Google Hangouts Chat | Hacker News Reader

Google Hangouts Chat

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164 pointsalooPotato189 comments

I would pay cash money to read an interview with a higher-up about what the fuck is happening at google with all these chat apps.

Tech Journalists, somebody, ask a C suite or even just a team lead, "why are there fifteen chat apps and what is the google chat app long term strategy." Then link your patreon.

Where are these kids hiding? I'm in South Bay all the time - which bar do I need to and who do I need to feed alcohol to until I get answers? It's to me the world's greatest unsolved mystery.

Based on the article from earlier today [0], my new theory is that engineers at Google have realized that the best way to get promoted is to launch a big, shiny product (regardless of need, market fit, etc), and the easiest way to get a big, shiny product is to just re-launch the same projects over, and over, and over. Who cares about long-term product strategy as long as you get your promotion?

Seems like a classic case of employees optimizing for local maxima, at the expense of the global maximum.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241

I've understood this to be the explanation for years now. I'm not sure if this is common knowledge, but it's what the Google Voice community has come up with to explain why we constantly get shoved to new platforms that absolutely suck.

I mean seriously, every time google voice moves to a new platform it loses several features. It's one of the reasons why I avoid Google whenever possible. I went with Office 365 Enterprise over the Google solution for my business, and I use Linux as my primary desktop.

Do you know how badly you have to mess up for a Linux user to look at your offerings and say "Well, I trust Microsoft more"?

I remember when I would be excited/happy when Google would acquire some software/service that I use. Surely this means the project will be well supported for the foreseeable future... why else would Google pay XXX million...?!

These days the same announcements just fill me with dread and I expect the the software/service to be shutdown or gimped to the point of worthlessness within a year.

Are there any examples of core G-Suite products Google has deprecated? I can't think of any.

Reminder that "Core G-Suite" is an official designation, not something I just made up. Right now, their Core G-Suite products are: Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites, Calendars, Hangouts, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Meet, Plus, Keep, Vault, and Jamboard.

When the introduced the $10 / user tier (up from $5), $5 gsuite lost at least one feature that I use: email content filtering. It was implemented in a pretty hard-to-find place, but was effective and had enough functionality to catch, e.g. social security numbers and credit card numbers.

If a team was already using the feature they got to keep it for an extra year or so, but otherwise you had to upgrade at double the price to have the feature.

That being said, it is now implemented in an easier to use way.

Don't recall details, but I believe there were a few other minor functionality losses of that type. I had already moved to the higher tier for unlimited storage and data retention tools.

There's a feeling of a stronger and stronger push to get per user revenue up and up with the new Enterprise level functionality coming at "contact us" pricing.

Well, that sucks. And I've not been keeping up. $10 tier?

The last "interaction" I had was convincing/reminding someone to make sure the G Suite account/service they were signing up for was indeed HIPAA compliant, and that they had the signed business agreement with Google to put same in force.

Don't know what the pricing for that was/is. It was more a "don't let your partners and manager do this unless you are sure of it and have this in place", in the context of casual conversation.

Anyone else got such an agreement? If the legalese doesn't preclude saying, how's it priced?

I’m still wary when they switched from free to pay for small businesses. I think in general it’s not a good idea to use free services for businesses, but in my mind it means that Google makes pretty big changes and don’t care if it disrupts you. Microsoft doesn’t do this or rarely does. If anything they start high and drop. Starting free and climbing is not good.

But I don’t think they’ve ever dropped products entirely. Although hangouts has been titled a bunch of different things.

> I think in general it’s not a good idea to use free services for businesses, but in my mind it means that Google makes pretty big changes and don’t care if it disrupts you. Microsoft doesn’t do this or rarely does. If anything they start high and drop. Starting free and climbing is not good.

Wow, I could not have stated it better myself. AWS is also like Microsoft in that they start high and commit to only dropping price. They also seem to do a pretty good job at customer service which Google has a reputation for lacking (although that is Amazon's bread and butter).

Actually, on this score I think they've been pretty reasonable -- generous, even. Free "beta" G Suite accounts (where you got x users, where x declined over time for new sign ups) have remained active and with the same number of users they got when they first signed up. As long as they are actively in use.

Unlike many other companies' free/beta offers, Google has made no excessive push to free/beta users out of their accounts. Of course, they do keep trying to upsell you, e.g. in the administrator management console or whatever they're calling it.

All the same, yeah, relying on a "free" account for a business is probably not a good idea.

And, you get no tech support beyond reading their help pages.

They don't have to discontinue a product to massively screw with my workflow. All they need to do is change how the product is accessed, or the settings and labs features that are available.

I mean, point being I don't trust them not to mess up my workflow. Even if I trusted them to not screw with the core g-suite products, I trust Microsoft more than Google at this point.

If you had told me that I would trust Microsoft more than Google 5 years ago I would have literally thought you were insane.

Microsoft has been amazing at legacy support. The fact that they had an OS be supported for 12 years is pretty amazing. In contrast Ubuntu's LTS are only 5 years

How old is the official designation? They've certainly deprecated major apps; whether they were outside of some arbitrary core designation or whether they predate it's definition, it's somewhat moot either way.

There's also the fact that they needn't deprecate something to remove or degrade features from it, or alter the workflow significantly enough to make it into a product that's no longer worth using.

It's called Promotion Driven Development.

That’s the case for any big company. Middle management causes all sorts of inefficienties.

At Microsoft there was a running joke, “No one got promoted for a refactor”. Piling on more features was the way up.

Please stop forcing business decisions on engineers.

