There is definitely no chance of branding confusion there.
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).
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.
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.
Consumer:
- Video: Google Duo
- Messaging: Google Allo
Enterprise:
- Video: Hangouts Meet
- Messaging: Hangouts Chat
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
On your second point, I wonder that as well.
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.
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.
Inbox -> Email
Gmail -> Email
Useless as a standalone service however.
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.
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...
> Definitely Franz Kafka is alive and well as Google's messaging PM.
- Android, PWA, Flutter, Chrome Apps
- Gradle, ndk-build, Gradle experimental plugin, blaze, Soong
It is not only the messaging team.
My whole office is having a good laugh right now, we really cannot fathom how google can be this blind.
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.