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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

> So Google Duo is being rebranded to Google Meet, and the existing Google Meet app is sticking around for a bit. That means there are now two apps called "Google Meet." Google has a help article detailing this extremely confusing situation, calling the two Meet apps "Google Meet (original): The updated Meet app" and "Google Meet: The updated Duo app." The "Google Meet (original)" app will someday be put out to pasture; it's just sticking around while Google rebuilds the meeting functionality on top of Google Duo. Did everyone follow that?

I'm in stitches; dying of laughter over here. Folding together apps to reduce the number of chat apps if probably a good thing, but renaming them to an existing name while the old app is still around? Even Microsoft had the decency to tack on "for business" when they were butchering Skype's branding!

On a more serious note, I'll be interested to see how this affects the business side of things; will Google Workspace keep Meet, and what Meet will it be?

EDIT: Reading through the linked help article, they talk about Google Workspace under the section for the new "Meet" nee Duo and not under the section for "Google Meet (original)", so I guess they have or will transition it. Probably.

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It's sad because Google Talk was good. Jabber/XMPP on a web, for the masses.

It had good federation, as it followed the standard. And Google even contributed JINGLE, a XEP (standard extension) for videocalls.

I was making videocalls from Google Talk using a Nokia 770 in 2007. It feels we've gone backward once Google became dominant and Nokia got taken over.

There’s a certain dark humor in the way that Google Talk/Reader kind of marks the apex of their reputation - they sacrificed so much trying to beat Facebook at its own game, and all they got for that devil’s bargain was G+.

Google+ and circles were a good idea and should have been given a team with a lot of free rein and left to grow organically.

Google+ died because it was forced on everyone that had a Google and a Youtube account by psychopathic managers to "grow the numbers". This included forcing a realname policy on non-G+ users that explicitly did not want their online persona connected to their identity. It became the least cool platform on the internet overnight.

The mistake they made was having it be closed invites for so long. Facebook butchered Facebook Chat, and my whole friend group was ready to jump ship. Except Google wouldn’t let us, and then Facebook had enough time to get Chat/Messages kind of good enough again, and by the time anyone could get on Google+ no one cared to.

There were also some really bad decisions: for example, G+ on iOS would send you a push notification every time some rando who had you in their Gmail contacts joined G+ or added you to a circle. There was no way to turn that off other than disabling notifications entirely or deleting the app for something like half a year. I chose the latter long before they implemented it.

Circles were potentially interesting but if memory serves the first implementation was clumsy and I found it limiting because it required you to know what your followers were interested in and, if memory serves, didn't have a way to de-dupe shares so you'd see the same blog post shared by 20 people as separate notifications. My impression of that time was mostly seeing things I wasn't interested in or had seen before.

Yeah, that was the weirdest part, period

Forced increased followers + notification of every single one: creepy experience

Yeah, it was like something out of a cautionary short story.

Cool, I know them.

Oh, yeah, I haven’t talked with her in a while.

Wait, who’s that guy?

Huh, she responded to one Craigslist free stuff listing 3 years ago. Who cares?

That’s the landlord we sublet from for 3 months a decade ago.

… repeat for days …

Make it stop!

>Google+ died because it was forced on everyone that had a Google and a Youtube account

Today I have two Youtube accounts despite every effort to not end up with a real name G+ account. And while all of my main activity is on my non-real name account - i.e. the one I actually want, I'm forced to use the other to connect to rewards (Overwatch League tokens to my Battle.net account for watching Overwatch League), because I'm not allowed to do that on my "branded" account. An account I never wanted to exist.

"Google+ and circles were a good idea and should have been given a team with a lot of free rein and left to grow organically. "

I mean, it was given a team with unlimited free rein. That org's leader did not just want to grow organically.

They were also pretty toxic and arrogant.

Google Buzz (which was their social network built on open protocols) was excellent and grew organically for a while.

