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Google’s video chat merger begins: Now there are two “Google Meet” apps

295 points by leephillips 4y ago

unity1001 4y ago
Another google product screw-up. 'Deprecations', rebrandings, weird, unintuitive mergers of products...
bilal4hmed 4y ago
Seems like on mobile there will be one Google Meet app ? So not sure how there will be two meet apps ?? with that said, in terms of audio & video quality esp in poor connectivity conditions there is nothing that comes close to Duo - not whatsapp, not signal, not facetime
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > Google has a help article detailing this extremely confusing situation, calling the two Meet apps "Google Meet (original): The updated Meet app" and "Google Meet: The updated Duo app." The "Google Meet (original)" app will someday be put out to pasture; it's just sticking around while Google rebuilds the meeting functionality on top of Google Duo. Did everyone follow that? Sounds like there's two in the store for now. On iOS, I can find both Google Meet and Google Duo in the App Store.
- josteink 4y ago
  > Seems like on mobile there will be one Google Meet app ? So not sure how there will be two meet apps ?? I just searched the iOS AppStore. There’s three apps: Google Meet, Google Chat and Google Duo. They just don’t get how this works, do they?
  - ASalazarMX 4y ago
    Google Chat is for messaging, with its own folly of Chat / Hangouts because Chat was the new Hangouts for business or something like that.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> So Google Duo is being rebranded to Google Meet, and the existing Google Meet app is sticking around for a bit. That means there are now two apps called "Google Meet." Google has a help article detailing this extremely confusing situation, calling the two Meet apps "Google Meet (original): The updated Meet app" and "Google Meet: The updated Duo app." The "Google Meet (original)" app will someday be put out to pasture; it's just sticking around while Google rebuilds the meeting functionality on top of Google Duo. Did everyone follow that? I'm in stitches; dying of laughter over here. Folding together apps to reduce the number of chat apps if probably a good thing, but renaming them to an existing name while the old app is still around? Even Microsoft had the decency to tack on "for business" when they were butchering Skype's branding! On a more serious note, I'll be interested to see how this affects the business side of things; will Google Workspace keep Meet, and what Meet will it be? EDIT: Reading through the linked help article, they talk about Google Workspace under the section for the new "Meet" nee Duo and not under the section for "Google Meet (original)", so I guess they have or will transition it. Probably.
- deleted 4y ago
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- nextos 4y ago
  It's sad because Google Talk was good. Jabber/XMPP on a web, for the masses. It had good federation, as it followed the standard. And Google even contributed JINGLE, a XEP (standard extension) for videocalls. I was making videocalls from Google Talk using a Nokia 770 in 2007. It feels we've gone backward once Google became dominant and Nokia got taken over.
  - acdha 4y ago
    There’s a certain dark humor in the way that Google Talk/Reader kind of marks the apex of their reputation - they sacrificed so much trying to beat Facebook at its own game, and all they got for that devil’s bargain was G+.
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
fredley 4y ago
I love watching Google's attempts to unify/create/destroy messaging platforms, seeing them compete as if they are competitors on an episode of Takeshi's Castle.
- trebbble 4y ago
  > as if they are competitors on an episode of Takeshi's Castle. "It looks as if the two teams are merging, like two black holes: if both suck, surely they'll suck even more together." "Right you are, Ken!"
- codethief 4y ago
  After the article and this entire comment section, this mental image that you're drawing here caused me to fully break down. I mean I pinched a nerve in my back the other day (I feel it every time I breath), so now I'm more or less literally dying here laughing. Thank you! :)
- codethief 4y ago
  > seeing them compete as if they are competitors on an episode of Takeshi's Castle. Obligatory Video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=123&v=TZ-PeYaFniA https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=123&v=TZ-PeYaFniA
aeturnum 4y ago
The solution of solving your app branding problem by renaming the less used apps with the name of the most widely used app is something straight out of the Onion.
- nneonneo 4y ago
  But no, it’s even worse! They are renaming Duo to Meet, even though Duo has 10x more installs than (classic) Meet.
  - cesarb 4y ago
    > even though Duo has 10x more installs than (classic) Meet. How many of these "10x more installs" are due to Duo coming preinstalled by default on Android, which AFAIK isn't the case for Meet? A quick look at two Android phones I have nearby showed both have Duo installed (and never opened), while none have Meet.
    - izacus 4y ago
      A lot, but being preinstalled is what makes Duo practical. It's effectively Androids' replacement for FaceTime, always there directly in the dialer. Last I checked it was quite popular in Asia.
  - alephxyz 4y ago
    Isn't that because Duo comes installed on new Android phones but Meet doesn't? It might be that Meet has more daily users.
    - abraham 4y ago
      Meet is installed on all Android phones as part of the Gmail app. It just doesn't have an app icon.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        If that's true then there's no way in hell Duo has 10x more installs?
mupuff1234 4y ago
Eventually it's all gonna converge to a single app that does chat, video and calls. And it shall be called "hangouts".
