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This is just an utter mess. Google keeps ignoring and trying to kill Hangouts (which should still be called GChat, that was an incredibly stupid rebrand), and b

This is just an utter mess. Google keeps ignoring and trying to kill Hangouts (which should still be called GChat, that was an incredibly stupid rebrand), and building new products instead of investing in the one which actually has some potential. Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from the early Gmail days and kept investing in it. It was great on the early versions of Android! The failure here is entirely self imposed and a major indictment of their senior management team.

Groxx 8y ago
I'm also one of those that was / is still sad about losing XMPP integration. Highly customizable alerts are borderline essential if you have a lot of threads going, but hangouts seems determined to prevent you from doing any of that.
- draw_down 8y ago
  Makes sense, unfortunately commercial products universally abandon those open protocols at some point.
smt88 8y ago
Want to know an even more stupid rebrand? A totally new, half-baked business product called Hangouts Chat.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  There no polite way of expressing it: Hangouts Chat is a shitty product. We moved to Chat when Hipchat was closed. Because we’re using G-suite it seem sensible to go with Chat, but everyone hates it. The UI is useless, Google try to be clever about “conversation” and tries to group them together, but now people miss most conversations that happen when they aren’t looking. Notification is broken, you can only get to many or not enough. Chat seems to be designed by the same incompetent team of interns that did Google Groups. Using the two products feel oddly similar.
  - xte 8y ago
    A small sidenote: chats are shitty concept in general. They have had a reason in a past era when voice coms are expensive and limited, they have a reason in terminals to broadcast few messages, no more. For real communication we have letter so in digital world mails or we have phone calls so in digital world VoIP one's extended with eventually video/screen sharing and conferencing capabilities, no more. Discord, Slack, ... are all only a mean to keep abandonware live for business purpose and, unfortunately, many companies fell in the grave. People who want productivity should rediscover classic software, modernized to actual "graphic style" but nothing more so: - good desktop MUA (I can, unfortunately, only list notmuch-emacs, mu4e, mutt, pine) instead of limited and limiting webmails. Of course we have to add few things to the mix like having our mails in a local maildir and a good filtering/autorefile/autotagging solution (alot, IMAPFilter); - good VoIP desk/softphones, something like old sip-communicator (now Jitsy); - decent software to share screen as needed (actually I know only proprietary one's like bomgar, anydesk or teamviewer, xpra etc are simply too limited); - local, well integrated, productivity suite. Mine is Emacs, not easy to convince office guys to learn it, but even ancient plain office suite can do the business with a decent DMS that enforce good taxonomy and have decent full-text search (YaCy for search, nothing for DMS in my list... They are all crap)...
    - piaste 8y ago
      > A small sidenote: chats are shitty concept in general. They have had a reason in a past era when voice coms are expensive and limited, they have a reason in terminals to broadcast few messages, no more. Not at all. Voice chat is synchronous - you must stop whatever you're doing and listen or talk in real time. And people nearby will overhear. Chat is asynchronous and private. I can chat and consult a colleague while I'm in a meeting with a client. I can keep a chat open while coding and read/respond when I'm not most concentrated. I can go offline and answer a question the next day. Text chat isn't literally "chatting through text". It's email with a different UX, more suited for quick communication.
      - xte 8y ago
        I still have to find something LESS productive than "chat while doing different things", perhaps even less than having an opposite (same, depending on personal orientation) sex beauty, naked, dancing winking at you... Many have thought and still think that multitasking and quick things are productive, I see the exact opposite. And we can see it at another level in mean per capita hourly productivity: in the past (so before business model substantially merge around the world) French hourly productivity was the highest in the world, and they are still one of the less-working in term of hours and holidays. USA, Japan and Germany are the opposite, they work far more and have a far lower hourly productivity. To the over extreme try the difference between a lover vs a prostitute... Open spaces are another TOTALLY unproductive things, born only to push more economic constructions sold as a higher price and facilitate reorganization. The letter also is one of the less productive thing we have if done constantly because any change, if positive, demand time to start pay back, doing constantly means NEVER get paid back, only suffer the change itself.
- wodenokoto 8y ago
  That is almost exactly what Microsoft did with Skype. I guess Google really is turning into Microsoft!