It picked up where FriendFeed left off when it was acquired by FB. But then was killed by the G+ project.

> Google+ and circles were a good idea

Facebook already had friend lists with identical functionality when Google+ Circles were created.

Circles are a good idea in theory.

In practice, for Circles to actually be useful, they need to be scrupulously maintained.

If you send a message to a certain circle about a pool party, and it turns out that you forgot to add a friend to the circle they will be insulted.

Or if you send a message to a circle that included someone who the message was not intended for, once again, you’re in trouble.

Group chats tend to work much better because they are simpler and are only created when you have a specific need. They can last beyond that need if the people in it end up being a useful grouping for the long term, but this filtering happens organically.

I was an intern at Google right around the time where Google+ (long before it was known under that name) became a thing for Google engineers internally. I sat next to a team that was majorly impacted by that.

It's all subjective of course, but I could practically "feel" Google changing. Before I started my internship and still during it for the most time, Google was this incredible company that people, including me, were in awe about. All their products were so good. So technically refined, so methodical, you could really see that the people working on them were really smart, and really cared about it all.

And then it changed and became this "corporation", and nowadays it's sometimes seen as almost the opposite of what it was, working there being boring but stable. Part of that is probably just a normal consequence of the immense growth, but personally I can't shake the feeling that Google+ had a large part in it.

I was a fulltimer there around the same time, and I agree. I ended up quitting fairly soon after the G+ real names fiasco blew up, and it felt like a lot of internal "social capital" got burned on that, which was never really recovered.

I don't think the whole place went to hell at that moment, or anything, and your description is maybe a little more dramatic than I'd go with, as to the role of G+... but it definitely seemed like one of the big turning points.

Sorry, I did not mean to imply a dramatic and sudden change either. I just perceived this as a turning point, like you say (and with only my limited first hand experience there, of course).

Google major revenue stream is and will always be search/ads. Everything else is marginal, irrelevant and that’s why I think they don’t care much.

I still can’t explain how Google got beaten at their own game (cloud / computing at scale) by an e-commerce site : Amazon.

That says it all.

Having many friends who work at Google, I think they have the wrong system of incentives in place. Rightfully, people optimize and prioritize based on their path to promotion rather than building products that people love.

It’s much easier to get a promotion if you build something new vs keep iterating on existing products making it better.

>I still can’t explain how Google got beaten at their own game (cloud / computing at scale) by an e-commerce site : Amazon.

But it wasn’t Google’s game at all: cloud computing is a low margin business (relatively speaking). Amazon knows how to run low margins businesses, and Google doesn’t.

Google was so unimpressed with cloud, that they got serious about it only around 2012, when it became obvious that other clouds will outgrow Google as a whole. I think it was Google’s Internet Explorer moment.

I don't understand how cloud computing is a low margin business.

I can rent a dedicated server at Heztner. 8 hyperthreads, 32 GB RAM, 4 TB HDD. €33.

Amazon EC2. t4g.2xlarge 8 cores, 32 GB RAM, $194. 2 TB EBS HDD $30. $224 total.

Also Amazon charges for traffic.

Surely Hetzner is not working at loss. Surely economies of scale allow AWS to have better deals.

I mean, AWS is literally 7x compared to Hetzner. How is it bad margin?

I'm curious, have you benchmarked both of these and seen if there's no real world difference? I've had major performance differences between clouds on what is supposedly similar hardware. If AWS is faster in nothing then why they're so expensive would be a very good question indeed.

My initial guess would be AWS is relying on its advantage that users who are currently using AWS heavily are unlikely to switch clouds if they suddenly have to go from VM's to dedicated servers, and thus they can profit off such capture. e.g. 7x cost is probably fine when you consider what the cost might be to employ people for a cloud migration.

A lot of it also comes down to reliability, security (not just at the platform level but also the tools for you to build on), and most importantly integration with other services which you’d have to build and maintain on your own.

