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Comment by alphabettsy | Hacker News Reader

Hangouts and now this?

Their track-record is one of the reasons I don’t adopt personally or recommenced new Google services to friends and family.

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People use Hangouts. No one I know has ever used Allo. It hasn't even come up in conversation, even when they were marketing it. Hangouts, on the other hand, I get meeting requests all the time that include a Hangouts link. It's a quite popular technology...in my, admittedly limited, experience, it is a leading option, if not the leading option, in the "let's schedule an online meeting" sort of way.

So, I have no idea why they're killing Hangouts and it isn't clear to me what I'm supposed to use instead (as I also use Hangouts for that "let's have a meeting" purpose, and no one has ever said, "can we use something else?"). But, I see clearly why they're killing Allo. It could have literally zero users, for all I know. But, Hangouts definitely has a lot of users.

I don't think one should group the killing of Allo in with the killing of Hangouts. Killing Allo is a no-brainer, as it was seemingly a bad idea with no market fit (I mean, I guess...I never even looked into what Allo was, because I was happy with Hangouts, but the market has spoken, for sure).

I think you're confusing Hangouts with Meet? Meet isn't going away as far as I know.

Isn't "Hangouts Meet"[1] just the enterprise-y version of Hangouts? That's what it looks like on the comparison page[2], minus some Hangouts features that are missing in Hangouts Meet (no text chat, fewer supported browsers)

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

[2]: https://gsuite.google.com/learning-center/products/meet/swit...

I don't know what Meet is.

When I add an event in Google Calender, there is an "Add Conferencing" dropdown...in it is "Hangouts". That adds a conference link to the event, which I can then share with whoever I want to meet with. When it comes time to meet, I open the email reminder, or look in my calendar, and click the link. Everybody shows up...we meet. That's Hangouts, as far as I know. It opens in the Hangouts group video UI. I receive these invites from others pretty regularly, so I don't think it's anything mysterious? But, as far as I know I've never received a Meet invite.

Google is very bad at branding and marketing is what I think we can learn from this.

That thing you are describing used to be Hangouts, but is now Meet.

Nobody told me. Or Google, apparently. https://photos.app.goo.gl/E9qk9KJC73VoEj5y6

When you go to the actual conference in the calendar event, do you still see a Hangouts URL and UI?

Maybe we are on different sides of an A/B test.

Literally everything I see has Hangouts branding. And, not just for me or my events...I was invited to a meeting with someone from another company yesterday, and everything about it was branded with "Hangouts" and not "Meet", too.

Also, the Google Meet website is laughably useless. It has literally no content, not even a description of what it is.

> Also, the Google Meet website is laughably useless. It has literally no content, not even a description of what it is.

“Video meetings for your business.

Connect with your team from anywhere. With easy-to-join video calls, you can meet face to face without the added cost of travel.”

https://gsuite.google.com/products/meet/

EDIT: I just realized there is a separate “Google Meet” page which has no SERP summary and just redirects to the Play Store page for the Hangouts Meet app (at least, on Android.)

This is what I see at the first link when I search for "Google Meet" (url is: https://meet.google.com, which seems like it's a reasonable point of entry URL for the product): https://photos.app.goo.gl/C6HcFKEhMuFhy2EZ7

It's not a good web page. Clicking the "Learn more" link takes me to a help page telling how to join a meeting...but, not much about what Meet is. It can be inferred, but it's also not a good introduction to Meet. I have now figured out what Meet is, but not why I would prefer it over Hangouts. It appears to be the same thing, only "for business" (and with a price tag, but no promise that Google will stop surveilling my every action online...which is really the one feature I'd absolutely be willing to pay for).

I'll just reiterate that Google is bad at branding and marketing.

Here's how a random invite looks like for me:

https://imgur.com/a/I9NlO4X

Branding / re-branding is clearly not one of Google's strengths. Why change the name? Just change the feature set.

They didn't change the name so much as add disambiguation when they split the product. The broke Hangouts (for business, though this is now apparently coming for consumers too) into two apps, Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet.

Well, yes, that, but also announced that Hangouts would be shut down, which is exceedingly confusing messaging.

It's actually Hangouts Meet, so you are both right. Or both wrong, whatever.

I was happy with hangouts. When they took away merged SMS...that showed someone seems to be whiteanting the product or just wasn't the right person to make decisions about a messaging app. Then they pivoted to a business focused product, that was the death bell ringing IMO.

I think hangouts was their way to a decent messaging platform at some point.

Now I think they'd be better off supporting signal or buying Facebook...

TIL the word "whiteanting". Supremely useful, I'll have to remember that one.

Re-read the updated Hangouts article. It sounds like it isn't going away, just being moved to a new platform. I would guess most consumers won't notice the "change".

FYI, there was an update to that article that stated (from the lead for Hangouts) that Hangouts has no set shutdown yet, and they plan on transitioning everyone to Hangouts Chat/Meet before Hangouts Classic goes down.

see: https://9to5google.com/2018/12/02/google-hangouts-shutting-d...

I read that, but I don’t have much faith. And I would hardly recommend something to the average person in my family when I expect major changes that require them to relearn how to do things. There’s a reason I just recommend FaceTime or Skype to family members, it’s consistency.

But on the App Store, you can see that people fondly refer to Duo as the FaceTime for those without FaceTime. If Duo goes away without replacement, I think people will actually miss it.

I got a Duo ad Hulu yesterday. I think it will survive

> FYI, there was an update to that article that stated (from the lead for Hangouts) that Hangouts has no set shutdown yet, and they plan on transitioning everyone to Hangouts Chat/Meet before Hangouts Classic goes down.

What does that even mean?

As far as I can tell, the whole difference between "Hangouts [Classic]" and "Hangouts Chat/Meet" is that the former was for consumers and the latter was for businesses/enterprises.

So they're shutting down the consumer version and moving all consumers to the business/enterprise version of the same product? That would just turn it back into what Hangouts was before they introduced Chat/Meet in the first place!

> As far as I can tell, the whole difference between "Hangouts [Classic]" and "Hangouts Chat/Meet" is that the former was for consumers and the latter was for businesses/enterprises.

Chat and Meet replaced the classic interface for business. So, it's replacing classic for consumers, too.

(Which is interesting, because originally Hangouts was being announced to be pivoting to being business exclisive, with Hangouts classic for consumers left as-is with the implication that it, and consumer Hangouts as a thing, would eventually be killed, while Hangouts for business would be further developed, which is what Meet/Chat was. So it looks like Hangouts unpivoted.)

I have never understood why Google always exposes these account migrations to end users. Okay, something significant about the implementation is changing, and that takes development time, sure; why do users need to know or care about it? Just figure out how to make the migration as seamless as possible for them.

They didn't, this was leaked.

From the official blog post:

“Allo will continue to work through March 2019 and until then, you’ll be able to export all of your existing conversation history from the app—here are instructions on how to do so.”

That’s not terrible, but the bar is very low for this kind of thing. It’s hardly seamless.

What company has a track record of indefinitely supporting products/services which have failed in the marketplace?

Google considers what most small startups would consider a success, a failure.

Few, but that isn't really the situation here. Google creates largely overlapping products that are bound to be consolidated or shut down altogether, and this is usually clear at the start. If I may rephrase:

What company has a track record of creating duplicate products/services and then abandoning them, allowing most to fail in the marketplace?

Automobile manufacturers. You can take an El Camino to a Chevy dealership.

Wow, whole different issue. That's a franchise dealership essentially an independant garage with a dealer logo slapped on the front. The garage then has to source parts and I'm willing to bet the supply of OEM El Camino bumpers ran dry a long time ago.

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