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And they brand everything as a "tool for everyone" so no one can tell if they are the intended demographic until after they install the app or do an hour of research.

I would love to see how a branding team continues to justify this "Google $generic_word" branding model to the brass at Alphabet. People were unlikely to make "Hangout" a verb like "Zoom", and they definitely won't do that with "Meet". The only thing this seems to accomplish is reinforce Google's reputation for rushing things to market and pulling support too early.

I really think these rushed entries by tech giants only benefit the Zooms and Slacks in the specific space. When potential customers are bogged down by choosing between Teams, Discord, Telegram, Messenger, or whatever other chat app is out there, they are more inclined to choose the familiar incumbent.

Exactly, I can already create a Hangouts video call and share a link to invite others into the call. Doesn't make sense to create an entirely new service for this use case when Hangouts was designed for it (plus the new service will have a 60 minute limitation for free accounts). I agree with what GP said about Hangouts being a zombie product, but while there may be some valid market reasons for the product fragmentation, that fragmentation is also probably hurting them more than it's helping.

Slack is ripe for the picking--same capabilities with a better UI, giving better value? I am amazed no one has eaten them alive yet.

Discord did a complete R&D (rob and duplicate) of Slack and focused on video game communities. It’s doing very well from what I can tell!

It's Slack + low-latency voice chat. With vastly less hassle than Teamspeak/Mumble/etc. Recipe for success right there, though I'm not sure how well their monetization has gone.

I haven't heard this term before, but I'm not sure it is a "rob and duplicate" if they are targeting a market segment that Slack never advertised towards nor was really designed for. Seems more like refreshing Slack for a niche, but it turns out to be a really big niche.

You would think Microsoft Teams would beat them, but they inflated it with Office 365 "Features". In comparison, Slack feels more like a complete product the first time you use it. Any other must-haves for your organization are treated as add-ons.

Funny ... none of those other "competitors" seem to feel the need to have 4 different products in order to operate in this space. Each of them is expanding its reach and capabilities, coming from a place of strength.

Google is just practicing "me-too"-ism and not really trying to solve a problem except some engineer is bored and some product person thinks these tools could become a threat to ad dollars if allowed to grow "unchecked".

Google owns YouTube (which you forgot to include YouTube Hangouts On Air). Google absolutely is a video comms company.

Microsoft keeps shooting own goals such as buying Skype, renaming the popular Lync product (not be confused with several other Microsoft products also named after corrupted versions of the work "link") to "Skype for Business" just to make everybody confused.

Then later "Microsoft Teams" comes out of nowhere. Maybe I live behind a rock but I see people using all kinds of chat programs, and all kinds of Microsoft software, but I've never known anybody who uses "Microsoft Teams" and I wonder if it is as popular as "Hipchat" but backed by a company which gives in more benign neglect than Atlassian can afford to.

One constant is that chat programs are constantly churning, another is that every chat program seems to get worse over time, the third is the level of functionality that chat programs have had since early 2000s. (I helped reskin Paltalk for Brazil and it seemed to do everything that Skype and Facebook Messenger did today) The fourth is that consumers and vendors seem to learn nothing from past successes and failures.

(e.g. AIM was great, but AOL failed. Chat clients are usually an attempt to lock you into using services from a particular company, so whether they "succeed" or "fail" has nothing to do with how they succeed or fail, but just a function of what state in the vendor lock-in cycle they are in.)

Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram are all run by Facebook and have variously incompatible messaging capabilities.

Sure, but Facebook didn't name them Facebook Groupchat, Facebook Chat and Facebook Talk.

People actually understand the difference between the various Facebook products, unlike the Google products.

When I ask people what Instagram is for, they always describe it as Facebook, but without all the crap. Or as Facebook with posts sorted chronologically. Doesn't make me want to sign up with it, and end up with another Facebook.

For Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instragram they all started as distinct platforms and companies, so the question would be should they consolidate. IMO Facebook has made the right decision not to consolidate, as individuals bought into those platforms pre-acquisition and don't necessarily see themselves as part of a homogenous Facebook customer base.

> ...none of those other "competitors" seem to feel the need to have 4 different products in order to operate in this space.

So? Google wants to make more money than they do. What's wrong with that?

Also what's wrong with "me-too"-ism? Pepsi exists even though Coca-Cola is fine. Verizon exists even though AT&T works. What you call "me-too"-ism, I just call capitalism and healthy competition.

Google's strategy has nothing to do with ad dollars or anyone being "bored" and everything to do with making money in a different market.

You're basically arguing that Google shouldn't build more products to try to make more money? But that's not how public corporations work. Making money is their whole point.

I'll be honest, I personally find it hard to believe that the P/L for Hangouts Meet is remotely positive.

It's not even a standalone product, it's part of G Suite.

Any complete business suite has to have videoconferencing.

Do you genuinely think the P/L for G Suite isn't remotely positive, or will be over the next decade?

Remember it's the primary competitor to MS Office, and has been around for nearly a decade and a half at this point.

Google is trying to kill off classic Hangouts, starting with G Suite and then later consumers. This was started in early 2019 [0] but late last year they shifted timelines.