You don’t buy AWS because it’s cheaper than a dedicated server but because you can get that Linux server using the same management services (API, authentication, monitoring & logging, etc.) that you use to get serverless functions & containers, object storage, managed ML services, normal and reporting databases, development tools, etc.

That’s not saying that either one is wrong, just different - it’s like asking why someone used a hotel for a conference when you had a great tent site on your vacation to the mountains.

The question is how much money Amazon spends on development of those services. What part of price is hardware expenses, what part of price is software expenses.

My gut feeling tells me, that it's not much.

There's definitely a healthy margin but don't underestimate how much time goes into making everything work smoothly. The major cloud providers do a lot of things like handling zero-downtime migration between failed physical hosts, monitoring for infrastructure issues, firmware testing/security/updates, etc. which is completely transparent to you until you realize that you haven't spent time in years on things like hardware or environmental failures (stuff like that SSD 40k hour bug which showed up here, recently, for example) or dealing with stuff like Spectre.

The big confound here is scale: AWS can amortize the cost of someone really digging into firmware security over millions of customers but a smaller provider can't. You might not notice that until you either need to get your environment certified or some kind of vulnerability / supply chain attack against a hardware vendor is revealed. That can mean that AWS is both making a hefty profit reselling those engineers' work to all of their customers but also that it's still cheaper to pay them than it is for you to do that work yourself.

Thanks for that perspective – your subjective impression certainly matches my outside experience. That seemed like the point where the halo faded.

It didn't so much fade as that it got switched off. Suddenly Google was just another evil US corporation when before you might have had the impression that they meant what they said. To be fair to your comment: there were some earlier signs but they could all explained away in one way or another, but that time the mask fell and they never managed to put it back on again.

Now they get a lot of business because they are the least bad option. Which still makes Google useful but I'd love for some actual competition. But with the network effects at play any viable competition can be stifled.

Reader really was the turning point for me personally.

Before that I was a strong advocate for Google, I used any of their products that made sense and I would jump in and try anything new.

Then reader was shut down and I had to start re-evaluating the services I used. Slowly that meant distancing myself from anything google.

Same. One of the big things I don't think their management appreciated was how Reader's users skewed towards people who influenced others — journalists, libraries, the family “tech expert”, etc. — and how forcing them out of something which worked into something which simply wasn't ready to launch ensured that, unlike almost every previous Google launch, the coverage was predominantly negative. They'd had flops before (e.g. Buzz) but since nobody was forced to stop using something they liked to use the flop those didn't damage the brand anywhere near as much.

Yes, Reader was Google's Twitter, in the way that maybe it doesn't make money but it can be used to put the right info in front of the right people.

Throwing away that capability is demented. We were lucky, really.

Yeah I do think that was seriously under calculated.

It seems like reader comes up on nearly every article about google screwing up something like this.

What I never understood though, why did they cancel it in the first place. I always figured that the crawler likely used RSS for discovery. I mean why wouldn't it? I constantly find that RSS has articles before I see them on the website.

So how much extra data were they really storing for supporting Reader? I mean they had to support the UI but it just seemed like an odd removal.

I’ve heard it brought up by C-level executives considering GCP. The business models are different but the idea that things will be cancelled has been well linked to the brand.

My understanding on Reader is that it was less the data than that it was older code and the internal dependencies were rotting.

If memory serves well that was also the time Wave was supposed to take our communication to the 21st century

Didn't Orkut actually have a good organic following in Brazil before they axed it for G+?

So much stupid.

They did, it has always surprised me that they threw away a market they were leading in.

Wave was never really pitched as a social network - although some people sort of talked about it like it was.

It was more an intergrated workplace thing - sort of a predecessor to Notion+Slack in a single app. But it was very flaky to use.

Oh sure, it wasn't a social network, but it was, like the GP said, the apex of what Google once was: innovation in the field with completely new, potentially useless, but ultimately eyes-opening tech

It was pretty innovative, but it also showed such incredible hubris.

