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Comment by browningstreet | Hacker News Reader

I think the lack of a unified, platform integrated chat platform, a la Slack and Teams, will hurt a lot. They did great with Google Docs, and then built out a ridiculously complicated but robust Workspace Admin platform, but don't even seem to be thinking about chat anymore.

Office, Office Web, and Teams are a nice fit for business users. Ops/dev still tend to gravitate towards Slack.

Which makes their RCS complaints even more ...amusing (yes, I know it's not really the same space, or the same team, or the same platform -- but it is chat).

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Google Chat is pretty good and still under active development with the rest of Workspace. A good place to keep up-to-date on new features is their update blog: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/

The Google Chat built into gmail? It’s kind of okay for off the cuff one-on-one chats but its features, and those of rooms (is that what they call it?) doesn’t hold a candle to the other platforms. They had something called Google Chat years ago that they then discouraged everyone to stop using because of Duo and Meets and their other products. They’re behind and they keep burning mind share. It doesn’t feel as mature, integrated, and API enabled as everyone else.

You're right, Google has no right to be so far behind other chat apps, given that Google was the dominate chat system (with Google Talk) almost 20 years ago. I think they might finally be getting their act together with Google Chat.

Google Chat apparently is a thing. It can be found in my companies gmail and we used it once, when slack was down.

I just started a new job, and am amazed that even though being the sort of company that don't like spending money, like the previous 3 they have GW and Slack.

Does anybody at Google do anything other than throw stuff over the wall then move on?

The ironic/funny thing about your comment is that Google Workspace does have a pretty full featured chat platform, known as Google Chat. And it's clearly not dead (yet), because I just hit it on my account and get a nice pop-up, "Welcome to the new Chat", "Catch up with all your direct messages, group chats, and spaces - all in one place", and then get some walkthroughs on the new features related to the home screen, filters, etc.

But I agree, Google product management for anything but search and ads is such a cluster-f of afterthoughts, side-of-the-desk work, and the impending feeling that it will all get shut down once whatever engineer championed it leaves or is promoted to something else. Also, a huge part of the entrenchment of Slack is all of its programmability and plugins - lots of companies run "ChatOps". I don't see any of that in Google Chat, and even if it were there I think you'd need to be crazy to actually develop a plugin for it before it likely gets shut down or is migrated to something else.

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