Especially given https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241

Not at all! If that came off as a criticism of the engineers, it wasn't - it's a well-known phenomenon for poorly-managed employees (and/or poor process), since humans will naturally (and fairly!) optimize for their own personal success.

the easiest way to get a big, shiny product is to just re-launch the same projects over, and over, and over

Replace Google with Nintendo.

And before you get angry at me (and I would maybe say justifiably because I grew up with Nintendo as well), I recommend you sit through a few episodes of Zero Punctuation! covering any of the following titles: Mario, Legend of Zelda, Metroid or Smash Brothers and tell me if you detect a theme that that curmudgeon Croshaw is trying to get across.

(Spoiler alert: Outside of their hardware division, Nintendo seems depressingly want for original ideas and IPs as far as gaming franchises go, which is probably a good thing to see Nintendo getting into the 'maker'verse with the switch cardboard stuff)

You quote "re-launch the same projects over, and over, and over" and then you mention Metroid, one of the "less milked" Nintendo's franchises. And even Smash Bros, which has about 4 games in the entire 20 year span of the franchise.

Even Mario and the Legend of Zelda, which have many many games, try to present something unique and innovative every game.

I don't like to be frontal but I get a feeling that you don't have any idea of what you are talking about.

Mario games, in particular the New Super Mario Bros. series, were starting to get a bit samey. Thankfully, Odyssey snapped them out of that doldrum.

The same with Zelda. Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword were both attempts to recapture the Ocarina of Time lightning in a bottle. Breath of the Wild really shook things up for the franchise and brought it into the modern era.

You're making the argument that Nintendo refreshes and tries to innovate within these franchises and producing more games by volume, I'm making the argument that it's not about how different this year's Mario game is from last year's Mario game, it's about me being tired of Mario games from Nintendo and wanting to see some new IP. Splatoon is right now the most recent name I can think of to come out of House Nintendo as a wholly original game IP. Before that I think the first new original name to come from them was Pikmin.

And I'm NOT the only person who thinks this way. Nintendo has said so themselves. Five years ago[1]. And we're still got a new device with the same familiar platform drop titles: Mario, Mario Kart and Zelda.

[1]https://www.nbcnews.com/technology/nintendo-admits-it-needs-...

At least Naughty Dog, the creators of Crash Bandicoot got out of their comfort zone and explored multiple different IP, despite Crash ostensibly being to the PS1 what Mario was to the N64, and Sonic the Hedgehog was to the Sega Dreamcast.

>it's about me being tired of Mario games from Nintendo and wanting to see some new IP

So the truth comes out. But the thread is about Google employees redoing the same thing to get promotions with no long-term strategy, which leads to a lot of product churn. What does Nintendo actually have to do with this? If you have grievances with Nintendo, I don't think this is the thread to do it unless you in fact have something productive to add to the conversation.

It started out with

the easiest way to get a big, shiny product is to just re-launch the same projects over, and over, and over

As someone commented about Hangouts, and me comparing it to other instances where we see similar behavior in the video game space.

It was meant to merely be an analogy and we got off the rails a bit, this was never intended to be some kind of long-winded jab at Nintendo for its own sake.

>Splatoon is right now the most recent name I can think of to come out of House Nintendo as a wholly original game IP.

Had to laugh at the irony here. Arms is newer. You probably forgot about it (ironically) because lots of new IP is forgettable and that's why companies with strong IP and characters use them in more than one product.

People play Nintendo games for the game mechanics, not the story. Zelda and Mario are both about rescuing the Princess and defeating Bowser/Ganon. That's the Alpha and Omega of the story. Some details might differ, the exact how and why might differ, but its the same.

But the reason it works is because when Nintendo releases a new Mario or Zelda game, they also change the way it is played, introducing new challenges, dungeons, puzzles, and mechanics throughout the game, and they tend to do this part really really well even if the cast of characters is largely the same from game to game.

Sometimes that isn't the case, the NSMB series really could just disappear and nobody would care at this point, but that doesn't mean Nintendo can't introduce original ideas.

Yahtzee, for his part, cares mainly about two things. Is the story good and is the game fun? The story doesn't always have to be groundbreaking for him to be having fun, but it is a lot more fun for him if it is a good story because oftentimes, that's all he really wants and a lot of the things that make games fun for other people, don't necessarily do it for him. Saving the Princess over and over again also just doesn't do it for him, and I can respect that, but when the writing is really good, he can even enjoy that part of a Mario game. Just check out his Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door review.

Think about the Big-N not compared to Sony or Microsoft, but to Hasbro and Mattel.

Their strategy seems very reasonable to me.

- Duo was a bet that stand alone video chat app would be awesome.

- Google+ found some traction in groups, so that team built Spaces to extend the organic behavior. They could have built Spaces inside another product, but Google prefers to keep risky projects segregated from each other. That way one project failure does not kill the other one.

- Pushing proprietary messaging too hard into Android could anger partners (like carriers who make money from SMS) and raise anti-trust concerns (see recent Android troubles in EU). Because of this, you might want a stand alone SMS app.

- The messaging market is huge, and Hangouts is not that successful (even though people in tech use it). Hangouts was mismanaged, unloved for years, has a huge install base, and has some tricky core/structural/infra problems. This made it difficult to change and iterate on. Someone made a judgement call that it would be easier/faster/better to launch Allo than to extend Hangouts.

I love Allo and all but it still seems like entirely ripping out the android code base of Hangouts and replacing it with Allo's style would've been better.

The cost of fragmentation isn't worth simply not writing the new code base, I'd think.

