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Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

(i think OP was making a joke)

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".

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?

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

It is easy:

"Google Meet me" - clear

I googled it, now what.

> "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"

> 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.

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