
Google Splits Hangouts into Chat and Meet - ashishgandhi
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/09/google-goes-after-slack-and-splits-hangouts-into-chat-and-meet/
======
AaronFriel
Poe's Law as applied to enterprise messaging platforms.

Dear Google,

Please make one amazing chat app. Just one. Merge Allo, Duo, Chat, Hangouts,
Meet, Messenger, Voice, and your RCS platform into one extensible platform
with third party integrations.

The comments in this thread? They are not flattering. It is not a sign of joy
that people comment on Google releasing a new chat app, or confusing your
branding even further.

Here's a quick question: I have a friend on Android, I have an iPhone, how do
I message them? What's your best solution. What if I want to switch from
messaging to voice? What if I want to make a video call? What if I want to
invite a third person? iPhones make it easy to transition between different
types of communication, and provide useful SMS sync to computers.

Slack, Microsoft's Teams, and surprisingly Discord, are all moving in the
direction of being a single hub for communication. Admittedly, Slack and Teams
don't make it easy (yet) to message people outside your organization. Discord
does, and they're beating you to the punch, quelle surprise. All of the above
platforms are easy to set up on the web and smartphones.

So please, please stop this proliferation. Stop footgunning yourselves on
messaging platforms. Build one, make it amazing, and devote resources to
making it work for users and organizations.

~~~
ucaetano
Why stop there? Gmail is communications as well, so include email too. And
snail mail too, so add Fedex/UPS service into it. And fax, we can't forget
about fax.

But hey, connectivity is just a section of productivity, and docs, slides,
sheets, drive is all productivity, so add it all to the same app, as well as
google plus. You also use the app store to get your company's apps, so add the
play store as well.

Finding the destination for a business meeting is also productivity, so add
maps inside it as well, and translate, since you might be running meetings and
emails in different languages, plus keep for note-taking, calendar, my
business, contacts, forms, groups, etc.

Congrats, you just designed Lotus Notes.

Or Android.

~~~
AstralStorm
Lotus Notes didn't have video, and sound or real-time chat functionality. It
does integrate a spreadsheet, decent word processor, calendar and task list.
Google Docs with its Calendar and Gmail integration is close enough.

Integrating different use cases is different from interoperability. For
example, make it easy to share a file on drive via email and chat does not
require drive to be integrated. Likewise meet (new contacts, social net) vs
chat (known contacts, rooms) might be a good split if they interact nicely
together.

Splitting chat from email is a stretch, much like with voice from text or from
video. Or simple images.

What Google is doing is create apps that do not work together with each other.

~~~
ucaetano
Lotus Notes did have chat. And voice. And IPTV. And fax services. And
databases. HR tools. Expense tools. Business process tools and whatever else
you can think of.

And the apps do work together, apparently. From the announcement they're
integrated with Drive and the entire permission system. I'd guess there are
far more integrations to come.

------
joshwd
Oh yay, more chat apps from Google. I had finally hit a nice point of
integration: using Hangouts with Project Fi means I got somewhat close to the
iMessage experience (at least as far as being able to send/receive SMS from my
computer). Clearly the integration wasn't great, and the Hangouts app is badly
in need of work, but it's a shame to see that even that limited functionality
is going away in favor of more fragmentation.

~~~
asidiali
The new Google Voice app is a relatively good experience, unified across
web/mobile platforms.

~~~
sib
Except somehow they managed to completely hide the "make a phone call" button
on the web - which is pretty much the most important use case. So, first thing
I do is go to the "legacy Google Voice" menu item; it re-loads the page and
there's my old friend...

~~~
BugsJustFindMe
You can't make a phone call from the app either afaict. You still use Hangouts
Dialer.

------
scottmf
I was starting to wonder if they were even going to launch a new messaging
product this week.

~~~
cwyers
Their messaging strategy was lumbering worryingly towards being
comprehensible. I'm glad they corrected that.

------
abarringer
Google Cloud Next '17... introducing products that will go live in '18 and be
shuttered in '20.

Our company is evaluating team collaboration products right now. I told them
not to even look at hangouts because you couldn't trust Google to keep a
product alive. This was two days ago...

