Google launches Meet, an enterprise-friendly version of Hangouts | Hacker News Reader

Google launches Meet, an enterprise-friendly version of Hangouts

techcrunch.com

102 pointswebmaven94 comments

If I was in charge of communication at an enterprise I would stay the hell away from this. Google has probably abandoned this project already. I'm being semi serious - based on their history it might never get an update, or be dropped in a matter of months.

I'm not sure how Google expects anyone to invest in any of their minor platforms when they're so unfocussed and so notorious for abandoning and shutting down their services. Haven't they launched something like an average one new chat app every two months over the last six?

Enterprise apps are the very type that need long term confidence the most. Why are we to expect this would be any different to the multitudes of platforms they've abandoned and fragmented already?

We have Google Hangouts equipment in all our meeting rooms at Square, and use them for many (most?) meetings. They generally work great.

What do you mean by hangouts equipment? (genuine question, I didn't know they had hardware)

Update: Never mind, I googled it :) very cool. So it's reliable? I'd love to suggest something like this for my organization. We waste the first 10 minutes of every. single. meeting. just getting situated. It's very frustrating.

I've had good experiences with the $1k Hangouts boxes [1][2]. At first they felt unnecessary vs just dedicating one person's laptop to a hangout in each meeting, but the 5-10 minutes here and there that they save, the professionalism they bring to team meetings, and the improved audio quality from the dedicated mic makes them worthwhile.

I think $1k is a bit steep for what they are hardware-wise, but they're still worth it.

[1]: https://chromebusinessdevices.withgoogle.com/products/2911/a...

[2]: https://chromebusinessdevices.withgoogle.com/products/1706/a...

If you decide to suggest this, be sure to buy Chromebox _for meetings_. The regular Chromebox cannot be upgraded or converted into a Chromebox for Meetings. This caught me out the first time.

https://chromebusinessdevices.withgoogle.com/products/catego...

Well, it's video conferencing, so of course sometimes it completely fails to work for no discernible reason. But generally, yes, it's pretty reliable. :-)

And yet there is another thread on HN today saying that hangouts is going to stop working shortly on Firefox, as, inexplicably, it uses a plugin rather than WebRTC on FF.

Also, given that they're in the process of shutting down the hangouts API, it doesn't really inspire confidence.

WebRTC, on the other hand, seems to have a bright future.

I don't think any of it's made by Google. I think we have these or something similar: https://enterprise.google.com/chrome/devices/#meetings

Same at Udacity.

Yup, same at Twitch.

Google use Hangouts for all their video conferencing, both purely internal AFAICT and with externals. I expect that's a large part of why they're continuing to support Hangouts for enterprise: they're heavily bought into it themselves.

I'm honestly surprised by it. I had gotten the uninformed impression that it was being abandoned. I think the introduction of Duo or whatever it's called (the new chat platforms) threw me off.

I'm a Google employee, opinions are my own.

Duo is person-to-person for mobile without the requirement of having a Google account. There are no multi-user video chats. There is no desktop client. It's more akin to Facetime from my point of view.

Hangouts video continues to serve a different market (people that need 3+ people in a chat, plus desktop support). Meet simplifies this for businesses that heavily use it, as you can just jump into Meet and join your next meeting (instead of finding it on your calendar and then joining it). From my own using of it, I've like it so far.

Keep in mind that March 8 is the start of Google Cloud Next[0]. This event covers cloud services, gsuite, and other enterprise focused features from Google. I'd keep an eye on that event.

[0] https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/

You're probably surprised only because you didn't know that at some point Google was one of the largest Tandberg customers on the planet, if not the largest. Then it all makes sense.

This is just the next iteration of hangouts, which was already pivoting to enterprise, re-branded. Kinda necessary, since hangouts doesn't really suggest business use.

> they're so unfocussed and so notorious for abandoning and shutting down their services

When was the last time they shut down anything major other than a consumer service? Cloud is still going. AppEngine is still going. Apps/GSuite is still going. Google admittedly has a pretty terrible record on consumer products but in enterprise it seems pretty solid. The only shutdown I recall seeing that would affect a business is the site search, which doesn't appear to have been used much.