- raverbashing 8y ago
  > half-baked business product called Hangouts Chat. So, to compete with Skype for Business?
Cookingboy 8y ago
I was there when that happened. The whole rebranding/transition of GTalk/GChat was the result of some political muscle flex by Social and its army of PMs, then after Social lost its favorite child status Allo was born as a result, championed by another army of PMs, and I wonder if Duo had a similar story of birth. >Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from the early Gmail days and kept investing in it. That's just not what Google was back then. It was all about PMs/designers wanting to jump onto the shinest and newest projects and lots of politics were involved to win support/attention/resources from the top management.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
  What is a PM? I am getting insight into how google works because this sounds like a bunch of idiotic internal wars between acronym teams instead of focusing on making actual useful products.
  - sincerely 8y ago
    Project Manager
  - luhn 8y ago
    Project manager. Pretty standard role in a software team. The person who determines what the end result should look like.
    - Uberphallus 8y ago
      It can be Product Manager too. Product Manager has more of a focus on customer/marketing, whereas Project Manager oversees the technical teams implementing Product Manager's ideas. A Product Manager doesn't need to have a technical background, but a Project Manager should.
    - gdfasfklshg4 8y ago
      From context it is a Product Manager. Project Manager: manages day-to-day running for project e.g. fighting for the right number of devs, designers etc Product Manager: (also product owner) determines what the product should look like.
whoisjuan 8y ago
Yes. Their explanation also didn't make much sense since Hangouts was targeted for a while to consumers. But what I got from this is basically: Messages <-> iMessage Duo <-> Facetime Hangouts <-> Slack I think they should rename the Hangouts to something completely different. That at least will increase clarity for consumers and businesses.
- time-domain0 8y ago
  This is what happens when there isn't an unified company product strategy but fiefdoms duplicating and fighting with each other.
- bufferoverflow 8y ago
  This mapping isn't correct. Hangouts does all of the above - video chats, voice chats, text with emojis, pictures and videos. Hangouts is also integrated with Google Voice and GMail. So when someone calls my GV phone number, it rings on my cell phone and in any open GMail tab (but not in the GMail app). I get an SMS, it pops up as a hangouts message too. It is a mess, but trying to kill Hangouts is insane, it's deeply integrated and it's extremely convenient to use.
  - basch 8y ago
    >it pops up as a hangouts message too. Unless you have google voice installed instead of hangouts. It manages to be two apps still.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
I think there's another way look at this. Per "Zero to One" Google is a very powerful monopoly. It wants to protect that position, as well as make it less noticeable. All these "side projects" create the illusion that Google is not a monopoly. More importantly, new Product X, whatever it is, helps to attract new top talent. Top Talent is going to want to fix old things, they want to build new. While this might sound a bit extreme, even if it's not actually true (in tandem) both of these "incentives" are real. Google does need to mask its dominance. And it does need to attract top talent (if only to keep soneone else from acquiring it).
- bajsejohannes 8y ago
  > More importantly, new Product X, whatever it is, helps to attract new top talent. Top Talent is going to want to fix old things, they want to build new. Is that really true? I would personally chose to work on Facetime than Google's new messaging system, all else being equal. Facetime is really solid and I'm sure I could learn a ton from the expertise there; as well as working on something new within that product. In contrast, Google's messaging systems just seem like a mess. I would feel like it could be cancelled at any time, that we didn't have the best talent (because it's spread across the various systems) and honestly would be slightly embarrassed to talk about it ("yeah, I know, yet another message system from Google").
mongodude 8y ago
I agree with you 100% and if you analyze the comments on HN everytime Google decides to mess around with their IM, I have seen similar sentiment around Gtalk. I was a regular user of Gtalk during college days 10 years ago and was pissed when they merge/transition them into hangouts. It is a poor product management decision driven by Google's philosophy of capitalizing the next big trend in the internet industry ignoring the preferences of their users.
erentz 8y ago
Is no one in charge of marketing or strategy in Google? Surely you can rewrite all the code underlying the product you like, forklift replace it if you want. But why endlessly rebrand existing products. Just keep the brand going. Or converge/consolidate branding even if the underlying software might be different between target markets, like Microsoft did with all its different messaging platforms over time. Now it’s Skype. And Skype for Business. (They’re very different.)