~~~
leipert
If you are still looking at this, we use the following solutions at work:

\- [https://meet.jit.si](https://meet.jit.si) as a hangout replacement (seems
like a polished hangout alternative)

\- [https://about.mattermost.com/](https://about.mattermost.com/) as a on-
premise slack / hipchat / irc alternative

(not affiliated with any of those products)

~~~
tajen
As long as [https://appear.in](https://appear.in) is independent, I don't care
what Google does with Hangouts. Appear.in doesn't even require a login!

------
dantiberian
Yes Google's chat strategy is a mess, but this part is great news:

> It’s a full rewrite of the Hangouts meeting experience and will work without
> any plug-ins (and Google also promises that it will be lighter on the
> processor, too, and won’t eat into your battery life or make your laptop’s
> fans spin at full speed). The team also cut down on the code size and
> promises that meetings will load “instantly.”

Our team spans macOS, Windows, and Linux and each one of us has our own unique
bugs with Hangouts ranging from robotic voices to not being able to join
existing Hangouts. In short it's a giant mess. I'm glad to see they're
starting from scratch, hopefully this time around will be more reliable.

~~~
izacus
Of course their "rewrite" and fix currently means that it only works on Chrome
and not other browsers.

~~~
IanCal
If it works properly, then it's no worse than having to install any other
specific app like slack.

------
oomkiller
From the comments here you would think there is a negativity competition. Chat
and Meet are sorely needed, and make GSuite a viable replacement for
heterogenous services: HipChat, Slack, GTM, Zoom, Uberconference, etc. Some
organizations have all of these deployed simultaneously, along with GSuite,
this is a huge win for easier management and lower cost. You can complain
about fragmentation of their chat strategy all day long, but most of the apps
mentioned here are designed for consumers, not businesses.

------
zitterbewegung
Is Google's strategy to enumerate all possible messaging / social applications
? Then either stop development on them or shut them down when they don't have
more than 1 million people using them within 6 months?

------
pierrebeaucamp
> Your browser doesn't support Hangouts Meet

> To join this meeting, install the latest version of Google Chrome.

I guess no more meetings for me then...

~~~
NoGravitas
Lucky ducky.

------
pasbesoin
I gave up on most Google instant messaging some years ago when the stories
appeared about how enabling Hangouts was somewhat of a one-way process, with
many people complaining about their existing functionality being hosed in one
or another fashion. (E.g. Hangouts wants to take over SMS responsibilities,
but borks them.)

Google Voice languished, with message forwarding sometimes taking many minutes
or even a few hours. Then this year, a new Voice push of some sort was
announced, and now message forwarding is mostly back to nearly instantaneous.

One fucking product, Google. That works. Fine, add new functionality to it,
but don't make me keep chasing down and and installing new apps, wondering
whether and how this integrates with what I already have and what is going to
get hosed. (By the way, do you guys ever try to use your public help pages,
yourself? Hahaha...)

So, that little sidebar in Gmail? I'll still use that, when it happens to work
and to be convenient. I recently used Hangouts -- setting up an entire account
under my domain for the other party -- in a case where Skype had proved to be
crap in terms of quality and holding the connection (what they typically use,
and what I've refused to use since moving to a new machine).

That's about it, for my current Google IM-ish experience.

Gmail, I use. Calendar, I use. Docs, I use. They change -- I can keep up with
this.

Pick a name, and a front door, and leave that the fuck alone. Your
schizophrenic branding -- and sometimes dueling functionality -- is not doing
you any good, here.

Cheers.

------
anw
Slack is very important to a lot of companies and groups. We use it not only
as an IRC replacement, but also to hook into our CI and git repos. Along with
the wealth of information and tools already put in there, there is the mindset
that Slack is our communication tool we can rely on.

Google does not have a good track record when it comes to supporting their
products. Look at Picasa, Google Glass, Bump, Currents, and sadly, Google
Reader.

Google is good at advertising, email, and search. But I would not put any
investment of time or data into their other products if I knew I needed them
in the future.

~~~
01000001
My thought exactly. How long could I use this for, before it was ripped away
from me? How much would I invest into this, only to get told I have two months
to migrate?

Sorry Google, your search is great, your email services easy to use, but
everything from your Apps for business panel through to your plethora of half-
baked products are messy and inaccessible.

------
arcanus
I'm no fan of slack but I don't see this as being competitive.

Google hangouts (which I use for sms, among other things) has a very poor
search feature. Slack on the other hand has decent search capabilities. Plus,
slack-bots are well integrated already. It does not avoid my largest criticism
of slack: the inability to save conversation history locally.

This sounds like a late to market slack-clone. What is innovative about this
offering?