Enterprises pay money for support and these kind of guarantees.

They shut down the enterprise search box. It doesn't matter if its paid or free google isn't going to guarantee much.

Especially their messaging services, they officially promote at least 3 at this point? Just pick one and work on that you jerks.

In case anyone is having trouble keeping track of the state of Google's communication apps, I made a handy visual guide:

http://imgur.com/a/BgAuc

You missed Spaces (which was also recently discontinued).

- https://meet.google.com/

- https://hangouts.google.com/

- https://duo.google.com/

- https://allo.google.com/

- https://voice.google.com/

Android Messenger on android phones too lol

trying to go to meet.google.com yields:

    Your browser doesn't support Hangouts Meet

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

Thank you, Google. I do have Chrome installed. I have other browsers installed. I also have my gym clothes at home, graduated sunglasses and contact lenses. But right now I am dressing casual, with regular glasses and using firefox. So you are out of luck.

Everything but "an enterprise-friendly version of Hangouts". Hangouts is multiplatform application that connects gmail addresses through chat. Meet is just a chrome app?

> Your browser doesn't support Hangouts Meet

No, Google, it's the other way round. Hangouts Meet doesn't support my browser. Quit trying to blame your lazy coding on others.

Sort of like how my Firefox does support yubikey through an extention, but Google just hardcodes the user agent as not working.

It is a bit different, Firefox doesn't support one TLS extension that Google wants to perform a Yubikey authentication.

Not trying to blame FF here as I am also using it...

This is extra lazy on their part if this is legitimately an effort to hit the enterprise market, where users might not necessarily have the freedom to install Chrome on their company machines. Or it's an attempt to force corporate IT into approving chrome.

The enterprise market would be the least likely place you'd find Firefox.

I'd guess IE, Chrome, Firefox in that order. Maybe Edge in there but since it's new a lot of Enterprises will be fearful.

I wonder what so new technology they use that is bundled in the chrome that they need it that bad?!

Chrome has a baked-in plugin for Hangouts. They used to have you install a plugin for Firefox, but since Firefox has removed NPAPI in version 52 it no longer works. Supposedly they are working on a standards-based solution.

https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/02/google-hangouts...

The cynic in me things this is a case of "We use chrome so we developed for chrome - we'll fix other browsers later" (Yes I'm bitter about the state of the cross-browser development sometimes)

That's nowhere near as cynical as "the more things are exclusive to Chrome, the more market share Chrome gets through lock-in and so the more data we can harvest." Which is what I'd guess is the real reason.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect the key to success in videoconferencing is doing really extensive testing.

The users are going to try to transition from NATed-mobile-data to corporate-wifi-with-ssl-mitm while reinserting their USB headset and connecting an external monitor while screensharing with participants running five different OSes.

Maybe they've had time to do all that testing on Chrome, but they haven't got around to it yet with Firefox.

Possibly the same thing that powers Hangouts and requires to install plugin in other browsers (as other browsers don't support plugins anymore, Hangouts works only in Chrome too).

Is there some sort of internal competition at Google where each team releases a chat service and they see what does best?

Yes, actually there is. Internal promotions at Alphabet are based on "launching". So these teams launch their products and then Google culls the ones that don't do well in the market.

Yes and the race doesn't end until it's got at least N users and subsequently been shut down.

Each team hoping to further fragment massaging ecosystem... But why do I bother, I'm sure they'll discontinue it in a few months.

Only if the winner is the one that deceives more users.

I have a MacBook Air 2011 with Lion and Safari 6. Today Google released Meet and I can't even know what's that about, their web page won't even show me a welcome page showcasing the features with some cool pics or something, instead I get a blank page saying I am not welcome.

Sadly that same experience has been happening lately in every major website I visit, like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Medium. Sometimes I go to the Develop menu and change my user agent to Safari 7 and now they let me in, WTF? Am I welcome or not?

Some people would say I should upgrade my OS, and even if I would like to do that, my laptop only has 2GB RAM so it would be almost impossible to even open notepad without making it crawl to a halt, while right now from start up to the web it takes less than five seconds. So no, that's not an option, much less buying a new computer.

