Google's payment solutions are shockingly diverse. Google Checkout, Google Wallet, Android Pay, and now Google Pay. Checkout failed so they replaced it with Google Wallet; Wallet failed and they replaced it with Android Pay.
The Google Pay API developer site https://developers.google.com/payments/ has the audacity to call it "The newest way to pay with Google." I wouldn't be surprised to see yet another brand (and yet another API) within the next three years.
Also, they have had Hangouts, Messenger, Talk, Voice, Allo, and Duo... most with the same functionality. What is up with Google's product management? Is there a strategy?
Then they seem to randomly consolidate (I believe Hangouts was supposed to bring all that together, including SMS), only to do a complete 180 a few months later and split everything up again. I mean it's kind of absurd at this point.
The problem is, most of these sorts of services work via a network effect. Especially chat: You use the one all your friends are using. Payment is the one that all your accounts and stores you go to support.
Running a bunch of your own competitors is self-defeating when it ensures you don't have the network effect. Google Talk worked mostly because it was in Gmail, and everyone had Gmail. People who never used it had it, because Gmail.
Hmm, what? I think e.g. Talk/Hangouts and Voice are radically different: one is about text messaging and video calls, another is about a connection to the "legacy" voice telephony network, with a dial-able number, etc. They started (long ago) form very different areas.
They could have a seamless bridge between them, though. They sort of tried: you can dial a phone from Hangouts, but not back, or you can receive your Voice text messages in the email, but not send a reply back (afaict).
Google is notoriously bad at cohesive product management. They have a number of bright ideas, but no visionary in the consumer product space, so apparently no coordination.
Google Voice was a rebrand of a product acquired in 2009. Google Talk was an XMPP chat service launched in 2005, and integrated into Gmail in 2006. "+Hangouts" was originally a feature inside Google Plus, launched in 2011, just like "+Messenger". 'Google Hangouts' was a 2013 launch to bring Talk, +Messenger, and +Hangouts into one product. This was further blurred by their various apps, which sometimes had differing functionality from the websites.
The latest iteration of Google Voice has chat, for example, while SMS support inside the Hangouts Android App was removed on purpose and users told to use yet another app, first called Messenger, now called Messages.
All their communication products suffer from convergent evolution, yet remain in dizzyingly varying states of integration with each other.
Announced in January 2017, the Android, iOS, and Web versions of Google Voice have a revamped UI and, apparently, text chat [1]; discussed on HN at [2].
I use google voice and hangouts. I can both send and receive voice calls using my google voice number via hangouts. I can also send and receive sms message using my google voice number via hangouts. Both of these have been true for at least 4 years, maybe 5. They started trying to phase sms out of hangouts a few years back, but never removed it for google voice users.
I'm not sure I would characterize it as optimistic. The subtitle is "Fifth Times A Charm!" and the bulk of it is talking about how many times Google has (mostly unsuccessfully) tried to make a product in this space.
I find Ron Amadeo's articles are often much more critical of Google than others writing about them. If I were to summarize his attitude in much of his writing it'd be "Come on, you need to do better than this, Google." It's refreshing because normally writers who cover a particular company almost always view them through rose colored glasses and minimize all the mistakes.
I have a generally positive view of Ron's work, but there's been some tragic missteps of late. This is a trashfire of a piece justifying incredible incompetence by Google[1], and suggesting a major vulnerability 'isn't a big deal': https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/pixel-wont-get-krack...
[1]Google had months of notice under coordinated disclosure, and it took them a couple months after it went public for the fix to finally make it to Pixel devices (which is to say, most other Android devices still aren't patched). Since ROM authors fixed this in like two days, the fact that Google couldn't do it in five months is inexcusable. I actually suspect this may be part of why the Android Security Lead just shifted to a massively less important position at Google around the end of the year.
And it's still only credit cards. Like how many iterations can you possibly have on CC processing. Add debit and then it becomes a lot more useful, but no.
Most of the rest of the world uses debit, and as a result enjoy very low transaction fees. Credit cards have much higher, and highly variable, transaction fees that cost merchants and thus all consumers, money.
American credit card companies have lobbied successfully and now have blatantly anti-competitive most favored nation clauses that make it impossible for merchants to charge you anything other than the credit card price.
I always wondered why (at least in America) credit cards have more consumer protections? It's essentially the same way to use money, if someone steals from your credit card you're protected, but if it's debit card, it's not? Why?
Credit card fees in America are >2%, debit (and CC) is limited to <0.3% in Europe. So it makes sense for credit card companies in America to take the occasional loss and give out all those gimmicks as long as it keeps people paying mini-VAT on every purchase.
That's before you get into the whole "you gotta build credit" perversion that has Americans go into debt en masse and pay horrid fees on that.
If you are in a relatively healthy financial situation, you can also profit off of the system with many of the rewards card benefits in the last several years. One example of this is: https://reddit.com/r/churning
> It's essentially the same way to use money, if someone steals from your credit card you're protected, but if it's debit card, it's not?
Debit cards have some protections; the basic difference is that a credit card is spending someone else's money, which you have to pay back to them if it was actually authorized by you; a debit card is spending your money, which you can recover from the bank in certain circumstances if it is accepted to be unauthorized.
Actually some banks (if not all, I only really know about my own case with BofA) have protections with debit as well. I left my debit card in an ATM in Peru and someone took it and tried to buy jewelry. They succeeded in two purchases before being declined in the third (I assume for invalid PIN). They alerted me that there were some weird transactions and I was able to recover all $1200 that they spent on my card.
Sadly, the United States operates more on a credit system than relying on having cash or funds upfront. Society regresses towards that when people want things that cost more than what they can afford (e.g. homes, cars, college education). Side effect is that you will have people taking out unnecessary loans just to build up a credit.
It’s not difficult to build credit in the U.S. without resorting to maintaining debt, nor accepting unnecessary loans. The credit scoring models in place strongly favor many open, revolving accounts, but also favor the continual paying off of those accounts and maintaining zero balances on the majority of one’s revolving accounts. The scoring models favor low utilization of large amounts of available credit — that the credit in question needs to be in the form of a loan or a fixed line is false.
It’s accurate to say that the U.S. operates on credit moreso than it does on cash, but the rating methods genuinely favor those who have the means to manage credit wisely and pay off revolving balances in full, which is antithetical to the notion of societal “regressions”.
The Google Pay API developer site https://developers.google.com/payments/ has the audacity to call it "The newest way to pay with Google." I wouldn't be surprised to see yet another brand (and yet another API) within the next three years.