The famous post (now gone but referenced from [1]) about how they spend who-knows-how-long reimplementing scroll bars in the browser when the app was so janky it barely worked was the kind of thing that doomed it.

The HN discussion at the time is interesting too[2]

[1] http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scroll...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943947

Wave was two things.

- A public and open protocol that could have replaced email with structured messages if it got popular, and

- A series of self-love technical exercises like the scrollbars and the live-typing which nobody cared for and killed adoption (worked in Chrome only, very few people care to share half-composed emails with their correspondents).

A textbook example of losing sight of the goal and giving devs too much rope to hang themselves with.

Web archive doesn't forget (some of those links):

https://web.archive.org/web/20091012020227/http://www.easier...

https://web.archive.org/web/20100308003557/https://www.compl...

Excuse me, there was Wave.

I was a happy Google Talk user who had written a useful App Engine chatbot. It was really easy because App Engine had built-in XMPP support and each one had its own built-in address, so handling chat messages was even simpler than handling HTTP requests.

But then Google stopped supporting XMPP from other domains (including their own domains) in their chat apps, which meant that I could only use my Google App Engine chat bot from non-Google chat programs, and that was a ridiculous situation.

According to Google, approximately nobody used the federation capabilities of Google Talk except inbound spammers. It was absolutely not "for the masses". The masses all stay entirely within the censored and pruned walled gardens, then and now.

It was all maintenance and antispam burden for no product benefit to users.

Hackers vastly overestimate the desire of users to use federated systems.

This is how I feel when I get an SMS from an email address. There are 0 legitimate people who would message me that way.

I have an entire rant on XMPP in some other HN thread, but basically I agree, chat federation is for nerds. And if XMPP wanted its federation dream to come true, the core standard (not including extensions) needed to be more rigid and keep up with the times. Instead, every sever ended up supporting a very different feature set, usually lacking things you'd take for granted in other chat apps.

Approximately nobody used the federation capabilities because approximately nobody used Google Talk... LOL

In more seriousness, I know of quite a lot of people who chose to use Google Talk specifically because they could use it with their client of choice. (It also had a very wide reach for a while, thanks to its Gmail integration edit: and federation)

I honestly don't know anyone else who used Google Talk (other than whenever they checked their Gmail they'd also see any messages in it).

In other words, Google killed off the two reasons why people used it (edit: reach and choice of client). Since then they've "replaced" pieces of it with multiple different apps (Hangouts, Chat, Allo, Duo, Meet), some of which they're finally deciding to merge back together, and in the process all they've ever done (and all anyone expects them to do with this merger) is remove features. Usually exactly those features which were the only differentiation those services had from the competitors. Which means there's no difference from a competitor with a wider reach (Zoom, 100 different IM apps, iMessage/FaceTime, etc.). Which means it's doomed to be terminated (and probably reincarnated) by Google again in a few years.

(Maybe there was even a third reason to use Talk: it was the IM with Google accounts. I don't think there's been One IM To Rule Them All from Google at any point since then.)

Federation doesn't mean you can use any client. It means you can talk to clients on other (in this case non-Google) servers, which is a step further.

... oops :)

The two reasons were supposed to be reach and client choice. I got a bit side-tracked thinking about whether I should clarify that I was able to reach most of my contacts on it because of the "Gmail integration and federation".

Yeah, the client choice was very nice. I used it too, with iChat on my Mac.

How is Google's share of the chat market doing these days?

And it was simple and everyone had it in their Gmail. I used to use it with friends all the time! Then Hangouts and every rebranded disaster took its place. Since then we all migrated to Facetime, Zoom, Discord, etc. There was too much friction to follow Google's video chat decisions. This current headline just makes it easier for me to decide to never try their new products.

> It feels we've gone backward once Google became dominant and Nokia got taken over

It feels Capitalist.