Since when is it ok for a company like Google not to have a top-down strategy that they work hard to get right once, instead of launching parallel competing projects because it's "easier/faster/better"?

There's no rule/law that says businesses can't compete with themselves. Taking multiple independent bets seems like a reasonable way to put a lot of resources into a market that you are weak in.

This is similar to how startups beat big companies, a small focused group sometimes beat a big one. If you fund multiple small groups, you multiply your chances of finding a winner.

Microsoft famously killed its Courier project because it competed with Windows. Its now a decade later, and they are still way behind in tablet market share. Maybe if they had built both Windows for tablets and Courier, they would've done better.

All that said, Google has done a poor job of earning their user's trust after killing things like Reader. I believe the execs learned their lesson there.

> I would pay cash money to read an interview with a higher-up about what the fuck is happening at google with all these chat apps.

I suspect there are two main reasons:

(1) Google will often put two products in the same market where one is relatively low-risk and designed to fit perceived current needs, and the other is aimed where Google thinks the market will be going longer term (and often is part of the strategy to draw the market in that direction.)

(2) Google doesn't see “chat app” as a single coherent market that (at least in the short window) has a single solution, but several overlapping markets, and has multiple chat apps for the same reason GM has multiple automobiles.

> and has multiple chat apps for the same reason GM has multiple automobiles.

But all of GM's cars (and their competitors) can use the same roads.

All those chat apps with their own user bases and incompatible protocols create isolated bubbles, ultimately harming all of them.

> But all of GM's cars (and their competitors) can use the same roads.

And all of Google's messaging apps use the same internet. (If you mean to suggest endpoint compatibility, “parking spots” might be better, though that's not entirely true even of the cars, but certainly more true than the analogous thing would.be of Google messaging apps.)

Google's chat strategy is the Mary Celeste of our time.

These days I feel they're sailing on the Gitche Gumee.

Also, where's Sundar? I feel like he should answer that question.

Sundar's main job is keeping the FTC and EU at bay. All other matters are rounding errors.

"Throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks" is probably the strategy... because Google acts like oil and makes everything fall off the wall in that space.

If it is already erroneous to expect a single individual to act as a rational economic agent, why should a rational economic behavior be expected from a loose aggregation of individuals?

What I've learnt from working in such companies is that individual career trajectory and team politics is the real focus of anyone attention, and that the external world appears as abstract and distant to them as these internal manoeuvers are opaque to outsiders.

I’m shocked it’s so elusive to this crowd

They want inputs to their machine learning.

Who cares what the GUI looks like? They can reskin the same backend to look like 50 chat apps.

They’re generating interest with launches and keep ML input coming

Google isn’t a product-centric company

It’s annoying to the public who are used to going down to Target and buying a toaster.

They built a money making analytics machine and need inputs to analyze

Tech business models all rely on users using their shit. That’s all there is to Google’s interests

Our team at Streak has been using the product for several months now and are pretty happy with it.

The killer feature for us is the threading model. We found Slack to be really hard to follow in a really active channel and worse, hard to catch up on if you've been away for a while. Its easy to skim the threads to see which are important. One thing that might be jarring for people coming from slack is that the entire thread moves to the bottom (newest) any time there is a new message in the thread. Similar to email but in a chat product, you really see it moving around - just took some getting used to for us.

We also found the search to be really good. I don't really have a hard time finding things as I did in Slack - I think the threading also really helps here.

Adoption was pretty quick in our company because it works with the old (regular?) hangouts chat thats built into gmail so people were already used to using that.

It's definitely not as feature rich as slack but for a new product, it works for us. I wish there were more integrations with 3rd parties (looking at you github).

> I wish there were more integrations with 3rd parties (looking at you github).

Not arguing against your general point, but just wanted to point out there is in fact a Github bot for Chat (try "@Github").

I already find Google's handling of their chat software utterly nonsensical, but this one arguably takes the cake for ridiculousness, considering they already have a chat product called "Hangouts".

There is definitely no chance of branding confusion there.

> I already find Google's handling of their chat software utterly nonsensical, but this one arguably takes the cake for ridiculousness, considering they already have a chat product called "Hangouts".

Apparently this product ("Google Hangouts Chat") is meant for work-related text chat targeted at businesses (I guess like Slack).

Not to be confused with Google Hangouts Meet, which is Hangouts video chat, but branded for businesses. Google Hangouts Meet is also known as Hangouts Meet, or just Meet, and even their official website can't decide on which one to use, or even which one should show up in the Google search results: https://twitter.com/chimeracoder/status/968914718508371970

(Apologies for the self-link, but it's easier than reuploading the image).

Google is taking naming cues from Microsoft now. Microsoft's naming conventions are maddening if you are trying to search for documentation.

I have spent a lot of time developing for Access and Excel, and trying to search for VBA solutions is a madhouse. You could maybe chalk up the VBA|VB madness to decisions being made at a time when search engines were somewhat uncommon tools, but they have made this mistake so many times.

For instance, try figuring out the difference between all the Active Directory solutions on Azure. The documentation describing the differences between them is spread out all over the place, and it's not clear which option is necessary to achieve a given result. Plus several of the Azure AD solutions have nothing to do with the Active Directory protocol.

I would chalk it up to being unfamiliar with the Azure environment, but I'm working with a couple of Azure devs and even they were confused by the limitations of each version of AD and when you could use them.

Honestly, if business units within a company could sue for copyright infringement resulting in market confusion I would highly recommend the Active Directory team send a cease-and-desist to the rest of the company.

