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Comment by drumhead | Hacker News Reader

They're not stupid, surely they must know that constant change and fragmentation of their products just weakens thier offer to the consumer?

Whats their gameplan? Are they just throwing as much as they can against the wall to see what sticks, a survival of the fittest attitute to their apps?

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Why do you assume they are not stupid? Individuals and groups even at companies that are, on average, pretty smart can easily be really really incompetent. I think this is really common at google where they have lots of awesome products but still many seem either abandoned or led by people who are misguided.

It's incredibly frustrating because if you look at something like their messaging strategy, it makes no sense. They come out with a new way to message people seemingly every year and then abandon it instead of building on their base and giving consumers the things they actually want.

In this case, it's a welcome consolidation of different existing wallet/payment products.

All large companies seem to have trouble with branding as politics take over and each group wants to have its own spotlight. Apple arguably had better luck due to strong centralized leadership, although that's also become undone in recent years.

This is quite literally a consolidation in name only. "Google Pay" is a brand name for all of those products, not a unified API. Hopefully a unified product strategy will follow…

From what I've read, that's always been the way the company operates. I read on here years ago that Google 'regularly cuts off its own limbs', and never seen it so succinctly put.

>They're not stupid

And yet this blog page wastes ~1/3 of the vertical space with a top and bottom bar.

Perhaps because Google is currently working on a potential Android successor in the name of Fuchsia. Knowing this, Google Pay makes more sense.

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