They've gone backward and the "spirit" of the old Google was literally killed when Sundar Pichai took over.

The only reason he's still CEO is that he's milked the Google brand for all its worth and has made everyone a shit ton of money.

Other than that, the direction he's been giving Google, as a brand, has been terrible.

To replace Pichai the two largest Google shareholders would have to give a shit about the direction of the company. But they've been absent for longer than Pichai has been CEO.

Yes. Normally people are too quick to attribute power and fault to individuals, or so everyone says, but here's a case where two individuals really seem to have something close to full power and ability to fix at least the more obvious and readily fixable problems—they simply choose not to—and yet people usually diffuse the blame among "Google" or "the incentives".

One of those individuals also solicited sexual favors from his subordinates in the Google offices during work hours [1].

I don't know if we should put them on a pedastal.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees...

> and yet people usually diffuse the blame among "Google" or "the incentives".

People are not wrong to do so. Those two are not causing the problems. They can carry some blame for inaction, sure, but not that much of the blame.

> They've gone backward and the "spirit" of the old Google was literally killed when Sundar Pichai took over.

What? That happened with Eric Schmidt. Coming from old-school Oracle, old corporate. He said "Brands is how you sort out this mess" and killed the variety in google search by prioritizing big brands. That's why you get search results from only the biggest corporate outlets in every other category. He succeeded in bumping shoe shopping searches and sales for Amazon etc, but killed the independent web.

What has he milked, though? I thought Google's money just comes from preexisting businesses like search, ads, YT, etc. None of the new stuff introduced under Sundar went anywhere, but all boats rose over the years for tech, especially in 2020.

This is very typical for Google. I still have no idea if I'm using Google Pay, GPay, Android Pay, Android Wallet, or Google Wallet. Maybe some of those old names didn't exist or even still exist? And good luck finding all those reward barcode cards that you added over the years.

I'm sure someone got a bonus for saving the company money by improving their focus, though.

Google released this totally not confusing graphic to help you understand

https://i.imgur.com/liaNvzz.jpg

If you're in Singapore or US, Wallet & GPay. Everywhere else Google Pay (not to be confused with GPay) points to Wallet. And in India, you will continue to "enjoy" the current Google Pay app.

See? So simple!

I'm in the UK, so it doesn't affect me, but is there a reason the USA and Singapore are different?

I'd be very curious to hear the true story as well.

As an outsider, it looks like a classic process followed by many tech companies. GPay was probably the first attempt and the assignment was to build anything that works and just make it work in the US - we'll expand to other markets later. And then, because it's payments, they immediately learned that every assumption they made in the model fails to work in any other jurisdiction.

No idea why Singapore - maybe that was the first attempt at expansion where they learned supporting other regions wasn't going to scale.

From there, maybe they built Google Pay based on better assumptions that apply globally. But, of course, nobody bothered to tell the GPay team who kept cranking out new features in the meantime. Lo and behold, Google Pay could never reach feature parity with GPay so they perpetually have to support GPay in the US, while deploying Google Pay to the rest of the world.

But now we have to manage two apps. We'd better just build a brand new app to replace both. Enter: Wallet. It supports every region with all the critical features.

Oh, except Wallet's model can't ever support those 20-year old legacy APIs that are still used by tons of products nobody owns. So actually people who use GPay now get both GPay and Wallet.

That's my guess, at least...

There's some backstory in here:

>"Caesar [Sengupta] leaving was the capstone on a lot of frustration felt by employees. The product wasn't growing at the rate we wanted it to." Sengupta departed Google one month after killing the old Google Pay and making his new app mandatory for all users in the US.

> The new Google Pay app launched in November 2020 in the US, and for about four months, Google was running two "Google Pay" apps: the old Google Pay (which had been around since 2011, first as Google Wallet, then Android Pay, then Google Pay) and this new Google Pay, which was a ground-up rewrite the company started for the Indian market. April 2021 capped off the final death of the old Google Pay service, which had been winding down since January. The two services were both called "Google Pay," but other than that, they weren't related in terms of features, contacts, or accounts.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/google-pay-team-repo...