> I would chalk it up to being unfamiliar with the Azure environment, but I'm working with a couple of Azure devs and even they were confused by the limitations of each version of AD and when you could use them. Honestly, if business units within a company could sue for copyright infringement resulting in market confusion I would highly recommend the Active Directory team send a cease-and-desist to the rest of the company.

Sometimes what happens is that a certain brand name becomes popular, and other people (or departments) want to piggyback off the popular name. For example: Watson is literally a household name, thanks to Jeopardy, so IBM now uses the Watson brand pretty generously, even applying it to things that are only vaguely related to the project that created a computer which beat Ken Jennings.

I could believe that that's what's happening with Microsoft - Active Directory is a known entity to corporate IT departments, so tacking "AD" onto something makes it seem less threatening and more familiar.

But I don't think that's what's going on here with Google. Hangouts was never that popular a name with users[0]. And it doesn't even look like they're piggybacking, from the trail of names we see. It just looks like a chaotic mess. I'm really perplexed as to what's happening internally to cause this sort of confused word salad of branding. I can't figure it out.

[0] Amusingly, people still refer to it colloquially as "GChat", which was never one of the official names of the product! It was always "Talk" not "Chat" - look at the logo if you don't believe it - even though the records were stored in the "Chats" section on GMail.

Google certainly called it Google Chat: https://support.google.com/chat

But now you can have five Google IM apps in your phone! Allo, Duo, Hangouts, Hangouts meet, Hangouts chat... am I missing any? Definitely Franz Kafka is alive and well as Google's messaging PM.

It feels like they are doing A/B testing by releasing entirely different products rather than small changes within existing products. I wish they'd pick a name and iterate on features on one product that I can invest into using for a long time (like Gmail).

Totally, but at some point aren't they polluting their A/B data by exhausting user confidence and diluting their own market too much? At one point I had both Duo and Allo (and Hangouts and Messages and Voice) installed on my phone, and I never found a use for either. Allo never provided a compelling use case for my everyday life, and why would I try and convince someone I know to install Duo just to try it out, aside from pure curiosity? I just don't understand what their endgame with all this is

My experience with Duo is that the video chat quality is far better than Hangouts, especially on mobile devices and poor hotel wifi. Not sure what it's doing differently but I think it optimizes for lag-free video/audio vs quality.

Allo would have been nice as a plug-in for Hangouts. Maybe even an alternative GUI on phones.

Useless as a standalone service however.

Exactly! From the maybe five minutes I spent using Allo, it seemed like a totally fine messaging app with additional features. If Allo was released as the One True Google Messaging App (rolling in functionality of the other apps as well, i.e. Voice), REPLACING the others, I suppose people would've grumbled about change because change is scary, but I would've just been happy to have one Google messaging app on my phone again.

I had Google Voice before I had an Android phone. A big selling point of Android to me early on, especially stock Android phones like the Nexus One, was how, being a Google product, it would integrate with my SMS and phone apps, and provide a unified experience. Since then, they've released so many chat apps, most with SMS integration, that it's just frustratingly confusing and it makes me think less of the entire platform.

So I get they wanted to make a Slack competitor... why not make this new app FINALLY also double as the One True Google Chat App? Surely that would be good for adoption and stuff, plus it would finally solve their "too many chat apps" problem once and for all...

My guess is that the original hangouts will be deprecated, leaving:

Consumer:

- Video: Google Duo

- Messaging: Google Allo

Enterprise:

- Video: Hangouts Meet

- Messaging: Hangouts Chat

I use Hangouts on my phone and computer to chat with friends and family on phones, computers, and tablets. If Hangouts gets deprecated I won't switch to Allo (I don't even think it's available on tablets), I will switch to something without Google.

Seriously if there is a plan to deprecate Hangouts, then it should not use back the same brand for GSuite to confuse users.

Do not understand why the need to have separate app for video chat, especially the one consumer facing. WhatsApp, WeChat etc all combine text, voice and video chat in one.

They might deprecate hangouts and replace it with hangouts chat, and you might not really see the difference.

On your second point, I wonder that as well.

This seems right.

The tricky part is what will they do in Gmail? Gmail is used by businesses and currently has Hangouts Chat built in. But Gmail is also used by consumers so will they have allo integrated into that too?

Gmail seems like a big entry point for chat - not sure how they are going to solve that one if they split up the chat products as you suggested.

The point is that business and personal overlap for a lot of us. I don't want separate products.

Are my professional contacts business if we're socializing?

Are my personal contacts personal if they are also clients?

I don't segregate my life cleanly into business/personal and I certainly don't want to double the number of installed apps because marketing.

Counterpoint: I don't message my group of friends over Slack to socialize. And I don't message my teammates and coworkers over Whatsapp groups to organize projects.

Counter-Counterpoint: My group of friends has a slack channel that we use essentially as an IRC chatroom where we organize long term events, plan evening activities, and chat about an assortment of topics. Nothing about Slack makes it less useful as a personal communication tool as opposed to business communication.

Does something about this new app make it less useful as a personal communication tool as opposed to business communication, for the use case of how you communicate with your friends?

"Hey George, how are those TPS reports coming? Also, do you wanna get drinks after work?"

"I'll have those reports for you by EOD. Please send me a message on Facebook Messenger about that non-professional inquiry."

I just don't see it happening like that. I have people I contact on both Messenger and Slack, and while I tend to keep professional communications to Slack and personal to Messenger, they bleed over.

No reason why you can't have a product which is focused on enterprise, but has a free consumer version.

