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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Google has gone so far off the deep end with messaging products that they don't know the answer to this question either.

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The other day Slack was down and someone proposed we use Google Chat[1], had no idea they built a Slack competitor.

[1] https://chat.google.com/

I opened this up, and there's a new concept called rooms... but there's no way for me to create a room, as far as I can tell? And I don't have access to any others?

Weird.

There's a plus sign at the top of the rooms list (assuming you're logged in with a GSuite account).

It's my personal gmail. Why make this page available if it doesn't work for normal gmail?

They're in the process of opening it up to individuals, but it hasn't formally been announced as generally available.

It's quite nice, really. Good enough for us to drop Slack. Google is slowly replacing all their messaging products with this - Hangouts for GSuite customers is going away, and presumably this is why they drop the Voice integration.

The way they do threading - everything being a thread, at the top level - is more natural than Slack's.

Collaboration with external teams is seamless, you can add any GSuite or GMail accounts to a room. Much less annoying than being logged into a dozen external Slack workspaces.

Automatic permission management for Drive docs. Drop a link into a channel and it'll prompt to auto-add the right permissions that give everyone in the channel access.

> Google is slowly replacing all their messaging products with this

This is exactly what Google used to say about hangouts! https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2017/03/updates-in-g...

> Collaboration with external teams is seamless, you can add any GSuite or GMail accounts to a room.

And when a collaborating company isn’t on Google?

That is totally bonkers, I've used GSuite for years (which I generally really like, although on the topic of mindless Google branding decisions I guess it's now Google Workspace), and I also had no idea this existed.

The message and skimpy page they serve here if you browse that url signed into gmail could be an object lesson in how to invite product failure.

We dropped Slack for GSuite Chat because as a healthcare company bound to HIPAA rules, Slack wanted to charge us $250k to sign a BAA while Google offered it for free. Having a closer integration with Drive and Gmail really makes me wonder why anyone using GSuite would use Slack tbh.

We do screensharing + voice call after chatting all the time. With google chat it sends you to the beginning of a google meet flow. Now you have a silly dance to get a meeting going with the person you are working with.

In slack you click the phone icon, and voice is live, then screen share and voila. Same app etc.

There is a different problem though slack call has many more issues than Google meet. It's anecdotal but it's not infrequent between all the colleagues that we stopped using it altogether.

What are you using instead?

I keep on getting yelled at the zoom is insecure etc. But actually no one actually wants the waiting rooms and no one is willing to name the alternative that they use that is better. I interact with a hundreds of folks often with only 1 or 2 chances to speak, and zoom gets everyone in / on much more reliabily in my experience.

Same with slack. We are using slack between companies now, and trying to figure out google's chat app strategy with video / screen sharing integration is a NIGHTMARE (even though we pay for gsuite so would prefer it). You have meet, hangouts, chat etc. Some things are in gmail, some things are not. The integration between everything is broken (we also use google voice). We've had issues where I guess folks have domain admins that block them joining a meet call? WHAT! So no your invitee can't get in etc.

I think if we just rank on reliability and smoothness of video call, I would rank zoom > google meet > slack.

We do chat, plus a quick audio + screenshare to look at stuff together -> slack has this workflow down.

For video calls + possible screen sharing zoom is smooth.

Meet is fine, but the flow from chat to a screen share is horrendous because the chat product is NOT meet (I don't think- google's product organization here is confusing).

> why anyone using GSuite would use Slack tbh

Because maybe business care more about the future of the tools they use than $10 per user. Most of the Google product in this segment have been axed over the years.

I use hangouts because it's right there in Gmail. The last few timse I looked at Chats, it couldn't connect with my other @gmail users. Now it does. That's nice.

But rooms doesn't work yet (someone else said it's coming to Gmail), and I can't see how to make Chats show up in Gmail yet, so I can't turn off Hangouts yet, and is it even possible to?

Will chat show up in the right sidebar of Gmail, or below the labels in the left bar?

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