Further reading:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/google-pays-disastro...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/google-loses-two-exe...

Just the history I guess.

> If you're in the US or Singapore, Google Wallet is now the primary Android payment service and wallet to store your hotel keys, driver's license, boarding passes and more, as well as make contactless payments. Google Pay will stick around, but only as a service to send payments to friends and family.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/google-pay-vs-google-wallet...

Might be a regulatory reason, but also totally willing to believe it's just poor planning on Google's part.

I've told the "two different apps named Google Wallet" story for years to illustrate G's internal dysfunction, but didn't know there were so many brands/apps in addition to the two Wallets. Incredible.

I know which ones I'm using, none of them.

Don't forget Google Pay Send and the Tez mobile payments app in India.

This one is particularly insane. Google appears to want the branding from one app (old Meet) but the install base of the new app (Duo) and the best they've come up with is to call them both "Meet"? Is branding so critical that Duo can't be used? Or that it cannot at least do so until all of "old Meet's" functionality has been brought over?

This should be in the fucking interviews. It is such a predictable scenario. When you hire some PM or brand manager who will be responsible for things like this ask them precisely how they will navigate this situation.

The worst part is that the install base of Duo is, in my experience, fake.

Between the push for "identify yourself by your phone number! yeah, that's right, just pretend it's an unchanging identifier even though that's not even slightly realistic!" (which, IIRC, was mandatory to use it in the beginning, although apparently now you can use a Google Account intead). And the fact that they push people to use it by adding a "video call" option (which has actually never worked for me, maybe because the other party didn't have it installed yet? who knows) on the Android call screen. And the fact that they pre-install it on the phones of people who will never use it so that they can say it's installed on soooo many phones.

The only reason (I see) for them to combine Duo and Meet is because they want to be able to claim to have a decent market share (even though they have virtually no market share with either one, outside of perhaps Meet with Google Apps ^W^W G Suite ^W^W Google Workspace for Education).

> When you hire some PM or brand manager who will be responsible for things like this ask them precisely how they will navigate this situation.

This is good advice for most companies, but for Google itself who could be trusted to evaluate these answers? From what I can see, their current product management is inept.

The problem is brand management doesn't come up on leetcode, so they can't test for it in interviews

This doesn't even make sense. Why would a brand manager role interview have leetcode questions?

That being said, who the heck greenlit this change? This is parody level mismanagement.

The subtext is that Google's excessive emphasis on engineering over pretty much any other discpline is what led them into this mess. The parent comment was a joke

> Why would a brand manager role interview have leetcode questions?

I took the original poster to mean that there should be leet-marketing questions for brand manager positions, like there are leetcode questions for developer positions.

It's not just that they greenlit this change, it's that it's far from the first time they've pulled something like this. It is utterly baffling to me that there isn't someone in senior management who can say "What? No, that's utterly stupid, you can't do that".

> Why would a brand manager role interview have leetcode questions?

(i think OP was making a joke)

lol, i like how people cannot understand sarcasm...

> Is branding so critical that Duo can't be used?

I'd be willing to bet someone in Google finally got tired of the jokes. "Google is so confused, have you seen how many IMs they have?" is literally a meme, so one day Big Exec probably blew his top and went "Right, we need to fix this for good" -- obviously not by changing the internal processes that produced the mess in the first place, but by tackling the meme. That's typical salespeople's reasoning. So the result was... a mess of a transition, and probably even more memes: "Google is so confused, have you seen how many IMs they have? They're so many, they ran out of names and started reusing them".

>Is branding so critical that Duo can't be used?

Actually, if they keep both apps for a while, Duo is the better name.

Duo makes way more sense for a casual video call app you'd use with your grandma or girlfriend. I'm not gonna Meet™ with my grandma, she's not my coworker. Hell, you can't even tell it's a proper noun when spoken out loud.