I'd guess that in the real world outside Hacker News and SV, very few people use email for consumer communication, that role has been taken over by messaging apps. Personal email became a personal business tool, and its usage isn't that different from the regular business usage.

So gsuite, which includes gmail, the new hangouts products and google drive/docs is now focused on enterprise with a free consumer version available.

I think you're underestimating email. My almost 70 yrs old mother constantly exchanges mails with her friends. None of them use any chats.

> My guess is that the original hangouts will be deprecated

The original Hangouts is not yet retired but I thought that Google was clear as far back as the 2016 enterprise focus announcement that the future of Hangouts was as a business communication platform within G Suite and that consumer Hangouts is deprecated.

Which is stupid. They have no consumer messaging application that works across devices to migrate to. If they kill off Hangouts, it will cause a bigger backlash than killing off Reader did.

Reader, and its shut down, were mostly irrelevant for Google.

Which is why I said it will cause a big backlash, not that it would impact revenues.

Allo works on Android/iOS/Web.

Hangouts can't be fully deprecated though unless they plan on killing off Google Project Fi.

They will certainly kill Fi. It will be of no use anymore soon. Already is in Europe.

Except they've started expanding their plans to include family plans, etc.

There is no indication that it will be getting killed off anytime soon. Also since they're a phone provider they can't just shut down. It'll take them years of bleeding money to finally shut down Project Fi.

Well there's also "Messages", which is the default Android SMS app. And even if you're on Fi and set Hangouts as your default SMS app, some things ignore that and open Messages anyway. This shit is so frustrating.

I have the opposite problem, I'm on fi and all SMSes end up in hangouts, even though I have signal set as default sms app.

- ChromeOS, Android, Fuchsia

- Android, PWA, Flutter, Chrome Apps

- Gradle, ndk-build, Gradle experimental plugin, blaze, Soong

It is not only the messaging team.

  > Definitely Franz Kafka is alive and well as Google's messaging PM.

Thank you for this!

Voice -> not technically IM, but forced upon people after functionality removed from hangouts (after originally being removed from Voice...)

Inbox -> Email

Gmail -> Email

Voice - You can 'text' to each other. Although ig you're both using Google Voice you're really just IM'ing.

Technically Google Talk is still around but yo have to use a third party Jabber server.

Each Google Document has whats left of Google Chat built into it which allows anonymous chatting.

Probably can count Android Messages as another Google chat app.

Duo and Meet are video, not IM.

You forgot Android Messages

I can't believe this isn't an April Fool's joke - it's just too ironic! Is google really not self aware enough to see what's going on?!

My whole office is having a good laugh right now, we really cannot fathom how google can be this blind.

(I'm a Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work on chat apps).

Hangouts Chat will sync with classic Hangouts, as called out on this page[0]. Copy/paste of that text here:

>How will this interact with the older version of Hangouts, the one that lives in my Gmail?

>To help make your chat experience seamless, all your Chat conversations will sync with your classic Hangouts experience.

Though to be clear, it's 1-to-1 chats that sync between the 2. So migration for existing companies will be much easier.

[0] https://gsuite.google.com/products/chat/

Hangouts can barely sync with itself. Does anyone really expect it to sync properly with the shiny new thing?

It must be one of those accelerated returns laws - the number of Google chat applications doubles every few years.

It looks like they're going to switch from Hangouts Chat to just Chat.

If you search for "Google Chat" the first result is Hangouts, and the sidebar card is for Google Talk. So, not even Google can keep up with their own rhythm

So do I have this straight....

- Classic Hangouts (deprecated?), has chat, works with most browsers and all devices [0].

- Hangouts Meet is the new Hangouts (for Apps (sorry G Suite)), has chat, chrome only. Poor device support.

- Hangouts Chat, is chat, GApps only, doesnt appear to work at all.

I truly wonder how much worse it can get.

[0] https://support.google.com/a/answer/7303775?hl=en

Hey look, another "I need a promotion" chat product from Google. Incredible impact.

I had the same thought. May be after so many underwhelming messaging/talk products from Google I am imposing my bias but seems like now there are too many people in 'rest and vest'[1] mode at the top along with of course 'I need a promotion'

[1] https://www.businessinsider.in/Inside-the-world-of-Silicon-V...

Yup. The Google promo article [1] from today is good on the background for why these things happen. How can you show technical impact on a chat product that scales from 20 million to 80 million users? (numbers made up) Sure, there are challenges, but they're very easy to look at and dismiss as not that hard. If you launch a new chat app it's very clear something happened.

I'd also add that it's a often a lot easier to build and launch something like this with Google infrastructure than it is to get a new feature suggestion taken seriously by someone two levels up and an org over.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241

I'm honestly starting to believe that Google's fleet of chat products is the most elaborate / expensive April fool's joke they've ever pulled.

It almost seems like satire at this point. Maybe this is all actually a long con to drive everybody back to IRC (or keep them there if they never left).

They already drove everyone I know to FB messenger. A long time ago.

It's sad and true. FB messenger is such a crappy thing but google still manages to be worse than it. I think the last time I used a messaging app that doesn't consistently crash and fail on the basics (scrolling, pasting text) was when I used MSN messenger. That was also the last time I could use a single messaging app to message everyone

Luckily my friend group has slowly migrated away from FB Messenger thanks to the battery life impact (substantial, in our experience) and hamfisting of Stories/Ads into the app.

For the most part, we're back on SMS now. Personally I'm hoping AOL releases AIM mobile soon and we can finally go full circle to my first messaging client.

I'd love SMS if apple would stop screwing around with it re: imessage.