~~~
curt15
>Google hangouts (which I use for sms, among other things) has a very poor
search feature.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks that a search function seems
absolutely basic for a messaging app.

~~~
infogulch
What search function? Do you mean going to gmail.com and searching "in:chat
blah"? Even that is terrible.

~~~
curt15
To make the UX even more annoying, chats are grouped under a special label
that's invisible to the gmail app on Android.

------
MyMan1
Oh good we've gone full circle, back to Google Chat.

~~~
samfisher83
I think gchat always worked at least inside gmail.

~~~
mynameisvlad
That transitioned over to Hangouts in 2013, and the final GChat app (Windows)
stopped working 2 years ago.

------
nunez
Despite Google's confused messaging strategy, I am actually okay with this.
This is the clearest indication I've seen of a clear, targetted approach from
them on the messaging front.

Hangouts was/is amazing for conf calls, so they took that, made it simpler and
called it Meet. Hangouts was less awesome for chat, but a lot of people are
using it and Slack, so they took the good things from Slack, revamped the chat
experience and called it Chat.

Their intro explainer has quotes from people in large corporations saying how
good it is and scenarios of these products being used for "work things."

I like this and hope that it rises in prominence.

------
edgyswingset
I hope this means that various usability and performance issues with Hangouts
I've had improves.

That said, I'm having trouble not laughing out loud at this whole thing. It
legitimately feels to me like they have no clue what they're doing and are
spinning their wheels so that they have wheels to spin.

------
shmerl
Google still didn't fix the damage they did by abandoning XMPP, and not
supporting server to server encryption in Google Talk.

~~~
vkou
SNAP has a market cap of 29 billion USD, and does not support XMPP.

~~~
deelowe
> SNAP has a market cap of 29 billion USD, and does not support XMPP.

Berkshire Hathaway has a market cap of over 400B. They also don't support
XMPP. I think we're definitely seeing a trend here...

------
ketralnis
So now they have:

* Gmail

* Google Talk

* Google Voice

* Allo

* Duo

* Hangouts Chat

* Hangouts Meet

Am I missing any products that compete with their own other products?

~~~
devopsproject
Messanger which got renamed to Android Messages a few weeks ago

~~~
izacus
That's just the SMS app.

~~~
accountface
Hangouts, Voice, and Allo are all meant to be SMS replacements — so they are
directly competing with their SMS app.

------
nikolay
I am done with Google! Except for Gmail, which I can't flee, everything else
has been a disaster! A disappointment after a disappointment! Apparently, they
focus way too much on hiring engineers with their notorious interview process
and not on hiring people who can design and deliver sane and practical
products! If they weren't a monopolist in search for too long, they'd be long
gone!

------
therealmarv
Let's wait for the next iteration where they put Duo, Allo, Chat and Meet into
one product named "Hangout Next".

But I'm happy they do not forget the enterprise... using hangouts nearly every
day with slack and /hangout . Still the best quality when you have a global
team and sometimes flacky internet or below 300 Kbit/s bandwidth.

------
pfooti
The unclear thing here is: what is going to happen to hangouts on personal
accounts? I use google hangouts on my gmail account for group hangouts all the
time (role-playing game group that's geographically distributed, for example).
I mean, I'll use hangouts meet or whatever instead of vidchat hangouts, but
only if it exists.

~~~
syntheticnature
I agree, since I engage in a bit of this myself, though admittedly the largest
such chat got moved over to Slack a while ago due to the (at the time) lack of
any easy way to remove someone from a group hangout.

------
seanwilson
Why do Google keep rebranding their chat attempts? Why don't they iteratively
improve what they have?

~~~
jboggan
Most tech companies are like nation states, ruled from above by a single
strong leader (Apple under Jobs being the best example). I've become to
understand Google is much more like Germany in the mid-19th century - a
collection of competing principalities with a common language but a weak and
ineffective government coordinating their efforts. I remember being told on
the first day of orientation that Google was not a meritocracy, but a feudal
society. I think all of our more puzzling product evolutions make much more
sense in that light.

------
AndrewKemendo
More than likely Google Meet is trying to take market segment away from Slack
with the major advantage of offering video meetings.

I can't imagine it will be free. Not that I suggest it should be.

edit: Nope.
[https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html](https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html)

~~~
aembleton
I'm more concerned that they would abruptly drop it in a couple of years.

------
neogodless
Meet Google's suite of messaging apps: Alphabet.

