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Can someone tell me the difference between Google Meet, Google Hangouts, Google Duo and Google Chat? Multiple of these support video and chat. I’ve used Hangou

Can someone tell me the difference between Google Meet, Google Hangouts, Google Duo and Google Chat? Multiple of these support video and chat. I’ve used Hangouts and Chat and Duo before. Why the new brand “Meet”? And why have competing - even more importantly - confusing products at Google who seem to offer the same features? I would like to, but cannot be bullish on Google as a video communications platform for this reason.

wanderingstan 6y ago
Likewise. I’ve given up trying to understand the differences in feature sets, contact lists, and pricing.
crb 6y ago
Certainly. Hangouts was a brand that had both text and video. It has split into Chat (for text) and Meet (for video); both now revolve more around "rooms" as well as 1:1, and as such are primarily targeted at business users. Hangouts will now be going away and the legacy platforms migrated to the new. Duo is FaceTime for Android.
- abraham 6y ago
  Duo is also available on iOS and web.
deadmutex 6y ago
Meet was originally enterprise focused, with features like being able to record video, tight calendar integration, etc. Chat is also enterprise focused, similar to Slack. Duo is targeted at consumers, and has e2e encryption among other things. It similar to Apple's FaceTime. Hangouts is old school Google+ tech, the whereas the others use newer tech. E.g. There is some impressive tech behind Duo: https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in-duo-with.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in..., https://www.blog.google/products/duo/4-new-google-duo-features-help-you-stay-connected/ https://www.blog.google/products/duo/4-new-google-duo-featur....
corobo 6y ago
Honestly I'm convinced the only real difference is the people on the teams within Google Left hand doesn't know what the right is doing and that, will probably lead to splitting the audience and everything being killed off
lnanek2 6y ago
We use Meet at work. As far as I can tell, it's just Hangouts, but with a lot of stuff removed like the good chat integration that Hangouts previously had. I think they rebranded it B2B to try to kill it off to not compete with their new Duo and whatever else consumer offerings no one likes. Bet they are kicking themselves now that Zoom ate their lunch in the pandemic. If they hadn't killed their consumer offering, they would have been well placed like Zoom was for a massive traffic boost. Bet whoever wrote Duo to replace Hangouts got a promo, though!
darrmit 6y ago
Hangouts used to be a single product that combined video, voice, direct, and group chats. It was quite good, especially with Google Voice layered in. Google split that in to Meet (video/voice) and Chat (direct/group) in a half-hearted effort to compete with Slack and Microsoft Teams. You could also say they split it further via Google Voice, which became a standalone paid offering. The issue is they still haven't solved for external chat in Hangouts Chat, which is a critical feature many rely on in legacy Hangouts, so that feature keeps the legacy version running I think. They really botched the launch of Google Chat. The original deprecation timeline for legacy Hangouts was something like last June.
- fulafel 6y ago
  Hangouts still exists and is popular, it's not a past product.
  - darrmit 6y ago
    > that feature keeps the legacy version running I think I'm well aware that Hangouts still exists.. I use it often. But Google has every intention of deprecating it. Example: https://9to5google.com/2018/12/02/google-hangouts-shutting-down/ https://9to5google.com/2018/12/02/google-hangouts-shutting-d...
  - NDizzle 6y ago
    Not yet anyway...
ashtonkem 6y ago
I also trust Google about as much as I’m capable of picking up the entire organization and throwing it; not at all. Any product Google releases has a half life of about a year at this point, betting even the tiniest bit of my business on them is a non starter.
crazygringo 6y ago
It has extremely valid market reasons. Google Hangouts = the original chat+video product which was semi-popular, but never got huge traction and mindshare the way WhatsApp, Slack, the original Skype, or the newer FaceTime did. And now Zoom and Teams. So Google realized it had to compete better against all of those, all of those being very separate communications channels with different priorities. Hangouts could never be an awesome focused product if it had to be all things to all people. So the competitor to Facetime/WhatsApp/FB Messenger is Google Duo. It's originally phone-based and designed primarily for 1-1, though it supports small groups. The competitor to Zoom and Teams is Google Meet. It's enterprise-based for huge meetings. The competitor to Slack is Google Chat. And Google Hangouts is this zombie product that used to do everything, but never as well as any of the competitors, and still has moderate consumer usage so they can't kill it, though I'm sure they're doing their best to figure out how to get people to migrate eventually without losing them to a competitor in the process. So despite all the flak Google gets for a fragmented messaging ecosystem, it's driven by extremely valid market reasons. And Google isn't a video communications platform, it's a company. With several platforms, serving several totally distinct markets.