I am not saying the world should stop progress to accommodate our needs, or that everybody should feel compassionate for poor, insane and plain dumb people like me, I just say it is hard to accept that a perfectly fine computer no longer has access to the modern internet.

We're being phased out, and that's definitely a sad feeling.

Have you considered using another browser? Staying up to date isn't just about the convenience of web devs, but about your security.

[Disclosure: I work in this area, but I'd much rather someone be using a patched browser than an unpatched version of our browser.]

Yes, I have five browsers installed, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Tor and none is getting any more updates.

The latest browser I can think of that should still support your OS and still gets updates (for a few more months at least) is the extended support release of Firefox 45: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/ While it may not support the latest HTML5 features, you'll still be patched against security vulnerabilities.

Alternatively, you could install Windows 10 using bootcamp according to the bottom post of this thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7171259?tstart=0 Windows 10 works pretty decent on low RAM devices, and you'll be able to run all the latest browsers and software.

Quit using an outdated safari and install a different browser? Your computer is fine.

How about Firefox 51.0.1? Oh. Nope, that's not supported either.

Firefox 48 says it can not update on my computer any longer.

Like?

I have a 2011 iMac in the house, and gave my parents a 2011 Macbook Air. All are on the most recent OS X. They all have more memory than 2GB, but does the new OS really take that much more memory? I've not checked.

I'm running El Capitan on a Mid-2009 Macbook Air with 2GB of RAM. It's not noticably worse than it was with prior OSX versions, might be a little better.

Should I try El Capitan first or go right to Sierra if I decide to update?

I run Ubuntu on an old iMac and run the latest Chrome. Maybe you could even try this out inside of VirtualBox?

Because nothing says enterprise like a 2.6 MB photo of a lake.

My first instinct was to agree with you. I mean "enterprise"? But... Google Meet would likely be intended to enable remote work (possibly for an enterprise), in which case, why not work next to a beautiful lake?

hangouts, voice, messages, allo, duo, meet

I'm curious to know the product thinking around so many chat apps. Does the success of snapchat mean that there are deeply segmented messaging verticals ?

There were also the chat integrations in Gmail, Docs and Google Plus. I think google is still trying to make something stick.

which is fine - but why not one product. does every feature need a new app/product?

Did anyone actually check if this isn't just the same codebase repeatedly released as differently-named products, in hope that eventually one sticks?

Google is going to have to reinvent a federated chat protocol just to reign in their own products...

They don't have to reinvent any federated protocol; such a protocol already exists. See http://matrix.org

It would be really cool if google creates products that leverages the matrix protocol. I mean, gmail leverages email, smtp, etc....why not build a platform that leverages matrix?

And yet, I was evaluating a chat room app for the org I could post messages to from a script like a chat bot and none of these came up as options. We have a google apps account.

Google and Apple are competing as to which one can act more like a Monopoly as Microsoft was during 2000s.

I still dont understand what Google was thinking when they killed Google Talk when there was no replacement in place. Gtalk was an excellent app. The desktop app for gtalk was very light.

Must be in reply to Amazon's Chime: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/02/announcin...

Quite likely.

Sounds more like what's been tested by early adopters for the past six months: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2016/09/new-early-adopt...

I stopped using hangouts recently. Every link is wrapped in a Google redirect. It is a horrible user experience on mobile. If I click an app specific link a browser pops up, then the redirect happens and the app pops up. There is no way to disable these redirects.

Can't we just all converge on one message platform, like we also did with good old telephony?

May I suggest matrix.org... "Matrix is an open standard for decentralised communication...You can use Matrix for...Decentralised Group Chat (Fully distributed persistent chatrooms with no single points of control or failure)...WebRTC Signalling (Web-friendly signalling transport for interoperable VoIP and video calling)...Internet of Things (Exchanging and persisting data between devices and services)...and anywhere else you need a common data fabric to link together fragmented silos of communication."

