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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Google is terrible at this. They have no credible replacement for Hangouts, do they? I used and loved the old Google Talk. Then they shuttered it and pushed everyone to Hangouts, which is...the same? Not better, not worse, just a very similar experience, with maybe better voice/video support. So, now they're killing this one, too?

Is there a turf battle among teams over chat within Google? I can't think of any other reason for them to keep killing products that work and have millions of users with nearly identical products that have no users. So much wasted energy. How many times do they think people will switch platforms before switching to something else made by a company that won't kill the product every few years?

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>Google is terrible at this. They have no credible replacement for Hangouts, do they? I used and loved the old Google Talk. Then they shuttered it and pushed everyone to Hangouts, which is...the same? Not better, not worse, just a very similar experience, with maybe better voice/video support.

It's not even the same. It's worse. I used to be able to use XMPP.

Didn't Google just recently rewrite the infrastructure that supports Hangouts? IIRC that caused many Google Voice integrations to break, as they ripped out what was left of their siloed XMPP stack.

Why invest all this labor, only to announce shutdown of Hangouts a few months later?

The new Google Chat for G Suites is actually not even chat. Each chatroom is a collection of Google Wave style cards that jump over each other as activity happens in different ones. The experience is so bad I wrote a blog post about it here. https://technex.us/2018/11/google_chat_is_the_worst_desktop_...

We used it as a backup one day when our normal chat service went down. I closed it within 5 minutes and I didn’t even hit your issues which are way worse. What a shit show.

Uggh. Yeah. We've been required to use it at work, if we want real-time chat. We were using Slack before, but it was taken off the authorization list. I made a long list of things that was wrong with it while we were with it. The notifications are the worst so far. Constant notification spam for every single message. I disabled everything ... and it still sent them. I had to turn them off in iOS.

Because people at google need promotions and launches are one of the few good ways to get them.

Or maybe they are too busy protesting[0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][..] instead of focusing on product ;-)

Interestingly, before 2017, very few (no?) public news of them employees walking out or protesting publicly @ Google. It's almost like Sergey going to the airport to protest opened the floodgates[6]. The Times They Are a-Changin' (or no good deed goes unpunished...).

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/27/read-google-employees-open-l... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/11/01/google-em... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/technology/google-employe... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-... [4] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/30/google-employees-protest-tru... [5] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/07/542020041... [6] https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/28/14428262/google-sergey-br... [7] https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/google-employees-s... [8] https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/01/sopa-blackou... [..] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/10/12/whoops-g...

Google's been killing their products left, right, and centre long before this whole thing. Absolutely no link.

I hate when people just downvote posts that don't align with their politics.

This wasn't downvoted because of a lack of political alignment; it was downvoted because there's absolutely no link.

The post implies a causal link, but there isn't even a correlational one; Google has been shuttering its own projects only a couple of years after launch for years, long before the current round of employee protests.

That’s usually the case for any big corporation.

I think Google is at a place where it feels they have too many cooks. Just focus on the core things like Apple.

I'm thoroughly convinced one of the strategies of large tech companies is to suck all the air out of the room when it comes to engineer talent.

I've seen the inside of these corporations - most of the stuff people work on is way below their pay grade (even if it still technically needs to get done) yet they still have a ridiculously rigorous interview process and somehow manage to hire like crazy with salaries and benefits way better than a startup can offer. It just doesn't make sense unless the goal is to deprive potential up and coming competitors of talent.

I don't think that strategy is very effective though. The supply of developers is quite elastic in the long term and it just drives competitors to increase their engineering efficiency.

Also to pay more than they would normally.

Sry what?

Google has enough very good products which shows what Google is doing.

Yes they have some issues with wave, talk, hangout and duo but also have gmail, search, drive, etc.

Apple not always gets it right and Google also.

The problem is, they haven't even launched anything to replace Hangouts!

Think they will? anyway, what really worries me right now is what's going to happen with all those stored hangout conversations, will those still be accessible? will users be allowed to download them? or everything is getting deleted?

https://twitter.com/happyinwater/status/1068861340800958466

Apparently they'll be migrated to Hangouts Chat.

My Project Fi calling/texting from computer features are in limbo, though.

Performance wise it's much worse, too. Hangouts has always been a bloates mess. Only on recent high performance smartphones that hasn't been obvious.

Google Talk was better. I used that for business purposes, but once they migrated everyone to hangouts the quality -- latency, sound, etc, dropped a lot, at least as experienced by me.

