I have witnessed Skype to go from almost perfect video & chat communicator to absolute crap over almost 10 years, and I feel very sad that it has come to rip off Snapchat. There is no alternative like the old Skype now in the desktop.
https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/meet-the-new-enterp...
As for what's awful about it, where to start? Slow, hard to join, doesn't play well with multiple Google accounts, bugs and crashes with screen sharing, ...
1. It is a resource hog. Laptops spit fire when they run hangouts for more than 10 minutes 2. It can be buggy and unreliable. Almost every 3rd hangout meeting, someone on my team is unable to hear others or is unable to use the mic. Fix can range anything between restarting the computer to killing audio processes.
In my experience, it is much less reliable on OS X than Linux.
If they manage to make it reliable and reduce resource usage, it'll be the perfect video conference app.
Also, it doesn't currently work on firefox which is a pain.
At the moment, it's easier to send people to a Slack channel to chat during a Hangout than to use Hangout's chat.
It really is good, at least on Chrome, but I worry that Google will let it stagnate.
That there is a new product using the same damaged brand inspires zero confidence. It's ridiculous to have all these separate apps that don't seem to be cohesive at all. For instance, nobody I know who travels even knows that Hangouts Dialer exists, even though it's incredibly useful while abroad.
Pretty much every product that Google makes is crap, or there is always a better alternative, or the product is virtually invisible, and most updates seem to be making each product harder to use or more unstable. They're not intuitive, features have no useful help reference in the app, and bugs are everywhere.
The worst so far was the new web UI for Google Voice. It doesn't show the most current messages. I've filed a half dozen bug reports for months with no feedback or fixes.
Basically everything. It used to be the main communication tool of the Ingress community (precursor of Pokemon Go) due to it's integration with the game but 95% of all players have moved to Telegram because HO is a horribly broken piece of tech which becomes worse and worse after each update.
A running gag in the Ingress community was that the HO is to Google what Australia was to the U.K., e.g. if you did something stupid while working at Google you would be sent to work with the HO team as punishment.
(I have nothing to do with them other than wondering why everyone doesn't use it)
It seems that over the years, their PM team is more confident (capable?) in keeping a good balance between core chat usability and all the "extras", perhaps because they are not playing catch-up in the market.
But I hope for the return of XMPP. While the client development stagnated for the most part over the last years, there are a few which seem to catch up with the innovation of the last years (conversations, chat secure).
The last great hope was back when both Facebook and Google used it, and you could connect one to the other.
Since then both have gone proprietary, and dragged their user base with them.
It is sad though that basically the only desktop based chat/voice/video communications app listed at alternativeto.net[1] is LinPhone which in theory is a drop in replacement for skype, but in practice it is not =.=
Wire.com -- I'm not affiliated, just a big fan. They're very new and need more publicity in my opinion.