"Skype me" - clear

"FaceTime me" - clear

"Duo me" - clear

"Meet me" - meet you where?

> "Duo me" - clear

There are perhaps homonymous reasons why this might appeal to the sophomoric sort.

Eh, don't disregard the amount of people who don't use English as their main language here, I'm not even sure I could construct such a weird scenario in German, for example - but could be my imagination, maybe a good chunk of people would still say "call me... via X"

It is easy:

"Google Meet me" - clear

I googled it, now what.

I Zoom with my Grandma. What's wrong with that?

> Google appears to want the branding from one app (old Meet) but the install base of the new app (Duo) and the best they've come up with is to call them both "Meet"?

At least they didn't combine the two words into "Meo", which appears to be Spanish for "I piss".

"Duet" could have been interesting though.

One side has to switch.

Meet's fewer users have to do work to switch.

Duo's more users (and massive pre-install base) don't.

If you ignore everything, like most users do, then one day your app will either (Meet) tell you to to install the other app, or (Duo) change its name and logo.

Pretty simple.

Old Meet has a history of this. It's first iteration was called Hangouts - no relation or connection to the more well known Google Hangouts, the consumer messaging app. One was hosted at hangouts.google.com and the other at hangouts.google.com/_/ - hence why g.co/hangouts redirects to old Meet and not Google Chat which was the anointed consumer successor

This hurts my brain.

> Even Microsoft had the decency to tack on "for business" when they were butchering Skype's branding!

    1 Xbox (2001)
    2 Xbox 360 (2005)
        2.1 Xbox 360 S (2010)
        2.2 Xbox 360 E (2013)
    3 Xbox One (2013)
        3.1 Xbox One S (2016)
        3.2 Xbox One X (2017)
    4 Xbox Series X | S (2020)

On a tangent, MS really screwed up Skype when they bought it (by removing p2p supernodes).

Old pre MS Skype was pretty amazing for its day.

In mid 2000s Skype was dominant. Pretty much all chat/talk flowed through Skype with corresponding interest in monitoring from pretty much any government.

There is a plausible conspiracy theory that part of why Microsoft bought Skype was to have everything centralized on US servers. Sort of devil's bargain.

I remember reading Microsoft's defense of centralization here on HN some years ago and it was extremely unconvincing.

> There is a plausible conspiracy theory that part of why Microsoft bought Skype was to have everything centralized on US servers. Sort of devil's bargain.

I heard back in those days that they got a grant from the government for purchasing Skype... that sure doesn't help deny conspiracy theories.

Those names are far from good, but they're still different names for each generation. And you can skip the letter at the end for this comparison.

"Series" as a generation identifier (like 4 or 5 on PlayStation) is weird for me (but not English native). Is it natural for natives?

Nope. It sounds like it refers to the "franchise" "lineage" of xboxes.

It's really like that old Abbott and Costello skit "Who's on first" (especially the "Xbox One" and the "X" suffix. Which Xbox? the X one.)

Nope, it's a very strange and awkward sounding name.

No.

I don't know why they bother. I have never once used Google Meet, or Google Duo, or Google Hangouts. I have never heard of anyone else using them. I have never been asked to contact someone or join a meeting using one of these apps.

Google: just change the name, change the code, do whatever. Nobody will notice.

Your bubble is not representative of reality. Google Meet may not be as popular as Zoom but it’s a strong second. It’s very popular in the business space especially, so it’s mostly used for work. I also sometimes use it with friends when I want a reliable, easy video call with screen share.

It's so unintuitive to use for personal calls that I don't think I could ever convince one of my friends or relatives to use it. Having to create a meeting, send the link to someone, then hope they read it while I join the meeting and wait for them is so much more akward than just pressing a video call button like every other app does it.

