As with every other business market, google has the design, technical and market reach resources to clean up. However, as with every other business market, they never will due to their mysterious aversion to providing
a) actual support
b) product lifespans that businesses can rely on
Their penchant for "surprise! sunset"ing major products that users rely on, and showing no reluctance to do this for business customers as well means only scrappy small players who feel like the cost differential or some specific feature is worth the threat of having to migrate one fine weekend.
Specifically in the chat/videochat domain, Google has released and sunsetted
gchat (to...)
google talk (to hangouts)
duo
allo
voice
Their sales and support approach to Meet hardware is also abysmal. If they sold hardware direct, supported it through an official channel, and had reasonable documentation around it, they would slay, especially for customers who already have G Suite. Instead, it’s a confusing web of resellers bundling off-the-shelf hardware.
Google has lost all goodwill in this space in my opinion. They’ve built, sunsetted, and rebuilt multiple solutions for video conferencing and at this point who can trust them with putting out a long-term product?
Of this list, only Hangouts is a video conferencing application, is it not? Allo's primary goal was chat, Duo's is 1-1 interaction, GTalk is simply the older version of hangouts, and so on.
> only Hangouts is a video conferencing application
btw, there are three different versions of Hangouts: Classic, Meet, and Chat. Hangouts Classic will be EOL'd later this year. Hangouts Meet is the video conferencing for business. Hangouts Chat is a Slack clone for business that includes video calling.
Google will transition Hangouts Classic users to Hangouts Chat, not Meet:
The fact that this is so confusing is part of the problem - consistency of product vision is not their forte and there are market economic consequences as a result.
Within our company we use Google for one person meetings, and BlueJeans for team meetings. Hangouts doesn't work well on anything other than Chrome. In Firefox it doesn't work with video on. It doesn't work well when other party is in China. We tend to use Skype for China calls.
