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Analysis

How Google's (Local) Development –> Deprecation Process Affects Innovation

GBP Chat's rise and fall is an example of Google's approach to local product development, which often hurts small developers and innovation more generally.

Mike Blumenthal

How Google's (Local) Development –> Deprecation Process Affects Innovation

As you are probably aware Google Business Profile chat and the Business Messages API (that integrates third party products with GBP chat) are both heading to the Google graveyard on July 31st. It was a product that held great promise but having been ignored by the GBP team for the past two years has fallen on hard times.

The big players in the local world will hardly miss it. And the SMBs that had been inundated with spam and review blackmail might breathe a sigh of relief. But the small, forward thinking developers that are providing SMBs with innovative and integrated SMS tools are the ones paying the price for Google's fickle development/deprecation processes.

Huge Untapped Potential

Google clearly has a lock on local discovery and recovery searches. Chat is a growing and popular way for end users to have a quick conversation with a business, and a quick and easy way for a business to interact with a new lead.

Aaron Weiche of Leadferno* spoke to GBP Chat's potential:

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For our customers it’s frustrating because messaging and chat is such a valuable touchpoint for many businesses. Offering this direct from their Google Business Profile and maps was helpful. Of course it was riddled with spam for many too, but the signal was there over the noise, and Google could have improved it for a huge impact instead of killing it.

However like many Google local efforts, left to win or lose on their own, the product was never rolled out fully nor promoted effectively.

Jon Hall of Switchbird, an independent messaging platform noted:  

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Early on I was bullish on the future of Google Business Messages because: 1) there was a great product team in place at Google who consistently communicated with partners, holding bi-weekly events and releasing frequent updates; 2) the "chat" call-to-action on GBPs was compelling and powerful: it drew more clicks than the "call" call-to-action in many scenarios tested by Google and others; and 3) the trickle of inbound messages and leads we saw come through GBM on our own customer accounts could quite obviously have become a firehose had Google continued the rollout.

Also, it was easy to see a monetization strategy for Google had it started to capture and "own" more B2C conversations.

Google's Development Cycle

Google has a bottom-up engineering culture that encourages quick development of an idea into a truly minimum viable product, with testing in the real world. In the burning light of real world search, if the product achieves enough volume to warrant maintenance and upgrades it is rolled into an update/bug fix schedule.

From the 2010s onward, when it came to messaging, the engineers across Google went wild, creating multiple, competing products across the breath and depth of Google's silos – all without a cohesive messaging plan. In this scheme, the original engineers are rewarded for their initiative. But businesses using the product (and the public) end up being punished for their loyalty.

It was into this world that GBP chat was initially birthed as a GBP dashboard-based SMB product in mid-2017. In the world of GBP, products either start on the dashboard side with an intense focus on very small businesses or on the enterprise side with an API. If the product gains traction, and there is market demand, then it moves in the opposite direction.

Without a thoughtful rich SMS strategy, Google built out an SMS API interface for chat following its release, which allowed integration of GBP profile chat with enterprise messaging systems like Podium. These early API releases are often only available to a select few companies that frequently leverage the exclusive capability for market share gains.

Google recognized the need for an integrated media messaging platform by the end of the last decade but axed the limited distribution of the GBP SMS API in early 2019. At the time, Google provided no client-side communication and left a number of big multi-location businesses high and dry. This was prior to the release of a more robust platform.

During late 2019 and early 2020, large enterprise SMS platforms like Podium were given early access and direct support to build out integrations with Google's future messaging platform, the Business Messaging API. It was over a year later, in July 2020, that Google announced that this new Business messaging API was generally available to replace the one deprecated in 2019.

Nobody Else Wanted It

I spoke with several folks about the why of the deprecation of Business Messaging and Chat now. After existing for such a long time most assumed that it would remain in the product. The answer to why is was nuked, uniformly came back that the team building and maintaining the platform was impacted (decimated?) by layoffs in GBP in late 2022, 2023 and earlier this year.

Google's Business messaging strategy (?) remains confused and confusing. There doesn't appear to be a single back-end API for the purpose of responding to chats from clients or coworkers. Besides the Business Messaging API, Workspace developers can access a Chat API for Google Chat (their Slack-like program); RCS Business Messaging apparently is another unique messaging backend for direct to consumer communications. Ideally some other team could have picked up the GBP messaging tools but apparently no other team or product was willing to take it on.

Again, from Jon Hall:

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The writing has been on the wall for some time that GBM was not a priority at Google. In late 2022, I and others raised concerns about the level of spam activity in the channel that mostly fell on deaf ears. (Not an unusual response to spam at Google.) Then in early 2023 a round of layoffs at Google decimated the GBM product team. Around that time, the primary developer liaison to GBM partners left the company and was never replaced. And since that time, product development at GBM virtually stagnated. Spam overwhelmed some GBPs such that we turned chat off, and the product itself never really got in front of the bulk of the local search audience.

Impact on Small Developers

Google prides itself on its quick product development and often quicker product deprecation as sound business. But Google's prejudicial development process, release of buggy MVP products and lack of commitment to those products isn't "sound business" for everyone.

New businesses and startups, so necessary for a healthy business environment and internet ecosystem, are negatively impacted by these sorts of actions. Again from Aaron Weiche:

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The killing off of Google Business Messages is frustrating. For our product, Leadferno, it was a brutal process to integrate with, taking nearly six months because of poor API documentation and issues. Once the integration was launched, their approval process was flawed for launching new brands and agents and created additional work every time. No feature has given us more headaches than GBM for integration. The time it took, the issues/breaking, the approval process.

Jon Hall added, "Switchbird first integrated Google Business Messages into our 'omni-channel inbox' solution in early 2021. Like all technical integrations with Google products, the effort involved was non-trivial. Behind the scenes of a seemingly simple chat functionality, GBM partners had to not only jump through administrative hoops to gain access to the relevant GBM and GBP APIs, we also had to grok Google's concept of conversation design and the messaging lifecycle, enforce adequate business responsiveness and customer satisfaction (or face automatic disabling of the feature) and build pipelines to manage the provisioning, verification and launch of messaging 'agents' tied to GBP locations and authorized by their owners."

Sleeping with Elephants

Short haul, Google might not feel the pain of these sorts of actions. Their bottom line is not affected and their engineers get to move on to "cool" new projects. The better funded players in the field of SMS communications, like the Podiums and SOCIs, see their investment in the product as a way to impress clients and the losses as a relatively minor inconvenience. The businesses using GBP Chat or Business Messaging are harmed in the short term but will likely find alternatives – and ultimately lose trust in Google as a "partner."

The bigger problem is that the internet and its diversity suffer. The small, unique players in the ecosystem are the ones that are harmed, which affects their ability to compete and succeed long term. These harms and consequences should be used to examine and evaluate Google's role and responsibility in keeping the internet a vibrant space – and I'm afraid they are failing.

Google is much like the elephant in the old adage, "Be careful when you sleep with elephants, you never know when they will roll over." And like the elephant in the saying, Google doesn't seem worried about whom it rolls over.

* The author is an investor in Leadferno

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