I have to agree with you it must be internal politics. Otherwise why would they keep inflincting harm on themselves? But maybe they have some data that suggests this is a good idea...

Really? I get excellent quality from Hangouts. HD video with enough clarity to make out individual hairs on a cat.

Yeah, I get lagging and voice/video sync issues. Trying having a conversation with a person instead of a cat to experience it. :)

I find Hangouts handles low bandwidth and/or high latency a lot worse than FaceTime.

For starters, Google Talk had an actual client app (and then of course you could just use any XMPP client). Hangouts is a Chrome web app, which in practice means that it doesn't really behave like a proper app at all - e.g. on Windows, if you pin it to the taskbar, then close the window, and click on the taskbar icon, it'll open Chrome extensions page, not the app itself.

I still use the XMPP client, though, it never stopped working.

My impression from reading stories about Google culture is that there is a very strong emphasis on launching products.

That's not necessarily a bad thing for consumers if the replacement product is just as good or better than the previous one.

Putting aside quality comparisons, consider that Skype is still "Skype". Even non-technical people know what Skype is, whereas no one knows for sure what Google's Skype competitor is going to be.

> Skype is still "Skype"

In name only. Even non-technical people know what huge pile of crap "Skype" is nowadays.

No, it's the same product with enormous care for user transition. Right now I sit in a Skype chatroom continuously running since 2007.

I have the opposite experience. I hated the new UI they came out with recently and apparently so did 90% of my contact list. I used to always have it running now I barely open it.

The UI has changed more times than I care to count. Skype itself changed ownership 3 times, the underlying communication tech went from P2P to supernodes to Azure integration. At some point I ran its Linux client that hasn't been updated for 5 years. The damn thing never stopped working and the chat is still there.

Zoom is the new skype

I've never once "zoom'ed" a friend. Do you find yourself doing that frequently?

No, but I don't use Skype for that either.

And though I don't use it with friends (FaceTime mostly fills that role) I work remotely and do use Zoom several times a week for video meetings and screen sharing.

Zoom is the new Webex

Wire is made by people who made the old Skype. Open-source and E2E encryption.

Doesn't it require some weird browser extension rather than asking for camera/mic or screensharing permissions through the APIs offered in all modern browsers? Seemed like a kludge when my SO had to use it, like they took the idea of Jitsi and wrecked it.

I use their standalone program on Ubuntu at work; we're switching from hangouts/meet to zoom for a lot (though ad-hoc stuff will likely remain hangouts due to it only being one-click to start one up). It's pretty straightforward, I've almost never had issues.

I just use their desktop app.

The call quality of video and screen sharing is significantly better than Skype and hangouts.

Zoom is buggy as shit. Example: all of the control buttons randomly disappear if you are running OSX Mojave.

Wait. You're right, I guess Zoom IS the new Skype...

To be fair, most software is full of bugs, Mojave especially.

I ignored the constant reminders to update until I saw that it had reached 10.14.1. I figured with the point release they've fixed all the issues and I seem to be right so far. No issues, and I love the Dark Mode.

Zoom is bad. It hangs frequently for me... it's so frustrating.

Zoom requires like 64gb of ram to run properly when someone does screensharing

Funny you bring up skype, Microsoft is actually phasing it out (skype for business) and replacing it with MS Teams. https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-teams-now-ready-rep...

Skype for Business is not Skype but a rebranded Lync.

Not surprised. Lync is terrible.

Why does it keep archiving all the conversations? Sometimes I want to continue a conversation, but it really doesn't want you to.

> Skype is still "Skype"

Except when it is Lync

Lync is an abomination that only exists to dilute the brand

No you're thinking of Office Communicator!

Replacing X with an "as good" Y is necessarily bad for consumers. It makes no sense to replace something that works. And hangouts works!

Thats silly. Consumers have to learn about the thing, learn how to use it. And those seeking to transition now don't have the google replacement.

I'm looking elsewhere.

"If".

Most of their product releases are one step forward and one step back. For example, the new Gmail is a little nicer looking, but it's a huge resource hog compared to the previous one without any striking features (though there autocomplete thing is nice). Google Meet just seems to have a few fewer features than Hangouts, and I'm not really sure what it adds.

I honestly haven't seen a new product from them that is noticeably better than whatever it replaced for quite a while. Most things seem to be change for the sake of change.

Inbox was a tragedy. It’s very effective at separating stuff I care about from stupid junk. Unfortunately it greatly reduced the time I spent looking at email. Fantastic for me, awful for ad impressions.

