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Comment by cptskippy | Hacker News Reader

I think Workspace is Google's attempt at a Teams/Slack/Wave product. I have to use Teams at work and can't fucking stand opening Word/Excel docs in Teams. That interface forces you to focus on one thing at a time and provides no easy way to navigate between work streams while maintaining state. Why would I want that?

Basically, Workspaces is failing so they're trying to open it to a wider audience in the hopes that it won't fail. It'll probably be abandoned by October and shutdown in a year or two.

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It is by no means failing; at least from what I see, their adoption is higher than it's ever been. They are making a lot of pointless changes while ignoring all the real problems they have, though. Like the fact that group Chats are still unusable for organizations with... you know... users.

The real question isn't is it failing?, it's does any employee at Google still happen to give a shit about it?

Because if the answer is no, it's going to the graveyard no matter how many users it has. (https://killedbygoogle.com/)

It’s all that’s used at Google. The office suite isn’t going anywhere.

What does Google use for internal chat?

Hangouts/Chat.

Which means, practically, that everything is done through internal mail lists, because chat is not usable.

Pre-covid, that also strongly incentivized everyone to actually work on campus.

I don't find Chat unsuable at all. My only team related emails are bug updates which are filtered. I feel group chats on Chat is a better UX than old Hangouts.

Edit: Disc: Googler.

I've been using Google for years. These days I literally do not know what Chat is. I'm not sure if it's what I'm using, if it's embedded in what I'm using, if it's one of the embedded things I ignore, etc. (I use Google Voice, which on android I think they tried to say was chat at some point? But none of the strings seem to say that. And then in gmail, is that Chat, the thing they keep pretending anyone cares about the 5th time they rebranded and split/combined/deprecated/invented?

I think they've gone beyond making it unusable, I literally don't know how I'd find it if I wanted to, and they've long since convinced me that I shouldn't try.

Okay. You can ignore it then.

FWIW, chat.google.com wasn't rolled out for @gmail.com accounts. It was being rolled out in Google Workspace/gSuite. And this announcement rolled it out to @gmail.com accounts. Old Hangouts is replaced by Chat for text and Meet for video. You can access it at chat.google.com.

Voice is for texting with your GVoice number. It used to be possible to integrate with Hangouts but it's not integrated with Chat. Chat just works with gmail/Workspace account and not a phone number. Voice works with a phone number.

Curious how y'all find the group chats you want in the bajillions that Googlers must have by now created, given that there are exactly 0 controls on who can create groups and no ability to delete or hide them...

Oh yeah. That can be a pain. Usually someone just invites or links me to the group chat. I rarely try to find a group chat using the search but I know that it's not the best.

Same reason Blogger is immortal.

Blogger wasn’t used heavily internally. What’s your point?

Every Google product/team blog I've ever seen is on blogger.

Workspace has SLAs[0] as well as 50+ features in development at any time [1].

0: https://workspace.google.com/terms/sla.html#:~:text=rate-,go...

1: https://support.google.com/a/table/7539891?hl=en (and this is just the public list).

Cool, it will limp along barely maintained for an extra 2 to 4 years.

>I have to use Teams at work and can't fucking stand opening Word/Excel docs in Teams.

If you open Word or Excel directly, does the main page show you a list of appropriate documents to open? I have found the amount of times where the workflow requires navigating to a document through teams first to be extremely minimal. If the document isnt on the list, typing a couple characters into the Word/Excel search bar does the trick.

That works for documents you previously opened but not documents just shared. You have to jump through hoops to open them in the native app. Once you do they're in the list but it's frustrating that it won't just do that by default.

Depending on how it is shared, thats not entirely true.

There is a "shared with me" submenu on the main screen of Word / Excel. Things shared with you should show up.

If it got dragged into chat, do you have the option to right click or three dot click and open in desktop app?

In my experience, you never have to open it in the webapp before opening it in the desktop app, if you ask to open in the desktop app or open the desktop app first and then open the file.

Me to that is the one thing I hate NO Microsoft I do not want to open an office document in some bastardized web version.

Well, and the web version can't handle really basic layout stuff like existing indentation. It's worse at being word compatible than LibreOffice.

I would love a feature in Teams that was "never, ever, ever, open a link in teams - use the default browser".

Like you, I can't fucking stand it, and I make the same mistake at least once a day.

Disclaimer: I work at msft etc etc.

Th Teams lack of tabs experience is remarkably similar to the IE6 experience, and their giving it away free to try and kill Slack is similar to how IE established dominance.

Ooh another one. I've completely lost track of them at this point.

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