And if IRC is not enough we could get back to Pigeon Post[0] running over "IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service"[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_post [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549

Wouldn't that be awesome!

Let’s do this.

Instead of creating the weekly/monthly/latest G-powered chat product, why doesn't Google go all-in to leverage something like the matrix protocol?

Gmail is so successful and it leverages the universal, decentralized email protocols. For non-techy users its clear the value platforms like gmail bring. Yet, there are so many tech-savvy users who COULD be managing their own mail/smtp servers and infrastructure but instead CHOOSE to still use gmail. I think there is an opportunity here for google on chat, and it does not involve constantly designing a new chat product almost every frickin' week.

I firmly believe that google could build a single/final chat product but leverage an open (and distributed) protocol like matrix...and still win mind-share, market-share, make enough money on ads (displayed in the chat product), allow for 3rd-party integrations, etc. But, hey, whatever.

Time to update! https://sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf

"We are Google and we know what is best for you. Go ahead and use it until we realize something else is best for you. Oh, and BTW if you think our UI is bad then you don't know what is best for you."

I'm inclined to say that going all in on a Google chat product is like betting it all on a slot machine.

This is an inane criticism. How many business services has Google released? How many have shut down? Let's get empirical here.

Well, a business decision can be driven by all product decisions, and if we look at the weird consumer/business crossover with Google the empirical answer is "probably just use slack."

Timelines:

1. Google voice gains voicemail functionality. Gains SMS functionality. Gains "make phone call" functionality.

2. Google Voice deprecated in favor of Hangouts. Hangouts gains SMS functionality. Gains "make phone call" functionality." Gains "receive phone call" functionality.

3. Google Hangouts "receive phone call" functionality removed.

4. Google voice gets a makeover. No new functionality, better UI though.

5. Google Hangouts SMS functionality deprecated.

6. Allo released. Duo released. Nobody is sure why.

7. Google Hangouts converted to "enterprise app."

8. Google Hangouts deprecated in favor of Google Hangouts Chat?

Other lost Google Products:

1. Gmail -> Inbox? Nobody knows

2. CAPTCHA

3. Google Site search

4. Picasa -> Converted to Google Photos (not so bad really)

5. Helpouts

6. Moderator (used by President Obama!!!)

7. Hello

8. Wave

9. Meebo -> Plus

Fucks sake even Google Maps Engine and Google Spaces was discontinued lol.

Here's a fun article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...

A business decision can be driven by all product decisions, but that would be a bad way to make a business decision.

Look at that discontinued list and look at the business services that have been discontinued, can you find any? Can you find more than 5? Look at G-Suite + GCP (Google's business offerings) and tell me how many there are. There are dozens. Many of which have been around for 10+ years (Email, Docs, Sheets, Analytics). So if I'm a business, making a business decision about a new business service from Google it's an incredibly safe bet that this service will be around for the long hall.

You can point to consumer services to try and discount that... but you'd be wrong to, and I think you know that.

Why does it have to be marketed as a business service to be considered a business service? We used Hangouts at my last job until it started shitting the bed in Firefox and Google told us to move to Allo or Duo or whichever. Yea we weren't a 50+ enterprise account, we were just a little English school in Taiwan, but we were a business using a google service that got shafted.

Business service = you pay for it, either directly or as part of your G-Suite subscription. I don't believe you that they told you to move to Allo/Duo. Hangouts works, still works, and will continue to work for the near future. It has hundreds of millions of users.

Depends on your definition of works. Hangouts is the only piece of software that is less reliable than visual studio.

If you spent 100k to build integrations though and are all in on google per se... you get screwed out of 100k if they decide to change the way things work.

Much better imho for a growing business to use their own in-house tools that they can mold how they want and that won't change UNLESS they want them to.

"In-house tools", do you mean something built in house?

If you're spending 100K in integrations you think building an entire service, or suite of services is going to be LESS than that? Now take into consideration opportunity costs. This is insane.

I'll be generous though and believe that you're talking about using open source solutions. That's a more viable option, but you still have to do integrations so the cost is effectively the same, probably more because Open Source solutions are typically far less polished.

And even Open Source projects change dramatically over their life. Everything changes. That's technology. Better to get better at dealing with change than try and hold the world still.

I think you missed "launch chat with xmpp support - later lock user to crappy" first party" clients only, dropping xmpp support".

This is the thing that really boils me. I mean, we can debate whether XMPP is a great protocol, but for a brief window it seemed like we’d have an open chat standard with at least one big stalwart to bring in the normals.

But then Google flipped us the bird and took their ball and went home. Their AMPification plans for email and my residual anger over screwing us over with XMPP was the straw that finally made me switch my vanity domain from Google to Fastmail.

EDIT: Every tech company seems to want to re-Compuserve us :-(

In fairness, Facebook pulled a similar stunt with messenger. It's marginally redeeming that their Android messenger app isn't terrible, but really annoying to lose the xmpp client connect abilityability, and any useful desktop client.

Apparently Google did allow broken (no tls) server side federation too - so they screwed us over twice - both on client and server.

Wave was so far ahead of its time that half of its features aren't available today, anywhere

They also have two VC arms called Google Ventures and Google Capital

Not at all! However infrequently, slot machines do occasionally pay out.

> To get started, go to www.chat.google.com on the web or download the app on your desktop or mobile devices.

Correct link is chat.google.com, no www.

Blog post has been up for an hour and that's still not fixed...how is that even possible.

I have no idea, but the Google Blog is weirdly unoptimized for something so public-facing/PR related. Can't find the relevant HN thread, but somebody pointed out that on another Google Blog post, the author managed to upload something like a 4000x4000px image of himself that then got displayed as something like 80x80px.

