> They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult. FWIW, the UI of your averag

> They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult. FWIW, the UI of your average teleconferencing app is way simpler than a chat app and the state is only relevant in the moment which makes both the front end and backend easier to design due to a lack of search or history. The actual "conferencing" parts of a teleconferencing stack, both the client and the servers, are also nigh unto commodities at this point (as Google open sourced the tech for almost all of the hard problems they solved for Hangouts), while figuring out how to better index file attachments people throw into chat discussions isn't exactly a solved problem.