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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

> Chat (whatever it's being called that month) is always changing, and not for any benefit that I can see.

I'll actually vouch for the current state of Chat. The Google Chat and Spaces functionality included in the office suite is a great addition. It still has a ways to go to be anywhere close to the level of Slack, but what they have so far is extremely useful for customers that don't want to deal with an outside service. It's improved a lot in a short period of time.

I've seen 2 companies I consult with adopt it and it's currently "good enough" to bypass a need for Slack without all of the pain points of equivalent MS Teams.

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Google chat is the worst software I’ve ever used

When did you use it last?

Not grandparent, but I use it every day. It's definitely the buggiest message client I've ever used. Maybe it's because I'm using Safari, rather than Chrome, but problems within the last few months of use include:

* long load times, sometimes I have to retry 15 minutes later. everything else works.

* often shows week old conversations when I open it fresh, eventually updating when it feels like it

* sometimes doesn't scroll to new messages, forcing me to manually scroll, even after page reload

* absolutely massive memory usage (685 Mb for that tab, seriously wtf)

* "open in a popup" used to be extremely buggy, but now it doesn't function at all, not being an actual detached window.

I'm patiently waiting for beeper.

Interesting. One of the small offices I know who’s using spaces with about 30-40 people hasn’t had any complaints except the lack of scheduled do not disturb.

The integration right next to email and calendar that are always open anyway have been very natural, but this isn’t a software company where people are always on it.

I usually use the chat interface in gmail, rather than chat.google.com. Maybe that's related. I don't see why they would be different, though.

The new Workspace suite has a big sidebar where you quickly toggle between Mail, Chat and Spaces (chat rooms/channels). Notifications for all are in one place.

You naturally have everybody in the company available and built in Google Drive/Office integrations are really solid.

The Google Chat iOS app just has Chat and Spaces separated for you too.

I was really surprised at the level of improvement because I needed to find them a chat option with a BAA for compliance, so a good enough solution that was already built in was helpful.

I don’t think it would be good enough for power users or fully remote companies yet, but small-medium businesses who are primarily in office get a solid win.

Every day

original google chat in gmail was fine. since then it's evolved but compared to slack it feels like google isn't even trying.

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