- uoaei 4y ago
  Everything old is new again
- ayberk 4y ago
  This is Google sharpening its focus ;)
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  Sadly with no xmpp support :/
- dmitrygr 4y ago
  An update on meet: we’ve decided to put more wood behind fewer arrows and sharpen our focus. (To any xooglers reading this, sorry for the dose of PTSD)
- wetpaws 4y ago
  Hangouts is too verbose. Why not just "Google Talk"
- mywittyname 4y ago
  Maybe they will allow you to type/speak the thing you want to do and will call it "search."
- philistine 4y ago
  One thing I loathe about Android is the messy need for every app has to be a brandTM. Compare with iOS: Messages, Mail, Calendar, Wallet, Home.
  - Bilal_io 4y ago
    But these apps don't need to be branded due to being a monopoly. Google's approach is better (if they didn't butcher the naming every time and kill apps constantly) for the consumer as it indicates you have choices.
justahuman74 4y ago
Someone surely got a promo out of this
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  I can somehow understand how "Meet" is a better and more recognizable brand than "Duo". At least they didn't release a "Meet for Business" to add to the confusion.
xnx 4y ago
They've come close to this situation in other areas as well. Google has a "Google Pay" app and a "GPay" app. https://9to5google.com/2022/03/11/the-difference-between-gpay-and-google-pay-which-one-should-you-use/ https://9to5google.com/2022/03/11/the-difference-between-gpa...
- jjulius 4y ago
  And, they replaced Google Wallet years back with Google Pay, but now Google Wallet is back, so that you can do the same thing you already do with Google Pay, but with a few extra types of cards that Google Pay can't store because, I dunno, "reasons"? lol >Google Wallet’s official rollout is the latest step in the long history of Google’s payment app variations. The company combined Google Wallet and Android Pay in 2018 to create Google Pay, a single app that included tap-to-pay, tickets, and loyalty programs under one umbrella that worked across Android and Google Chrome. In 2020, Google Pay had a big app refresh to pull in peer-to-peer payments, deals, and other services. >Now Google announced Wallet’s comeback at its Google I/O event in May, splitting things up again to create a dedicated home for payment cards, airplane tickets, government IDs, vaccination proof, and even car keys. >Users will be able to use the app to pay at vendors where Google Pay is accepted. https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/20/23270301/google-wallet-return-android-payment-cards-keys-id https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/20/23270301/google-wallet-re...
  - jsmith45 4y ago
    Part of the problem was that in 2020 they pushed out a new Google Pay, which was designed not based on google accounts, but using phone number tied login, specifically because that approach was necessary to get any real adoption in India. But after succeeding with the new app in India, the people behind the new app got approval to push it out on everyone else. (Calling it a "refresh" is a complete joke. It was a completely different app in all respects that shared only the name it stole from the older Google Pay). This went fairly poorly. For example, people in the rest of the world wanted to be able to use their google account. This approach had problems like not being able to support a website version. The wallet website still existed and was used to manage payment cards that chrome might suggest, but was no longer connected to the "google pay" service. The people behind the new Google Pay all resigned or were pushed out. And google decided to back peddle, and move to something more like the old Google Pay. But they wisely decided not to use the Google Pay name again. (It does not help that there is also yet another unrelated Google Pay service used for In app or website based purchases). So they decided to revive the Google Wallet name.
somehnacct3757 4y ago
The blurb ar the bottom about the Workspace GM focusing on communication apps in response to the pandemic, explains why the Workspace Addon ecosystem has been quietly abandoned by Google.
Apocryphon 4y ago
This is getting out of hand!
- deleted 4y ago
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atonse 4y ago
Watching Google continue to fumble and trip over themselves over the past decade with all their horrendous messaging “strategy” used to be amusing. Now it’s just cringy. What is going on over there? Why are they not able to make up their damn minds and come up with one app? Google reminds me of Ballmer’s Microsoft. Factions on top of factions and no leadership anywhere to be found.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  It's like they are their own little marketplace where the currency is promotions. New apps get created because a new app is a way to get ahead. Old apps and features get abandoned because the small set of people who created them started working on something else and nobody is left to maintain the thing. There's nobody with vision setting direction at Google, it's an internal game with lots of players that results in products, kind of.
  - snapcaster 4y ago
    I've heard this before about Google, I've never worked there so can't say it's true but if we assume it is: why wouldn't every other tech company also be like this? what makes google uniquely vulnerable to failure modes like this?
    - aerique 4y ago
      Eh, have you followed Microsoft in the past? It seems to be par for the course for very big companies. Apple's been doing strange things as well. IBM in the past.
    - dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
      Because Google has unique policies and culture that generate these outcomes?