- untog 6y ago
  [edit: deleted. Appear to have been rate limited by HN so I can't reply? so withdrawing from the conversation]
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    So I'm going to disagree with you for three reasons here. 1) A product has to have simple UX to achieve primary use cases easily. Even if all features can be engineered, building a simple intuitive UI that works for Slack chat, 1-1 calls, and big meetings is probably impossible. 2) Engineering-wise they're also very different. The behind-the-scenes architecture for 1-1 or small groups, versus huge meetings, is also totally different. Similarly whether chat persists in long-lived "rooms", or only for the length of a video call, or only between two people. 3) Finally, people making corporate buying decisions want a product that fits easily into their conceptual understandings. Slack created a category. Google had to respond with a product branded specifically for that category, not a mega-product that also does the things in that category, because people don't "get" that for whatever psychological reason. You're right that Hangouts did all this previously. But that's also why Hangouts failed. It was a "jack of all trades, master of none."
subhobroto 6y ago
Google Hangouts, Google Chat: Products that worked real well, had a lot of 3rd party integrations built for it and now deprecated because Google does not want to deal with legacy services. Their incentive structure there is to build the "next thing". Both were pretty "groundbreaking" apps when they came out. Hangouts managed to figure out and resolve a lot of issues of team chats and voice/video streaming issues over poor/unreliable connections. A lot of the novel UI and features they developed is now taken for granted. Google Meet: An attempt at Zoom. Will soon be deprecated because Google does not want to deal with legacy services and the incentive structure there is to build the "next thing". Maybe Google Conference. Meanwhile Zoom is laser focused. Google Duo: An attempt at Whatsapp with a whiff of FaceTime. Will soon be deprecated because Google does not want to deal with legacy services and the incentive structure there is to build the "next thing". Maybe Google Trio. Meanwhile Whatsapp, FaceTime are laser focused.
- anon102010 6y ago
  What's up does chat / does duo? We use zoom at work despite being on Google - meet really doesn't always work across even Google account tyoes. Ie Gmail vs gsuite vs some admin left some setting off for an external users domain and they cannot join. Zoom I can host a no account conference that everyone can join (waiting rooms driving us all crazy)
  - subhobroto 6y ago
    Exactly! Everyone on this planet has a GMail account and if Google understood what customers want, Meet would have had Zoom for lunch. Today, anyone who works remotely and is not tied into Teams, have heard of Zoom. Very few, including GMail users, know about Meet. Meet missed a big - perhaps once in a decade opportunity. Users already have Zoom on their phone and computers. There is 0 reason to use Meet if they were not already.
- eitally 6y ago
  You have no idea what you're talking about (re: Meet & Duo). Duo is included in the standard Android distribution image and even included on Samsung phones. It's a broadly adopted "Facetime for Android" and works very, very well. It's not going anywhere. Meet is clearly a business-first product and a core part of the G Suite offering set. As another poster described, it goes beyond just desktop & mobile apps and contains a lot of the same kind of conference room features you'd get from a Polycom, Bluejeans, Vidyo, etc. It's also Google's internal videoconferencing standard for both rooms & end users. Your comparison with Zoom makes literally zero sense. For one thing, you can't purchase Meet by itself -- it's an entitlement within G Suite -- and if you look at the Meet announcement this week explaining availability for "all users", you should see it as a side-effect of the business product's maturity, not as a consumer-first offering. The only remaining question marks are around what happens with classic Hangouts, and what additional features is Chat going to get that make it more consumer-oriented before it replaces Hangouts in Gmail.
kyrra 6y ago
(Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work on any of these products) Hangouts was born out of Google+, and that merged with gchat. They rebooted it's UI a few times through all of this. Over the years they put more and more features onto it (like sms app integration, phone dialing, and many other things). If you used Hangouts as your sms app, you could txt from hangouts within Gmail. I think it became a franken-app that was just too hard to add to or improve anymore. Duo / Allo: These were to be the consumer focused products. Allo obviously failed (I actually liked a lot about the UX of this app, I'm really sad it died). Duo seems to be a Facetime competitor. It focused on 1:1 video chats for a long time, with lots of fun little thing being added on (like the animation overlays), and leaving video messages. The UI is dead-simple, click a picture, get a video call. Tech wise there are a couple cool things. [1] it is end-to-end encrypted. [2] It is optimized for mobile. That means it adjusts very quickly to bandwidth and