I made a post recently on another article saying I thought the chatter about them killing product was overblown, but the chat/video stuff is truly a cluster that's doing them no favors whatsoever.
We had a separate SMS app, Google Talk, the Hangouts app, Hangouts integration with SMS, the new Messages app pushing you to de-integrate from Hangouts, and whatever the hell is happening now with Allo and Duo, Allo dying, Hangouts moving to business use only, or to become a Teams competitor, or is that even happening? They successfully scared everyone away from Hangouts chat, whatever is actually happening to it, but all this time, the "chat" area of Gmail still presents what I assume is Hangouts? But I guess that's about to change also...
Now Messages itself is slowly pivoting to "chat" with the RCS rollout and I really can't understand how this could have possibly come to be like this. The branding nonsense of introducing all-new, quite similar features for consumers and pivoting the existing brands everybody already knew to business must have been based on some analytics about Hangouts video chats being a Skype competitor for remote meetings, I guess, but it's still just baffling to think about. And I haven't even mentioned Voice's overlap in several of these areas.
Putting aside the obvious confusion it creates, how can it be efficient to operate so many overlapping services that do such similar things?
We had a separate SMS app, Google Talk, the Hangouts app, Hangouts integration with SMS, the new Messages app pushing you to de-integrate from Hangouts, and whatever the hell is happening now with Allo and Duo, Allo dying, Hangouts moving to business use only, or to become a Teams competitor, or is that even happening? They successfully scared everyone away from Hangouts chat, whatever is actually happening to it, but all this time, the "chat" area of Gmail still presents what I assume is Hangouts? But I guess that's about to change also...
Now Messages itself is slowly pivoting to "chat" with the RCS rollout and I really can't understand how this could have possibly come to be like this. The branding nonsense of introducing all-new, quite similar features for consumers and pivoting the existing brands everybody already knew to business must have been based on some analytics about Hangouts video chats being a Skype competitor for remote meetings, I guess, but it's still just baffling to think about. And I haven't even mentioned Voice's overlap in several of these areas.
Putting aside the obvious confusion it creates, how can it be efficient to operate so many overlapping services that do such similar things?