Open letter to Google

Dear Google

I love your products (almost all of them).

I've never understood why you closed iGoogle and RSS reader but it's fine others took the opportunity to create great stuff to replace them.

You learn from your mistakes by test-crashing your products IRL and that's your strength.

You failed with Orkut, Friend Connect and Google+ but YouTube is the greatest social network ever.

You failed with Picasa but Google photos is easier and even more powerful.

You failed with Notebook but Keep is incredible.

You failed wit Talk, Buzz and Wave but Hangouts … Hangouts is a milestone from my point of view. It changed everything. It's simple, it's fast, it's efficient, it's available online, from Gmail, Inbox and on smartphone.

That was great. Yup, WAS. Because of your presentation of Allo and Duo you just started to dig Hangouts' grave and, like it wasn't enough you removed the SMS support from the app to kill it a bit more.

I'm disappointed. For me, it's a huge mistake.

From my perspective Hangouts could have dethrone Whatsapp and Messenger if you decided to integrate it in all your services, keep the SMS function and add new features instead of creating two new apps to do the same job.

The only reason I still use Hangouts is because it's easily accessible from desktop and mobile but, I guess you will soon replace it by Allo and/or Duo and we'll have to change our habits all over again and that's maybe why your instant messaging Apps are not successful because you replace them instead of improving them.

I love your products but please, give them a chance to make you proud.

C