latency changes, which is great for cellular networks. Note that it has some group chat now, but only on mobile. (there is a desktop browser version, but that's still only 1:1). It also has integration with Google's phone app on android. EDIT: few other fun things: Duo and Allo can be used without a Google Account, only a phone # is needed. Allo had a web app so you could send/receive from your computer, this tech ended up being the foundation for the sms Messages app web client (both were available for a while and the UI and behavior was exactly the same [2.1]). Chat: obviously a slack competitor. It has bot integration, threads, and probably some other things. As a daily user of this, I will say message delivery and notification are much better than what old hangouts used to provide (when you are on desktop and mobile a lot, notifications were sometimes not great. It seems better with Chat). Meet: stand alone video. While it seems very similar to the old hangouts video product, I feel like it's been improving quickly and there are lots of smaller features that I enjoy. When a meeting gets to a certain size, it defaults to muting new people that join (this is minor, but proven to be nice). Desktop sharing on it works rather well (at least on chromebooks, I can share a tab, a window, or my whole desktop. Sharing just a tab is nice so I don't accidentally share my email with outside people for example). For enterprise, you can use Meet to do live streaming to really large crowds[3]. There will be a normal meeting for presenters, then everyone watching gets a youtube like video player, and this supports up to 100k people. It assume better bandwidth, so it doesn't degrade on low bandwidth as well (or so I read, but maybe it's better now). Meet has lots of other enterprise features[4], and has a focus on meeting rooms, hardware, UI and things that go with installing this product into rooms. They also have Jamboards, so you can do digital whiteboard that can be shared with everyone on a call. All 4 of these products got to start somewhat fresh tech-wise, and you can see that they are able to move rather quickly now, which is something classic Hangouts just wasn't allowing teams to do. Was it the right call? /shrug. For GSuite, there is at least Chat+Hangouts interop, so there is a migration path between those products. And I believe it was announced long ago that Meet+Chat would replace Hangouts for consumer, just not clear if/when (talked about Jan 2019 [5]). They were meant to be consumer vs business focuses, which seems to allow PM/UX not to fight about which features and designs they should move towards. The old hangouts mobile app had TONS of buttons in the past, and it could get confusing for non-tech savvy people, and I think they wanted to avoid this. [1] https://support.google.com/duo/answer/9280240?hl=en https://support.google.com/duo/answer/9280240?hl=en [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Duo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Duo [2.1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/23/14721280/google-allo-chat-app-desktop-web-app https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/23/14721280/google-allo-chat... [3] https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9308630?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9308630?co=GENIE.Plat... [4] https://roomdesignguide.withgoogle.com/equipment-locations/introduction https://roomdesignguide.withgoogle.com/equipment-locations/i... [5] https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/22/18193303/google-hangouts-end-transition-october-gsuite-chat-meet https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/22/18193303/google-hangouts-...
Spooky23 6y ago
I think the problem in this space is that expressed/accepted demand for Enterprise and Consumer offerings are very different, and the platform owners don't fundamentally respect the business. All platform companies saw these features as sideshows that drive engagement for something else. At work I talk about a "General Theory of Chat Clients Always Getting Worse" -- there is literally no messaging client on the market that is better than AOL/Yahoo/Google messenger of 20 years ago. That's because they aren't viewed as products. Enterprises seem to be going for "collaboration" solutions that integrate video/audio with content like documents and chat. Think of a venn diagram of Slack/Files/Conferencing. Microsoft delivered Teams (aka Chat/SharePoint/1:1 or adhoc Calling/Group Conferencing, Google has Meet/Chat/Currents/Drive. People just want to talk to people. Facetime and Facebook Messenger are great examples of that. But... even those platforms stick these functions in the ghetto of complementary products that a more like glue, they exist to keep you on the bigger platform. Google Duo is looking to be that kind of product. The magic of Zoom is they made conferencing a standalone product got normal people to discover and adopt a vertically integrated, focused collaboration product that does one thing well. Zoom is really an iteration of Webex without Cisco bullshit, and is a demonstration of the beauty and magic of competition. My wife's circle of friends are now paid Zoom customers. That's unthinkable in other contexts... how many mom groups or PTOs were buying Webex? (And conversely, how many O365 enterprises skipped free SkypeForBusiness/Teams and buy Zoom!)