Groxx 8y ago

I'm also one of those that was / is still sad about losing XMPP integration. Highly customizable alerts are borderline essential if you have a lot of threads going, but hangouts seems determined to prevent you from doing any of that.

draw_down 8y ago
Makes sense, unfortunately commercial products universally abandon those open protocols at some point.

smt88 8y ago

Want to know an even more stupid rebrand? A totally new, half-baked business product called Hangouts Chat.

mrweasel 8y ago
There no polite way of expressing it: Hangouts Chat is a shitty product. We moved to Chat when Hipchat was closed. Because we’re using G-suite it seem sensible to go with Chat, but everyone hates it. The UI is useless, Google try to be clever about “conversation” and tries to group them together, but now people miss most conversations that happen when they aren’t looking. Notification is broken, you can only get to many or not enough. Chat seems to be designed by the same incompetent team of interns that did Google Groups. Using the two products feel oddly similar.
- xte 8y ago
  A small sidenote: chats are shitty concept in general. They have had a reason in a past era when voice coms are expensive and limited, they have a reason in terminals to broadcast few messages, no more. For real communication we have letter so in digital world mails or we have phone calls so in digital world VoIP one's extended with eventually video/screen sharing and conferencing capabilities, no more. Discord, Slack, ... are all only a mean to keep abandonware live for business purpose and, unfortunately, many companies fell in the grave. People who want productivity should rediscover classic software, modernized to actual "graphic style" but nothing more so: - good desktop MUA (I can, unfortunately, only list notmuch-emacs, mu4e, mutt, pine) instead of limited and limiting webmails. Of course we have to add few things to the mix like having our mails in a local maildir and a good filtering/autorefile/autotagging solution (alot, IMAPFilter); - good VoIP desk/softphones, something like old sip-communicator (now Jitsy); - decent software to share screen as needed (actually I know only proprietary one's like bomgar, anydesk or teamviewer, xpra etc are simply too limited); - local, well integrated, productivity suite. Mine is Emacs, not easy to convince office guys to learn it, but even ancient plain office suite can do the business with a decent DMS that enforce good taxonomy and have decent full-text search (YaCy for search, nothing for DMS in my list... They are all crap)...
  - piaste 8y ago
    > A small sidenote: chats are shitty concept in general. They have had a reason in a past era when voice coms are expensive and limited, they have a reason in terminals to broadcast few messages, no more. Not at all. Voice chat is synchronous - you must stop whatever you're doing and listen or talk in real time. And people nearby will overhear. Chat is asynchronous and private. I can chat and consult a colleague while I'm in a meeting with a client. I can keep a chat open while coding and read/respond when I'm not most concentrated. I can go offline and answer a question the next day. Text chat isn't literally "chatting through text". It's email with a different UX, more suited for quick communication.
    - xte 8y ago
      I still have to find something LESS productive than "chat while doing different things", perhaps even less than having an opposite (same, depending on personal orientation) sex beauty, naked, dancing winking at you... Many have thought and still think that multitasking and quick things are productive, I see the exact opposite. And we can see it at another level in mean per capita hourly productivity: in the past (so before business model substantially merge around the world) French hourly productivity was the highest in the world, and they are still one of the less-working in term of hours and holidays. USA, Japan and Germany are the opposite, they work far more and have a far lower hourly productivity. To the over extreme try the difference between a lover vs a prostitute... Open spaces are another TOTALLY unproductive things, born only to push more economic constructions sold as a higher price and facilitate reorganization. The letter also is one of the less productive thing we have if done constantly because any change, if positive, demand time to start pay back, doing constantly means NEVER get paid back, only suffer the change itself.
wodenokoto 8y ago
That is almost exactly what Microsoft did with Skype. I guess Google really is turning into Microsoft!
raverbashing 8y ago
> half-baked business product called Hangouts Chat. So, to compete with Skype for Business?

