. And diversification is just that - dont put all your eggs
in one basket. Grow the business. AWS is immensely profitable and has nothing
to do with buying books online, but amazon is a stronger business because of
it. And if you just stick to your core product, you'll find yourself going the
way of blockbuster or Kodak.

And for the slack point - Really? I would be surprised if they didn't.
Collaboration is pretty much the core of slack and they already let you share
documents, making it possible to edit them seems like an obvious next step.

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foobar_
That makes sense. But why diversity needlessly ? Isn't google's core search
suffering ? Red Bull / Coke don't diversify but they are not exactly
ecosystems either.

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vikramkr
Coca cola is really diversified. Just because they're all drinks doesn't mean
that they haven't diversified across sectors of the refreshment industry - it
depends on how you define a core product. Google sees themselves as
"organizing the worlds' information" which is a core that lets them do pretty
much whatever they want. I don't know if they've done anything as offbrand as
Coca Cola purchasing Columbia Pictures, which was a thing they actually did
for some reason. And a counterpoint to red bull and coke is pretty much every
other consumer packaged good company out there, like P&G or Pepsi, who are
also the companies that might find themselves aquiring red bull once the
founders move on.

And in terms of diversifying needlessly - obviously, nobody doing the
diversifying thinks its needless. Everyone is convinced that it's positive
NPV, lowers overall risk, allows them to unlock "synergies," etc etc etc.
There's been a swing away from that as conglomerates like GE are dismantling,
but especially if you get financial analysists involved, it's nto hard to come
up with a model that shows diversifying will lower your risk.

And also, in case this isnt obvious, the most important thing here is more
money equals good. If your bonus is based on hitting a sales target, why not
acquire a company to boost division revenues and meet that target? And if you
can make money (or think you can make money) by entering a new business area,
why wouldn't you? Google doesn't see search as suffering or think their
moonshots are the reason for that, otherwise they'd be redirecting investment
towards saving their cash cow. They might be wrong, but they think this will
make more money.

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foobar_
You are right. This thinking is finance thinking as opposed to product
thinking. It seems corporations are acting as hedge funds once they hit this
stage of quasi monopoly / oligopoly.

In reality it's just squashing the competition and increasing sales numbers.
It's just a quirk of the law that it seems legal. I literally can't think of
one silicon valley acquisition that actually ended in synergy.

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vikramkr
They probably literally brought in hedge fund people to be their CFO. And it's
not hard to hire McKinsey to make a slide deck backing up your strategy to
acquire a company for whatever reason.

Interestingly, actual hedge funds tend to not like companies that act like
hedge funds. They want companies that are focused on one area since they think
they're better at diversifying their portfolios than the management at these
portfolio companies. They'd rather have fine grained control over what
markets/products/industries/regions they have exposure to, and you cant do
that with these messy conglomerates. That's why fiscal discipline being
imposed at Google looked like separating business units and providing insights
into the individual business units of the company, so even if investors in
alphabet can't control what alphabet diversifies into, they can at least
understand and evaluate it.

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foobar_
That's probably it, the CFO. I've mostly been sold on Jeremy Corbyn's ideas on
worker cooperatives. I like open source based economies, they seem to
encourage innovation and are fairly similar.

The concept of hedge fund is completely fine as well. Messy conglomerates
though! Ughh it's like a code refactor gone wrong 90% of the time. I guess I
like my naive capitalism of build a product, sell, make money and keep
everyone happy.

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moritzwarhier
I think Google Meet will probably continue to gain traction and might
eventually kill Zoom.

* integration with Google calendar, private Google accounts and GSuite

* no problems handling large numbers of participants

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akmarinov
“Analysis” of half a page.