[0] https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/01/upcoming-hangou...

>And Google Hangouts is this zombie product that used to do everything, but never as well as any of the competitors

So Google has Hangouts that is able to compete broadly in the consumer and business market but it's not quite good enough so the best answer is to let Hangouts slowly die and invent 4 new apps?

You should switch to Allo for IM. Oh, but if you want to send an SMS find something else, Hangouts might work. But if it is for work stuff you should use Chat. Well unless it's also for video then you should use Meet. But if it's for personal video then try Duo. Ah, well, nvm we killed Allo. Well now Meet is free for everyone so use that for personal use also, I guess.

Totally makes sense. What a cohesive strategy they have enacted to respond to market trends.

Why would anyone in their right mind trust a Google chat, video, or conferencing app? They reinvent the wheel every 3 years and set fire to their user base every time.

Hangouts was absolutely fine. They just needed to add more features and business tiers. Instead of updating Hangouts they invented a convoluted mess that is destined to fail.

The real problem is that there are too many chat servers period.

From a back-end perspective there is a real difference between a platform where a teacher can lecture to 500 students, as opposed to one where people talk to each other over an ad-hoc WiFi network.

However, the story of messaging applications is that something new comes along, like CuSeeMe, people are blown away by it, that thing inevitably deteriorates over time technically (why?) and often deteriorates socially (I switched from Skype to a real SIP phone since ever since I went to Montreal I get these ladies calling me up who want to speak French and I think show me something I don't know what to see.)

It's not easy to see progress. Facebook messenger doesn't seem that different from AIM except one of them is tied to Facebook and the other is tied to AOL.

Many of these video chat programs use WebRTC and related standards, but messaging applications have resisted any kind of standardization. (XMPP is popular for cops, firefighters, and soldiers, but ordinary people see those angle brackets and you've lost them)

Most people don't understand the real differences between the platforms and the benefits they get from them, but they know that every time your company partners with a customer or vendor that uses Slack you end up logging into multiple instances of Slack. Often they make you a channel to talk about your project, but for them it is one of 50 channels they monitor on Slack that are about anything from cat photos to immediate crises, so you might not get any replies if you hop in a week later.

Some people I talk to want me to install WhatsApp, other people want me to install everyone else.

The rest of the world gets it: I don't need to buy an iPhone to call other iPhone users, I don't need to have a Verizon plan to call an AT&T customers.

The reason why chat clients don't improve is that they aren't really competing -- if you had a common protocol then chat clients could compete on being better at helping you with your workload. Instead they remain a mechanism for enforcing platform lockin. In the end that's what's likely to happen to Zoom if it runs into any financial turbulence -- company X will buy it because they think they can use it in some way to lock in customers.

If the EU wanted to do something to improve digitial ecosystems it would be making standardized messaging a thing, but it is hard to do that: you can't stop a few high school students from making a walled-garden chat systems, but you really have to stop billion dollar companies from doing it.

In summary, they're a convoluted, catch-up merchant.

How about they stay out of a market unless they're innovating.

I've not seen them nail any of this stuff.

[edit: deleted. Appear to have been rate limited by HN so I can't reply? so withdrawing from the conversation]

So I'm going to disagree with you for three reasons here.

1) A product has to have simple UX to achieve primary use cases easily. Even if all features can be engineered, building a simple intuitive UI that works for Slack chat, 1-1 calls, and big meetings is probably impossible.

2) Engineering-wise they're also very different. The behind-the-scenes architecture for 1-1 or small groups, versus huge meetings, is also totally different. Similarly whether chat persists in long-lived "rooms", or only for the length of a video call, or only between two people.

3) Finally, people making corporate buying decisions want a product that fits easily into their conceptual understandings. Slack created a category. Google had to respond with a product branded specifically for that category, not a mega-product that also does the things in that category, because people don't "get" that for whatever psychological reason.

You're right that Hangouts did all this previously. But that's also why Hangouts failed. It was a "jack of all trades, master of none."

1) Is it really? Slack already has chat, and 1-1 calls. I don't see a huge UX leap to expand 1-1 calls to big meetings.

2) So what? If you have the technology for big meetings then you don't need to engineer anything else for 1-1 meetings. That's just UI at that point.

3) This makes sense and is probably the main reason hangouts failed. However, I wonder if they could have multiple sub-products under the hangouts umbrella but still keep it a unified piece of software.

> If you have the technology for big meetings then you don't need to engineer anything else for 1-1 meetings.

Unfortunately not. A framework for large video meetings is necessarily routed through a central server which can add tremendous latency, even between two people near each other.

The architecture for 1-1 meetings tends to be peer-to-peer and focus on minimizing latency.

There are a lot of architecture tradeoffs between the different models. Choosing an optimal architecture for each product turns out to be quite necessary.

>Despite the fact that FB Messenger is explicitly designed for non-professional use and can do group chats people are still gravitating to Zoom.

Facebook doesn't seem to be secure.

I bet people don't want to have hours of recordings attached to their real name, so creating random account on something like Zoom seems like an great.