wanderingstan 6y ago

Likewise. I’ve given up trying to understand the differences in feature sets, contact lists, and pricing.

crb 6y ago

Certainly. Hangouts was a brand that had both text and video. It has split into Chat (for text) and Meet (for video); both now revolve more around "rooms" as well as 1:1, and as such are primarily targeted at business users. Hangouts will now be going away and the legacy platforms migrated to the new. Duo is FaceTime for Android.

abraham 6y ago
Duo is also available on iOS and web.

deadmutex 6y ago

Meet was originally enterprise focused, with features like being able to record video, tight calendar integration, etc. Chat is also enterprise focused, similar to Slack. Duo is targeted at consumers, and has e2e encryption among other things. It similar to Apple's FaceTime. Hangouts is old school Google+ tech, the whereas the others use newer tech. E.g. There is some impressive tech behind Duo: https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in-duo-with.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in..., https://www.blog.google/products/duo/4-new-google-duo-features-help-you-stay-connected/ https://www.blog.google/products/duo/4-new-google-duo-featur....

corobo 6y ago

Honestly I'm convinced the only real difference is the people on the teams within Google Left hand doesn't know what the right is doing and that, will probably lead to splitting the audience and everything being killed off

lnanek2 6y ago

We use Meet at work. As far as I can tell, it's just Hangouts, but with a lot of stuff removed like the good chat integration that Hangouts previously had. I think they rebranded it B2B to try to kill it off to not compete with their new Duo and whatever else consumer offerings no one likes. Bet they are kicking themselves now that Zoom ate their lunch in the pandemic. If they hadn't killed their consumer offering, they would have been well placed like Zoom was for a massive traffic boost. Bet whoever wrote Duo to replace Hangouts got a promo, though!

darrmit 6y ago

Hangouts used to be a single product that combined video, voice, direct, and group chats. It was quite good, especially with Google Voice layered in. Google split that in to Meet (video/voice) and Chat (direct/group) in a half-hearted effort to compete with Slack and Microsoft Teams. You could also say they split it further via Google Voice, which became a standalone paid offering. The issue is they still haven't solved for external chat in Hangouts Chat, which is a critical feature many rely on in legacy Hangouts, so that feature keeps the legacy version running I think. They really botched the launch of Google Chat. The original deprecation timeline for legacy Hangouts was something like last June.

fulafel 6y ago
Hangouts still exists and is popular, it's not a past product.
- darrmit 6y ago
  > that feature keeps the legacy version running I think I'm well aware that Hangouts still exists.. I use it often. But Google has every intention of deprecating it. Example: https://9to5google.com/2018/12/02/google-hangouts-shutting-down/ https://9to5google.com/2018/12/02/google-hangouts-shutting-d...
- NDizzle 6y ago
  Not yet anyway...

ashtonkem 6y ago

I also trust Google about as much as I’m capable of picking up the entire organization and throwing it; not at all. Any product Google releases has a half life of about a year at this point, betting even the tiniest bit of my business on them is a non starter.

crazygringo 6y ago

It has extremely valid market reasons. Google Hangouts = the original chat+video product which was semi-popular, but never got huge traction and mindshare the way WhatsApp, Slack, the original Skype, or the newer FaceTime did. And now Zoom and Teams. So Google realized it had to compete better against all of those, all of those being very separate communications channels with different priorities. Hangouts could never be an awesome focused product if it had to be all things to all people. So the competitor to Facetime/WhatsApp/FB Messenger is Google Duo. It's originally phone-based and designed primarily for 1-1, though it supports small groups. The competitor to Zoom and Teams is Google Meet. It's enterprise-based for huge meetings. The competitor to Slack is Google Chat. And Google Hangouts is this zombie product that used to do everything, but never as well as any of the competitors, and still has moderate consumer usage so they can't kill it, though I'm sure they're doing their best to figure out how to get people to migrate eventually without losing them to a competitor in the process. So despite all the flak Google gets for a fragmented messaging ecosystem, it's driven by extremely valid market reasons. And Google isn't a video communications platform, it's a company. With several platforms, serving several totally distinct markets.