The new gmail is ok I guess. It’s not substantially different from Mac inbox for me to care. Either way I’ll spent some time scanning subject lines and senders. I might be an outlier though.

What new consumer software products have come out in the last year from google?

Google Duo would probably replace Hangouts

Google Due cannot be a replacement for Hangouts without a serious overhaul:

* Duo is linked via phones, not Google accounts * Duo is strictly peer-to-peer, not for groups * Duo is video/audio only, no chat/text

So, it could be a Duo-like replacement for Hangouts, maybe. But not a complete replacement. A merger of Allo + Duo (does anyone here know what Allo is?) could check some of these boxes. But one of the primary appeals of Duo is E2E encryption, and that is not in Google's interests in the long run.

There could be value in Google having an E2E encrypted messaging service if for no other reason than taking users from their competitors and keeping them in the Google ecosystem.

That was launched in 2016. My question to the OP was about their product-launching abilities. They seem rather slow on the consumer software front, i.e. they don't seem to be launching new products (or even updating existing) at the same rate that they're retiring them.

Like the article says Google Hangouts Chat will replace Hangouts. Chat even has hangouts classic backwards compatibility.

Google Chat is a horrible experience and I would advise anyone serious about communications at their company to seriously consider alternatives. I am currently forced to use it. I have documented multiple bugs in a blog post here and I have reported each one to Google multiple times without any fixes being made. We are a paying client for G Suites.

https://technex.us/2018/11/google_chat_is_the_worst_desktop_...

If it's backward compatible, why would they kill Hangouts, instead of just upgrading everyone automatically and calling it version 2? Google makes no damned sense. With all of the confusing product names, I can't figure out what they even want me, a regular Hangouts user, to do.

Chat can support Hangouts features but not vice versa.

And Windows 10 can run programs written for Windows 7 and not vice versa... so as the above commenter said, why not just call it version 2 and upgrade everyone?

But yeah, I guesss Google's culture leads to a lot of dick waving competitions...

Google has actually been making improvements to their Google Voice client again, and it is looking descent. I'm thinking the issue is they don't have a Slack/MatterMost/Zulip/Discord/Matrix type of chat client and that is what is in style now. Truly Hangouts is not setup for Teams using ChatOps, nor managing multiple channels for Enterprises.

Though, to note, Google Voice is US-only.

There's a lot of non-coding work involved in launching in a given country. Years ago, not long after GrandCentral became GV, there was a project to launch in a second country, but the effort just stalled for a variety of reasons and got cancelled. It was going to work differently from the US one because it would have lived in other market realities altogether.

How long has Google Voice been around, more than a decade? Excuses are wearing very thin. Their failure to come to Europe is the whole reason Skype exists.

I doubt it will ever come, especially to Europe. I don't think any international expansion was ever promised. I haven't worked at Google in years, so I don't know anything about current and future plans. It would be a stunning, but welcome surprise.

I think the Gmail redesign (which is a huge resource hog) and Google Meet (hangouts video replacement) were released in the last year or so.

I'm not too hip on Google products, so there's probably more that I'm missing.

Yeah and it's still rolling out slowly (or maybe the old version was still cached). Have a family member with a low-power desktop that works fine for general web browsing, video watching, email checking, and it used to be fine.

New gmail (even with hover actions turned off) is an absolute performance mess. Even just scrolling down the list of emails is choppy.

Never had a problem until now. I have no idea what Google is doing, but whatever it is there's a good chance they'll keep screwing it up

Google is dead - A rotting corpse. The people who made masterpieces were already thinking about leaving when I joined in 2010, the people who were really solid (many geniuses) are leaving now in droves. The management aren't asleep at the wheel - They're pointing in, effectively, the right directions. They just don't understand why they're losing speed.

Google is unfortunately a really solidly built ship sitting on a ton of cash and a really valuable resource whose proceeds are currently going to the parasites clinging to it's shell. The thing that made them great - Search - is still solid, and is large enough and ahead enough that it can sit still, even go backwards, and people will continue to use them for many years to come. Their money faucet, ads, went from being unobtrusive and helpful to obnoxious and exploitative to cover for the lack of forward movement of the giant it stands upon.

All that said - Google still has some great people, a great mission, and amazing tech that's still years ahead of the rest of the world. It's stock will continue to go up with Wall Street. It just isn't the place it used to be - Though, like all nostalgia, I wonder if it ever was.

