Speaking of organizational mess and product decisions... I find it shocking how bad Hangouts is. It's so convenient. Chat, built right into Gmail. It works. B

Speaking of organizational mess and product decisions... I find it shocking how bad Hangouts is. It's so convenient. Chat, built right into Gmail. It works. But. BUT. - It does not support video. Drop in a video, and you get a bizarre error message telling you to try "JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, and HEIFimage files" (sic) instead. https://twitter.com/dcposch/status/1303193761313206272 https://twitter.com/dcposch/status/1303193761313206272 - Tiny little chat windows. No replies, no reactions. Basic UX that feels like abandonware from 2010. - If you have Google Fi, you can take phone calls thru Hangouts, but you cannot send or receive text messages (??) I just feel bad for whatever rump team of a few engineers has to maintain that product. They are plainly caught on the wrong end of some strange and gross internal politics. Google has a self-defeating practice of emphasizing "new products shipped" in their promotion packets. That probably explains why their army of PMs has, instead of improving Hangouts for a billion Gmail users, chosen to create the following instead: Google Meet, Duo, "Google Chat", and an endless parade of now-cancelled apps like Allo.