Google Meet (original) has an excellent accessibility feature, it supports real-time computer generated captions. Duo never had that, or if it does, only recently. The only other big app that could do that back then was MS Teams which was not at all as accessible or pleasant to use as Meet.

Agree.

Google Meet (the current one) is a pretty decent app. Not as good as Zoom but much better than Teams or any other alternative.

And the number of meeting requests mirrors that. First Zoom, then Meet, then Teams, and then random other things which basically barely work long enough for us to switch to Zoom.

You mention butchering the Skype branding, but I also uninstalled one of the Teams apps so I would stop opening the wrong by accident.

The one I still have is called "Microsoft Teams (work or school)," I forget what the other was. "Microsoft Teams (friends and family)" or something.

There's also the two OneNotes. I got quite confused the other day when the OneNote on my personal machine did not look like the one on my work machine.

Turns out there's OneNote for Windows 10 and OneNote (which also runs on Windows 10...)

OneNote for Windows 10 is also for Windows 11, but why plan ahead with version naming? (see also: Xbox)

Okay, in my defense I escaped that ecosystem just as the thing I knew as Teams was replacing SfB, and I was unaware that they'd pulled that... fascinating little twist.

I was wrong, the other one doesn't specify anything at all. So you have "Microsoft Teams" or "Microsoft Teams (work or school)".

And then the icons are barely different too.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/image/serverpage/imag...

What a stupid branding mess.

It's definitely hilarious that they literally have made so many different chat apps that they ran out of names they like! On the other hand, it's a bit confusing that upon realizing this, they've decided not only to just prune the number of chat apps but somehow end up duplicating names while doing this anyhow.

They've recently shoehorned "Chat" tab into Gmail, of all places! So no, folding together apps is not always a good thing.

Google's chat products have been integrated with gmail since the start, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk

No, it was different. It was never in the same app. Merging chat history into it was the best thing about it, and you could use it with any xmpp client (disclosure: I was developing one such client).

But it never wasted valuable screen estate in a mail app to make you know that you can also chat. There was a separate app for that.

> It was never in the same app.

Yes it was. Look at the last screenshot in this article from 2008:

https://techcrunch.com/2008/06/06/the-evolution-of-pre-launc...

I was talking about mobile app. It has a tab bar at the bottom with now chat section, the option to remove it is buried rather deep in the settings.

Web version of Gmail did have a Gtalk widget, but it could be collapsed / hidden with a couple of easy clicks

Maybe I’m looking at the wrong screenshot, but they’re all web desktops. I assumed the previous poster was talking about mobile apps, where screen real estate is really at a premium.

The previous poster was probably talking about web Gmail where they recently added sidebar with Chat and Meet. The Gmail app, iOS and Android, doesn't have that. They did put "Chat" pane in the iPad Gmail app but seem to have removed it.

> web Gmail where they recently added sidebar with Chat and Meet

Chat has always been there though. I've used it every day for almost a decade on my work gmail account (I don't open the separate page or use a standalone client).

The web app used to have a Hangouts sidebar which was replaced by a Hangouts Chat sidebar which was eventually renamed to just Chat.

Worse, I prefer to chat in a separate app on the phone, so I can more easily multitask between chat and email, but the separate Chat app has less functionality than Chat in the Gmail app.

That's not recent - I was using that in 2010...

There wasn't chat in Gmail Android app until recently. It appeared sometime during the pandemic.

The long-term plan makes sense, but it's absurd that they'll have 2 different apps with the same name at the same time. At first I thought this was an Onion article.

I hope this is just some misunderstanding. If not, this will be a great example of how to confuse everyone.

And this is after Hangouts was used as a replacement for Google Voice for years, and then they kicked out Google Voice from Hangouts forcing people to use the Google Voice app again, for Google Voice

Hangouts is disappearing, but Hangouts Dialer is still around? And then there's Hangouts Meet, and now two Google Meet, Google Chat, ...

The Microsoft-acation of Google continues.

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