untog 6y ago
[edit: deleted. Appear to have been rate limited by HN so I can't reply? so withdrawing from the conversation]
- crazygringo 6y ago
  So I'm going to disagree with you for three reasons here. 1) A product has to have simple UX to achieve primary use cases easily. Even if all features can be engineered, building a simple intuitive UI that works for Slack chat, 1-1 calls, and big meetings is probably impossible. 2) Engineering-wise they're also very different. The behind-the-scenes architecture for 1-1 or small groups, versus huge meetings, is also totally different. Similarly whether chat persists in long-lived "rooms", or only for the length of a video call, or only between two people. 3) Finally, people making corporate buying decisions want a product that fits easily into their conceptual understandings. Slack created a category. Google had to respond with a product branded specifically for that category, not a mega-product that also does the things in that category, because people don't "get" that for whatever psychological reason. You're right that Hangouts did all this previously. But that's also why Hangouts failed. It was a "jack of all trades, master of none."

subhobroto 6y ago

Google Hangouts, Google Chat: Products that worked real well, had a lot of 3rd party integrations built for it and now deprecated because Google does not want to deal with legacy services. Their incentive structure there is to build the "next thing". Both were pretty "groundbreaking" apps when they came out. Hangouts managed to figure out and resolve a lot of issues of team chats and voice/video streaming issues over poor/unreliable connections. A lot of the novel UI and features they developed is now taken for granted. Google Meet: An attempt at Zoom. Will soon be deprecated because Google does not want to deal with legacy services and the incentive structure there is to build the "next thing". Maybe Google Conference. Meanwhile Zoom is laser focused. Google Duo: An attempt at Whatsapp with a whiff of FaceTime. Will soon be deprecated because Google does not want to deal with legacy services and the incentive structure there is to build the "next thing". Maybe Google Trio. Meanwhile Whatsapp, FaceTime are laser focused.

anon102010 6y ago
What's up does chat / does duo? We use zoom at work despite being on Google - meet really doesn't always work across even Google account tyoes. Ie Gmail vs gsuite vs some admin left some setting off for an external users domain and they cannot join. Zoom I can host a no account conference that everyone can join (waiting rooms driving us all crazy)
- subhobroto 6y ago
  Exactly! Everyone on this planet has a GMail account and if Google understood what customers want, Meet would have had Zoom for lunch. Today, anyone who works remotely and is not tied into Teams, have heard of Zoom. Very few, including GMail users, know about Meet. Meet missed a big - perhaps once in a decade opportunity. Users already have Zoom on their phone and computers. There is 0 reason to use Meet if they were not already.
eitally 6y ago
You have no idea what you're talking about (re: Meet & Duo). Duo is included in the standard Android distribution image and even included on Samsung phones. It's a broadly adopted "Facetime for Android" and works very, very well. It's not going anywhere. Meet is clearly a business-first product and a core part of the G Suite offering set. As another poster described, it goes beyond just desktop & mobile apps and contains a lot of the same kind of conference room features you'd get from a Polycom, Bluejeans, Vidyo, etc. It's also Google's internal videoconferencing standard for both rooms & end users. Your comparison with Zoom makes literally zero sense. For one thing, you can't purchase Meet by itself -- it's an entitlement within G Suite -- and if you look at the Meet announcement this week explaining availability for "all users", you should see it as a side-effect of the business product's maturity, not as a consumer-first offering. The only remaining question marks are around what happens with classic Hangouts, and what additional features is Chat going to get that make it more consumer-oriented before it replaces Hangouts in Gmail.