When you open up chrome dev tools, the blog post is 19.2 mb (!). And they are all like that (e.g. https://www.blog.google/topics/arts-culture/just-flick-wand-... 92.2 mb).

In this thread: Google needs to stop making chat apps that I'll never use.

This is a core G-Suite product for businesses. Right now, Google has no internal products that compete here.

Their MO so far is to move Hangouts to be G-Suite/Business centric, whereas Allo/Duo are consumer. If you are still using Hangouts as a consumer, you're behind the times.

Yes they need to clean up their Hangouts naming scheme. Yes they have Voice that's just kinda dangling there unloved. Yes, they could integrate SMS/Voice/Allo/Duo better.

But frankly, I don't get all the hate. HN loves startups and experimentation and mistakes, but Google isn't allowed to do that? HN hates when Google deprecates products, but they have too many messaging apps? They'll get there. I'd take their messaging ecosystem today over 3 years ago; Allo is amazing.

I get your point, but why reuse the Hangouts brand for a completely different product while deprecating the old one?

And I definitely would take their ecosystem of 3 years ago over today. Hangouts was the main chat app and it integrated my SMS and Google Voice pretty nicely at the time. Also, I'd like to go back even further and get back XMPP federation.

Now, I have the chat platform that I still use (consumer Hangouts), a few that noone uses (Allo & Duo), and some new ones that noone uses.

This pivoting is grating not great.

My guess: Its an enterprise product, so they want to help ease that transition and encourage enterprise users to adopt it. I imagine there will come a day when the "Hangouts" brand disappears, from both Meet and Chat.

If Google was missing some essential business features after building a messaging platform from scratch 5 times, they have simply failed at software development.

They did fail. At hiring, development, management and project management.

Amazing that something like this is possible.

When I was a SWE at Google, I thought about switching to the PM role. A PM told me that PMs are the secret emperors of Google. Sounded good then but now I think I finally got it: they are the only ones acting in a meaningful way.

As there is no overarching strategy to be followed, it seems like they can launch whatever they want if it "sgtm" to someone above. Launch done, promotion package complete for quite a few people, everyone happy.

How are Google PM's? I work at Amazon and the PM's seem to act like secretaries that manage the deadlines for each projects deliverable and when those dates slip, they page people until they get back on track. Don't even get me started on region build TPM's.

I think by PM at Google he meant Product Manager and by PM at Amazon you mean Program Manager?

Yes. PM @ Google is product management. Seems like 5 years later the ivory tower world view is still in effect.

I wonder why some UI designer thought it wouldn't be annoying to have a quarter of the screen taken up on the top and bottom with massive useless bars.

Maybe they only test on huge monitors and smartphones?

And yet somehow Pidgin with GTalk still works on my desktop.

I really have no idea how. I'm pretty sure Google said they would completely kill the GTalk plugin over the summer. But I'm not asking questions.

So after reading this and trying to enable on my own GSuite and getting nothing but errors I see this: "Chat will be made available over the next 7 days. "

So I expect over the next 7 days I'll have at least 20 emails from GSuite power users of why I haven't enabled it yet.

This is immensely confusing since the first paragraph of the blog post says: "Today, we’re making Chat generally available". I think this is becoming more common too, especially with GSuite releases.

I think it's on under chat.google.com, they never actually link this through the announcement page.

At this point Google has out-Hooli'ed Hooli...you'd be hard-pressed to write better satire than this.

Google is losing its mind. Funny that as essential as chat app is for an internet company, Google fails to push a consistent one to the market because of internal politics.

Any bets on how their next IM app will be named? My pick is Hangouts Talk.

It's about time for the "adding new words" portion in the Google What-The-Fuck-Is-This-For product cycle. Last time we had that was Allo and Duo, before that was Plus. The "filler projects" just have normal nouns like Inbox or Photos or whatever.

google hangouts allo talk

Killed rss reader, created dozens of useless chat clients

- Google

I'd argue that someone needs to needs to make a Google Chat Product equivalent of the Cleveland Browns Quarterback Graveyard jersey (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Clb2inPWAAAh3lX.jpg), but Google seems intent on circumventing that possibility by using pants-on-head moronic namespacing.

Missed Griffin...But that list certainly makes its point.

Another Google chat app? Anyone want to start a pool on how long it will last?

It looks like the announcement was a little premature. We tried for about 30 minutes to sign up with no luck.

The link to the official page is not resolving in the official blog post and the Techcrunch article.

When you do make it to the correct page, it is still showing the early adopter program registration.

I just get to the upsell landing page, despite already being signed into a GSuite account.

Looks like they fixed it.

Im tired of trying to adopt and stay current with Googles ever changing "This is what you should use" product line.

Is anyone else expecting this to be, or turn into a complete shitshow like the current hangouts is?

When I think of Google, I think of search. And then there's Hangouts which has no search at all. Mark text or calls as spam in Google Voice? They still come through on Hangouts, the only way to prevent it so to find the buried block option.

Google and chat is the Peter Principle in action. And everyone who has tried has failed. The idea anyone's been promoted is hilarious.

> And then there's Hangouts which has no search at all.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#chats

or search for "is:chat" in gmail.

Next year they'll come full circle and release Google Chat Talk.

I generally like you Google, but your lack of support keep me away from your business products wherever possible.

Let me pay you.

You can pay for products if you wish (Gsuite).

True, but the bulk of users seem to be using free versions, and thus product design follows whatever crazy motivations Google has.