For protocol info, see http://matrix.org

For seeing how it works, check out https://riot.im (only one of the numerous federated home servers, and only one of the chat clients). Or, better yet, host your own home (public or private) server across the matrix network! ;-)

Can't Google even converge on one message platform?

It's called XMPP but everyone hates it because it's based on XML and XML is not trendy.

No it's because XMPP's multi device semantics are the opposite of what you want, and they never got offline messaging and file sharing to work reliably across clients.

XMPP was created for and by geeks who roam from workstation to workstation, not people who need to preserve history and state while using multiple devices at the same time under spotty connectivity.

It has extensions like "Message carbons" and "Message archive management".

Google Allo is launched in late 2016 and it is strictly bound to single device. This is marketed as feature, because only geeks and rocket engineers use workstations, normies do internets on cellphone (and only terrorists and drug dealers have more than one cellphone).

Last thing I heard you could annotate XML so the receiver would actually know what kind of data was supposed to be in a field. A no-go with JavaScript. You should _always_ have a big surprise when you parse data.

HTML is based on XML, and most people seem to like it.

HTML is the largest trouble of modern IT industry. All technical progress is revolving around circumventing HTML. First came things like Rails where you build HTML with pieces of strings separated by special syntax and your real code is shielded from it. Fortunately, now this is almost solved by React, which builds HTML for you automatically from JSON-like structure of lists and associative arrays ("application state").

Both HTML and XML are children of SGML which is a child of GML.

HTML is based on SGML, not XML.

We are a Google Apps user, and since we went to a remote work system last year, we heavily depend on Google Hangouts. I've found it to be pretty terrible on a reliability, functional, and performance basis.

On the other hand, we also use Slack heavily and its video product has been getting better and better. It won't be long until we can use slack for all our video conferences and discard hangouts fully.

Where Hangouts is limited to 10 people, Meet says it supports high-def video meetings with up to 30 participants

A bit of a tangent: What's the best solution for a voice and chat or video-optional conference with 80-100 participants? Mostly presentation style but need the ability to take some questions/discussion among participants. Bonus points for a good mobile client.

We use Vidyo: https://www.vidyo.com/

It has the ability to simultaneously screenshare (for a presentation) and have a webcam on. There's a group chat feature for questions, too. The room admin can mute participants if you want to hold "live" questions for the end.

I wasn't sure of the maximum number of participants but have routinely been in calls with dozens of people with good performance, including in meetings with folks from both US and Australia (and US/UK).

It's a bit hidden, but if you scroll to the bottom here under "2017 VidyoCloud Service Description," the PDF there says limits are 100 participants for the "Team Plan," and 200 for the "Enterprise Plan," with the ability to buy extensions up to 500: https://www.vidyo.com/cloud-video-conferencing-service

I haven't used the mobile client (iOS/Android) personally, but it's seemed to work decently well for my coworkers.

Not sure of the cost of the different plans, but I've been quite satisfied with it as a full-time remote dev.

Used be, Sococo Teamspace could do that. We demonstrated 100-person meetings routinely. Presentation, some video sharing, everybody could hear everybody. Using our proprietary media channels and media servers.

Then Sococo got taken in a different direction - using WebRtc. The new version can only do maybe 6. Hangs routinely. Takes forever to enter a room/connect streams.

WebEx

If only Hangouts had a native client on Windows or Mac it would have been enough already. It works like a charm on iOS devices.

Laser focus - that's what Google desperately needs. It's too bad when company releases multiple products competing with each other.

> Google launches

Ctrl+W

Google launches a manned Mars mission.

(1.5 years later)

Google discontinues Mars Project; half a dozen users don't justify the costs of keeping the infrastructure up.

All Mars residents are given two weeks by Google to arrange their own transportation back to Earth, after which the water, food and breathable air infrastructure will be permanently shut down.

Google sunsets Waymo - passengers kicked out on freeway.

How about we get basics down first...like being able to send snippets/screenshots with hangouts.

I said it when they released allo (or was duo?) but this one is going to be a huge success! /s

Oh man, another Google product that does the exact same fucking thing another Google product does.

If only Google launched a messaging service...

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