kyrra 6y ago

(Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work on any of these products) Hangouts was born out of Google+, and that merged with gchat. They rebooted it's UI a few times through all of this. Over the years they put more and more features onto it (like sms app integration, phone dialing, and many other things). If you used Hangouts as your sms app, you could txt from hangouts within Gmail. I think it became a franken-app that was just too hard to add to or improve anymore. Duo / Allo: These were to be the consumer focused products. Allo obviously failed (I actually liked a lot about the UX of this app, I'm really sad it died). Duo seems to be a Facetime competitor. It focused on 1:1 video chats for a long time, with lots of fun little thing being added on (like the animation overlays), and leaving video messages. The UI is dead-simple, click a picture, get a video call. Tech wise there are a couple cool things. [1] it is end-to-end encrypted. [2] It is optimized for mobile. That means it adjusts very quickly to bandwidth and latency changes, which is great for cellular networks. Note that it has some group chat now, but only on mobile. (there is a desktop browser version, but that's still only 1:1). It also has integration with Google's phone app on android. EDIT: few other fun things: Duo and Allo can be used without a Google Account, only a phone # is needed. Allo had a web app so you could send/receive from your computer, this tech ended up being the foundation for the sms Messages app web client (both were available for a while and the UI and behavior was exactly the same [2.1]). Chat: obviously a slack competitor. It has bot integration, threads, and probably some other things. As a daily user of this, I will say message delivery and notification are much better than what old hangouts used to provide (when you are on desktop and mobile a lot, notifications were sometimes not great. It seems better with Chat). Meet: stand alone video. While it seems very similar to the old hangouts video product, I feel like it's been improving quickly and there are lots of smaller features that I enjoy. When a meeting gets to a certain size, it defaults to muting new people that join (this is minor, but proven to be nice). Desktop sharing on it works rather well (at least on chromebooks, I can share a tab, a window, or my whole desktop. Sharing just a tab is nice so I don't accidentally share my email with outside people for example). For enterprise, you can use Meet to do live streaming to really large crowds[3]. There will be a normal meeting for presenters, then everyone watching gets a youtube like video player, and this supports up to 100k people. It assume better bandwidth, so it doesn't degrade on low bandwidth as well (or so I read, but maybe it's better now). Meet has lots of other enterprise features[4], and has a focus on meeting rooms, hardware, UI and things that go with installing this product into rooms. They also have Jamboards, so you can do digital whiteboard that can be shared with everyone on a call. All 4 of these products got to start somewhat fresh tech-wise, and you can see that they are able to move rather quickly now, which is something classic Hangouts just wasn't allowing teams to do. Was it the right call? /shrug. For GSuite, there is at least Chat+Hangouts interop, so there is a migration path between those products. And I believe it was announced long ago that Meet+Chat would replace Hangouts for consumer, just not clear if/when (talked about Jan 2019 [5]). They were meant to be consumer vs business focuses, which seems to allow PM/UX not to fight about which features and designs they should move towards. The old hangouts mobile app had TONS of buttons in the past, and it could get confusing for non-tech savvy people, and I think they wanted to avoid this. [1] https://support.google.com/duo/answer/9280240?hl=en https://support.google.com/duo/answer/9280240?hl=en [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Duo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Duo [2.1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/23/14721280/google-allo-chat-app-desktop-web-app https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/23/14721280/google-allo-chat... [3] https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9308630?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9308630?co=GENIE.Plat... [4] https://roomdesignguide.withgoogle.com/equipment-locations/introduction https://roomdesignguide.withgoogle.com/equipment-locations/i... [5] https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/22/18193303/google-hangouts-end-transition-october-gsuite-chat-meet https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/22/18193303/google-hangouts-...

Spooky23 6y ago

I think the problem in this space is that expressed/accepted demand for Enterprise and Consumer offerings are very different, and the platform owners don't fundamentally respect the business. All platform companies saw these features as sideshows that drive engagement for something else. At work I talk about a "General Theory of Chat Clients Always Getting Worse" -- there is literally no messaging client on the market that is better than AOL/Yahoo/Google messenger of 20 years ago. That's because they aren't viewed as products. Enterprises seem to be going for "collaboration" solutions that integrate video/audio with content like documents and chat. Think of a venn diagram of Slack/Files/Conferencing. Microsoft delivered Teams (aka Chat/SharePoint/1:1 or adhoc Calling/Group Conferencing, Google has Meet/Chat/Currents/Drive. People just want to talk to people. Facetime and Facebook Messenger are great examples of that. But... even those platforms stick these functions in the ghetto of complementary products that a more like glue, they exist to keep you on the bigger platform. Google Duo is looking to be that kind of product. The magic of Zoom is they made conferencing a standalone product got normal people to discover and adopt a vertically integrated, focused collaboration product that does one thing well. Zoom is really an iteration of Webex without Cisco bullshit, and is a demonstration of the beauty and magic of competition. My wife's circle of friends are now paid Zoom customers. That's unthinkable in other contexts... how many mom groups or PTOs were buying Webex? (And conversely, how many O365 enterprises skipped free SkypeForBusiness/Teams and buy Zoom!)