Cookingboy 8y ago

I was there when that happened. The whole rebranding/transition of GTalk/GChat was the result of some political muscle flex by Social and its army of PMs, then after Social lost its favorite child status Allo was born as a result, championed by another army of PMs, and I wonder if Duo had a similar story of birth. >Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from the early Gmail days and kept investing in it. That's just not what Google was back then. It was all about PMs/designers wanting to jump onto the shinest and newest projects and lots of politics were involved to win support/attention/resources from the top management.

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
What is a PM? I am getting insight into how google works because this sounds like a bunch of idiotic internal wars between acronym teams instead of focusing on making actual useful products.
- sincerely 8y ago
  Project Manager
- luhn 8y ago
  Project manager. Pretty standard role in a software team. The person who determines what the end result should look like.
  - Uberphallus 8y ago
    It can be Product Manager too. Product Manager has more of a focus on customer/marketing, whereas Project Manager oversees the technical teams implementing Product Manager's ideas. A Product Manager doesn't need to have a technical background, but a Project Manager should.
  - gdfasfklshg4 8y ago
    From context it is a Product Manager. Project Manager: manages day-to-day running for project e.g. fighting for the right number of devs, designers etc Product Manager: (also product owner) determines what the product should look like.

whoisjuan 8y ago

Yes. Their explanation also didn't make much sense since Hangouts was targeted for a while to consumers. But what I got from this is basically: Messages <-> iMessage Duo <-> Facetime Hangouts <-> Slack I think they should rename the Hangouts to something completely different. That at least will increase clarity for consumers and businesses.

time-domain0 8y ago
This is what happens when there isn't an unified company product strategy but fiefdoms duplicating and fighting with each other.
bufferoverflow 8y ago
This mapping isn't correct. Hangouts does all of the above - video chats, voice chats, text with emojis, pictures and videos. Hangouts is also integrated with Google Voice and GMail. So when someone calls my GV phone number, it rings on my cell phone and in any open GMail tab (but not in the GMail app). I get an SMS, it pops up as a hangouts message too. It is a mess, but trying to kill Hangouts is insane, it's deeply integrated and it's extremely convenient to use.
- basch 8y ago
  >it pops up as a hangouts message too. Unless you have google voice installed instead of hangouts. It manages to be two apps still.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

I think there's another way look at this. Per "Zero to One" Google is a very powerful monopoly. It wants to protect that position, as well as make it less noticeable. All these "side projects" create the illusion that Google is not a monopoly. More importantly, new Product X, whatever it is, helps to attract new top talent. Top Talent is going to want to fix old things, they want to build new. While this might sound a bit extreme, even if it's not actually true (in tandem) both of these "incentives" are real. Google does need to mask its dominance. And it does need to attract top talent (if only to keep soneone else from acquiring it).

bajsejohannes 8y ago
> More importantly, new Product X, whatever it is, helps to attract new top talent. Top Talent is going to want to fix old things, they want to build new. Is that really true? I would personally chose to work on Facetime than Google's new messaging system, all else being equal. Facetime is really solid and I'm sure I could learn a ton from the expertise there; as well as working on something new within that product. In contrast, Google's messaging systems just seem like a mess. I would feel like it could be cancelled at any time, that we didn't have the best talent (because it's spread across the various systems) and honestly would be slightly embarrassed to talk about it ("yeah, I know, yet another message system from Google").

mongodude 8y ago

I agree with you 100% and if you analyze the comments on HN everytime Google decides to mess around with their IM, I have seen similar sentiment around Gtalk. I was a regular user of Gtalk during college days 10 years ago and was pissed when they merge/transition them into hangouts. It is a poor product management decision driven by Google's philosophy of capitalizing the next big trend in the internet industry ignoring the preferences of their users.

erentz 8y ago

Is no one in charge of marketing or strategy in Google? Surely you can rewrite all the code underlying the product you like, forklift replace it if you want. But why endlessly rebrand existing products. Just keep the brand going. Or converge/consolidate branding even if the underlying software might be different between target markets, like Microsoft did with all its different messaging platforms over time. Now it’s Skype. And Skype for Business. (They’re very different.)