You can only communicate using the letter matching the app you're using.

------
amatriain
There is a small but vibrant community that uses hangouts video conferencing
to play tabletop roleplaying games, with the added bonus of having sessions
automatically saved to youtube. There are also people with unmonetized youtube
channels that consist of videopodcasts: hangouts video conferences between
several people talking about whatever.

For these use cases restricting Hangouts Meet to gsuite customers means
Hangouts is dead for them. I guess most people will switch to
videoconferencing with Skype+OBS and streaming live to Twitch. It will work
but it's harder to set up for non technical people.

Of course google does not owe me nothing and they can do as they like with
their (until now) free product. But it's a pity that these common use cases
that were possible with Hangouts are going to be discontinued.

------
technological
I think this may attract customer who have existing Gapps suit in their
organization.

Advantage slack has is integration with different things and you can use any
email address to sign up.

if Chat and meet required to sign in with only Gmail then people may not want
to get locked in

------
jboggan
The cynic in me notices that this comes at the same time as Perf season in
Google.

It's such a bad running joke internally that we have a never-ending
multiplication of chat apps that I had to check the calendar to see if today
was suddenly April.

------
tn_
[https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-has-a-messaging-app-
prob...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-has-a-messaging-app-
problem-1485267212)

------
nottorp
The problem with google chat services is... will they last more than 6 months?
Considering how many changes Hangouts went through, do I even want to waste
time on evaluate its current incarnation?

------
laughfactory
I can't help but wonder if the comments defending Google's strategy are from
paid folks (shills, I suppose). The vast majority of comments are hating on
the strategy and then there's a few who are lambasting everyone else and
claiming that wanting a single chat app out of Google is paramount to "wanting
an app which does everything." Perhaps their Google employees? This is high
stakes so I'd expect some attempt to control the damage (I.e., "shape" the
conversation).

------
JoshTriplett
...neither of which has any support for third-party clients, still.

------
dfar1
Honestly, it seems that sometimes Google lives on another planet, and have no
idea what their customers want. Here's what all google customer want... they
want to see their apps improved and updated, and NOT replaced by more apps.

Maybe their plan is... if we make Hangouts worse, than we can make them use
Allo and Duo. I know 0 people using those two apps. Even people with Pixel
phones are not using it.

------
thecrumb
Wow, Google playing catch up to Microsoft who's playing catch up to Slack.

------
make3
I hope they'll fuse chat, message and allo, this is getting ridiculous

------
anigbrowl
Good grief Google, make up your mind. It's like some sad corporate race
condition. Google keeps optimizing things but has no guiding vision. I might
as well be watching cats in a diamond mine.

------
shouyatf
Guess which will die first?

------
eganist
Allo

Duo

Chat

Meet

Voice

\--

Did I miss any?

~~~
IvyMike
Hangouts, Talk.

~~~
infogulch
Doesn't Google+ have its' own chat system?

------
aabajian
I'll never for Meebo. It just worked, and Google shut it down.

------
jtchang
I don't think I will move any substantial business communication to Google
Chat. I'm happy there is competition but Slack nailed it and now google is
playing catchup.

~~~
debaserab2
I don't think Slack really nailed it any better than Google hangouts, other
than it's IRC like interface that differentiates it. It's chock full of it's
own horrible bugs and problems. I can't even have it open for more than a few
hours before it slows my system to a complete halt.

------
bandrami
Why does the ghost of Wave keep haunting Mountain View?

------
noja
FINALLY! What we were all waiting and hoping for: another chat app from the
same company.

------
Macha
More wood behind fewer arrows

------
rjammala
Hope the quality of Video Chat is as good as Apple's FaceTime.

------
webwanderings
> Running 30-person video conferences

Zoom provides 50-person.

------
artursapek
Does it work with Gmail chat?

------
pavement
Pah!

No delete or edit?

Useless.

------
1_2__3
Oh for fuck's sake.

Which is basically what I end up thinking after virtually every Google
announcement regarding chat.

~~~
sctb
We can profitably do without more drive-by snark (which we've asked you
repeatedly not to post) on Hacker News.

~~~
zeveb
Honestly, I think this is _exactly_ the sort of sentiment we need on Hacker
News, because I think it accurately and succinctly represents the opinion of a
significant portion of the community with respect to Google's chat apps.

Sometimes snark is the only decent response to a situation; I think that
Google's chat quagmire is arguably one of those.