Aside: Just moved my vanity domain to Fastmail, and it feels refreshingly like a paid product that hasn’t been fscked with endlessly for dubious reasons. I suppose that may be a feature of being an old school paid-for service.

The only way to use this product is to pay for Gsuite.

Now every single new feature is a new app. Every app has ONE killer feature.

I haven't been able to video chat using Hangouts for a long time now. Chrome on Windows 10 or Chrome on Ubuntu 17.10, I click the video button and... nothing.

Works on Android though.

Google should fix the regular hangouts first; I constantly am having troubles with it; and I am not the only one: a post from 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16383525

"Is Hangouts being so bad the reason for the popularity of Slack?"

Haha, this is hilarious. Can anyone keep track of all the Google chat apps? (And the only one that was pleasant to use was the original gchat, which they stupidly threw away.)

This makes for an interesting juxtaposition with the guy who quit Google because he couldn't get a promotion. I guess the the way to get promoted at Google is to make a chat app? ;-)

Everyone is talking about how this won't be a good chat app, but isn't this more like Jira than Slack? If it's a good alternative to Jira, I'd be glad try it out. I personally can't stand Jira, and not able to use VSOnline. I just never have a suitable alternative to suggest when I found out a team needs to use it.

Except you only have 18 months to use it before it's abandoned.

...and 3-6 before they release a new Hangout Business Chat or some such that's better because.

It's like Slack, but with a slightly different conversation threading model (and more Google integrations). Ostensibly its conversation model is better at keeping different conversations separate within the same room.

I'm curious, why can't you use VSOnline?

Because the place I'm at now doesn't have msdn and a lot of Microsoft buy-in by the developers. It probably works with other tools, but I know it's tied into VS very nicely. If it were my choice, that's what I'd like to use. I think it works great and is intuitive.

Finally, Google delivers the business chat app of 2016!

What the fuck are they doing with messaging apps? Is this going to be retired in a year?

Yup, this looks like ... it does ... something

never using Google for anything remotely related to Chats again

Will I be able to search my Hangouts Chat messages on Android? Because I can't with Hangouts. Seriously.

Yes.

Is this a joke?

On functionality (not google product history etc), is this worth switching a small 40 person company from slack? Killer feature in slack for us is probably granularity of alerting and mobile desktop handoff (read a message on one and that carries across), and full featured mobile.

I'm taking the over: 18 months before Google kills it, replaces with another messaging application.

too many people are thinking that a one fit solution can work for everyone but Google are massive and they can afford to have many product to suit their customers needs, Microsoft also has this with Skype, Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams.

Skype will always be consumer focus and it has built in video.

Skype for Business a old product bad UI that was called Lync is being replace with Teams.

Teams Fantastic product but i don't ever see consumers using it business its great check it out if you have 365.

and don't forget microsoft has there old system call messenger that they merge into Skype.

now we look at Google also all these new chat systems are build on WebRTC, HTTP2.0 & QUIC all built to be fast.

anything in G Suite has a requirements of Google Account, high SLA, standards compliance & data retention

Hangout Meet - be a easy video chat app Hangout Chat - be a group/teams chat app

both Allo and Duo work without any account creation all you need is a SMS verify and it works off a mobile number for area of the world that don't bother with creating accounts or maybe some beginnings of supporting a imessage type service so this would be a big change to Google whole systems and thinking around how that layers in with other services.

but there now gearing up to add the Google account layer with the latest teardown its coming and soon as the new smart display depend on duo having google account

Allo - be a modern consumer chat app Duo - be a modern video app Hangouts - be legacy

now this is what i would do to merge the system once they add Google Account support then i can see they will be able to build a layer to import legacy hangout chats into the allo system and in the end maybe even swapping out the hangout backed with allo's two different views/UI on a centralize base. this would keep the internet happy and most people would be no wiser but then allo people can talk with hangout people and the two apps would be 100% feature the same just a bit of paint difference.

Interesting. Some real challenges getting started on day 1.

Now I'm seeing that the Github bot is created by something called Linovi Developments which has a busted ass website and fewer than 100 Github users authorized it... fishing?

We should all just go back using ICQ, it would make things much simpler.

Does Hangouts Chat support browsers other than Chrome? Given that Hangouts Meet doesn't support Firefox or Edge yet, so I kinda doubt Hangouts Chat would be any different.

Definitely not diminishing the criticisms on brand confusion lodged by other comments here, but I would praise all the very assuring security and compliance features.

I have only one question: can I disable it in GSuite without disabling the Gmail "chat" and this "Hangouts" thingy that you schedule via calendar?

> "In case you’re wondering, Chat is compatible with Hangouts and works with your existing contacts."

Well no shit. A "contact" is a userid at a Google controlled service. If they'd managed to not be able to address their own siloed users, that'd be pretty sad?

Also: with email, you can email people.

> "To get started, go to chat.google.com on the web or download the app on your desktop or mobile devices."

So no Gnu/Linux client, only a Android/Linux client. Why am I not surprised.

Google Hangouts Chat is no Slack...

Sounds great to me :)

Good grief: Talk, Hangouts, Meet, Allo, Duo, Hangouts Chat... When does it stop?

You guys should skip this. On google i/o there is plans to introduce "Google Verb" which is a new chat platform something using AI something which lets you communicate using only verbs and culturally vetted smileys.

I for one will be on Verb, at least until Skype Edge is out.

Only verbs and smileys? Sounds great, sign me up at once!

Actually, I should say, ":-) sign :P"

Who needs nouns anyway?

nope.

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