I never understood how a company like Google constantly tries to build a decent chat app but never succeeds. They have so much software developers, they own the biggest ad-network worldwide and the majority of mobile phones runs their operating system with their appstore and default apps. They are the biggest email provider as well iirc.
How can you fail so miserably with building a chat app when you're in such a starting position?!
That answers your question TBH; I'm sure that every week, a team in Google goes "Let's use our 20% time to make a NEW chat app, only better!", and every year or so, one of those experiments makes it to the board who goes "Yeah this is the best thing ever, let's kill <yesterday's chat app> in favor of this!"
I feel like it's down to a lack of focus as a company on the one side, and too much of a shift in focus on the other.
What they should do (IMO) is to capitalize on that shift from Google to Alphabet and create a sub-company dedicated to chat, instead of leaving it to whatever organizational structure Google itself has. Make it their primary reason for existing instead of "a project a team within Google happens to be working on at the moment"
(caveat: this is based entirely on a very superficial view of Google and how things are organized internally. I'm sure there's a whole floor or building dedicated to one project. Probably not Hangouts though, that product is 'done' and all they do now is keeping it alive, maybe some support for paying customers)