"Google is unfortunately a really solidly built ship"

Why is this unfortunate? Isn't this a byproduct of their success they've had over the years? Sure, they haven't had many blowout successes in recent time, but still.

It's unfortunate because the people operating the ship and deriving profit from it aren't the ones who built it. Truth be told, I don't much like the people who work for Google now. There's still plenty of good people there, the median person is still a very good engineer and a nice person. It's the people who don't care and are looking for profit and promotion, and even the people who are just careless with the immense power and data that Google has, who scare me.

> It's stock will continue to go up with Wall Street. It just isn't the place it used to be - Though, like all nostalgia, I wonder if it ever was.

Well then who the hell cares, besides you?

Ignoring general Android features, their pixel phones have a lot of unique software, especially around Photos.

They're showing off a lot of Assistant features. Duplex is launching soon.

They're pushing a lot of ChromeOS features by adding Android App support.

Did streaming TV on Youtube come out this year?

They have a beta of their game streaming service that came out a month or two ago.

That's off the top of my head. There's a ton of smaller apps they throw at the wall all the time too.

Google talk had a small and clean desktop client. Hangout pretty much forced me to use mobile or chrome. GTalk could communicate with any jabber network. Hangouts was all about Google's walled garden.

I finally switched to telegram and I could not be more happy.

I may get scorn for saying this but it's the byproduct of a developer-first culture. They build amazingly functional products with no clear product strategy or branding. They need much more customer-focussed and product-focussed. That's why Apple and Amazon beat them on everything except search.

>I may get scorn for saying this but it's the byproduct of a developer-first culture.

Google is now a promotions-first culture. You get promoted for launching new stuff, not for doing the work to make someone else's vision better.

A company of rockstars without audiance.

The bazillions of android users relying on Google services is a big audience, and fundamentally captive too.

I reckon the problem is that very few services actually make money, everything else is so low-stakes in monetary terms that they can afford to be super-casual about it.

> They have no credible replacement for Hangouts, do they?

Hangouts chat is supposed to be the replacement: https://gsuite.google.com/products/chat/

It might be made available to (non-gsuite) consumers at some point.

Hangouts Chat is the replacement for Hangouts as far as I can see. While it is business only at this point, if they do release a customer-facing version of it, the existing Hangouts could easily die.

I think the replacement is supposed to be just straight texting now that they have the rich text protocol or whatever.

Kinda stupid, but like - that's Google's chat strategy in a nutshell.

> pushed everyone to Hangouts, which is...the same?

While Google is terrible at this, I believe there is one other major difference: IIRC, Talk did not have cloud sessions. You could not switch from desktop to mobile and continue a conversation right where you left off. (The closet you could get was look at archived messages in Gmail.)

Hangouts, like virtually any modern chat system, does have this. So they did add at least one feature that's pretty useful for people even when not using voice and video.

It may be some grander plan to slice an IT cartel cake by big-cos. G+ to FB, Hangouts > FB Messenger. Non aggresion pact in force for me.

Easy. They basically rebranded Hangouts as Meet.

Isn't Meet is part of G-suite, and only useful for in-network communication with your G-suite organization?

you can invite people from outside your org to meetings, but yes, it's not a purely public service. Duo and Allo are still out there though.

Only if you have a paid Gsuite account. Those of us grandfathered in to the Gsuite service with their free account don't get access to Meet.

>>> grandfathered in to the Gsuite service [...]

Ah, yes, ye olde "Google Apps for Domains" (boy, there's a catchy product name ...).

I've got three of them still running: two I rarely use, but the other is the family account and it's got a lot of history in the mailbox.

I'm gonna be effed if/when they pull the plug on us greybeards still rolling on that old free tier.

/Acey

p.s. The new Gmail theme sucks rocks. Anyone have a 411 how to make it look as near to the old style as possible. (tbh, I haven't hunted for an answer, but tacked this on in case anyone reading knows a good blog for that.)

I've got four still running, although 2 are mostly shut down now, I just need to pull the Google Docs. The last two are going to be bigger issues as there is a ton of mail and no good way even for an admin to transfer that mail to a new server.

One being a family account also is even more problematic, they expect Gmail quality web interface and I can't really give that to them.

There was also Google duo, which was.. the same but different?

For business conference calling they have meet, which is pretty similar to Hangouts for that purpose and is what we use at my office for conference calls.

I've never tried to make a call to a single person with Hangouts because Snap, FaceTime, and others are better. They also had another app that competes with Snap and FaceTime; I don't recall the name.

So, seems like their shutting down something that's already been replaced by their own tech.

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