      - cecilpl2 4y ago
        This is a tautological answer. What are those policies and culture?
solardev 4y ago
Lol, can't tell if Google is parodying itself right now.
joshstrange 4y ago
At this point I want to just create a copy/paste that I plop down everytime this happens (and yes, silly decisions like this happen at google often enough that I know I've typed it multiple times). Here we go: It will never cease to amaze me how much Google has bungled chat of any variety (text, audio, video). They seem completely incompetent from the outside looking in. Now I know a lot of it is due to the "People get promoted for launching a product not supporting one" and the fact that Google likes to throw things at the wall and see what sticks but this is getting absurd. Between the myriad of chat clients and mediums that Google has targeted to things like Wallet vs Pay (or the other iterations of this) I don't understand how the execs haven't just said "enough is enough" and removed the perverse incentives that have lead to this clusterfuck. I know this is not a Google-only problem and we can talk about other companies who reward similar behavior leading to less than desirable outcomes for the people using these products but Google seems to be the king dunce of this game where everyone loses except the people promoted for launching a PoC then riding off into the sunset. Do the Google execs just not see this? Are they oblivious to the issue? Are they trying (and failing miserably) to rectify it? I don't have answers to these questions but I sure hope someone at Google does because aside from a few "safe" products (Drive, Docs, Gmail) I don't feel comfortable using anything they put out with their track record (both of killing products, hello Reader, or leaving them in <1.0 state indefinitely). I feel bad for Android users, Apple has it's many faults but they coalesced on iMessage/Facetime very early on and haven't deviated from that path. Sometimes they are slow or unwilling to make changes but everyone knows they can trust those 2 services and that they are here for the long haul. It seems every other week we hear about green vs blue bubbles or how iMessage causes lock in. While lock in isn't great I guess I prefer that over the unstable ground that every Google-based chat program is built on.
- jfim 4y ago
  It's not isolated to Google, for example there's the whole Microsoft Skype, Lync, Communicator, Skype for Business, Messenger, Yammer, and Teams stuff that went on for years. Google is just more visible on the customer side, with people going through Google talk, Buzz, Hangouts, Allo, Duo, Messages, Wave, Google+ Huddle, back to Hangouts, Hangouts in Gmail, and I'm not sure where they're at now.
40acres 4y ago
Can anyone with experience at Google actually explain what's going on here? Assuming that social apps roll up to the same VP or whatever -- shouldn't there have been a decision long ago to simply their app offerings? I can understand separate orgs wanting to establish their turf by proposing a new app but isn't a leader there to stop the madness.
- tmpz22 4y ago
  Everybody at G-corporation personally benefits from the redundancy so why fix it
TimCTRL 4y ago
Not forgetting the "meet" tab in the gmail app, for android. And I tend to use this most since meeting reminders come through mail
avsteele 4y ago
I don't even know what I'm 'supposed' to be using. Which app goes with my google workspace account for work stuff? If I create a "Meet" room from within GMail and give my family the link as a text, now all of a sudden when they kick it asks to open the "Meet (original)", what does that even mean. How is a normal person supposed to understand this? I'm not even upset, it's just so goofy that this is the work product from one of the largest companies with the best engineers.
- jsmith45 4y ago
  My understanding is as follows: "Meet (original)" app is soon to be dead. Full interoperable Meet protocol support is being added to the old Duo (now called Meet). The original app is merely being kept around while the new duo roles out, and until they are sure that all relevant features have been added to the new app. Once this is all accomplished they plan to add a nag message to the old Meet app to convince people to move to the Duo based Meet app. If your family gets prompted to use Meet (original), it probably means they have received the recent update to the old meet app, but have not yet gotten the update to the old Duo app. It sounds like Google is doing phased rollout of the updates.
trasz 4y ago
Plot twist: they’ll eventually sunset both at the same time.
throw7 4y ago
I don't care about video, but the article notes that hangouts is being shutdown soon. I'm interested to know what they are doing with fi and the sms gateway. Personally, I switched to rcs chat (which disabled hangouts), but I would like to get back an rcs web gateway interface. And no, "device pairing" in messages is not the same. If google actually pulls that off I'd be impressed, but I'm not holding my breathe.
- oefrha 4y ago
  Didn’t Hangouts stop receiving SMS for Fi like two years ago? I was very mad because I’m an iOS user, and once that stopped working there was no way to receive SMS in places with WiFi but not cellular. That’s a constant theme of Google rebranding/mergers: beside confusion, good functional features fall through the cracks.
  - throw7 4y ago
    The sms portion of hangouts was kept working just for Fi users (I assume this is still true to this day... sorry, I'm too lazy to switch and check), while it was switched off for everyone else. It is indeed the "Google Gold Standard" to "move on to my next promotion".
zulu-inuoe 4y ago
Hangouts has been warning me that it will 'soon be replaced' since 2018. I still use it to this day as one of my favourite messaging apps..
- brokenmachine 4y ago
  The Hangouts app won't work for me at all now, it just redirects to a screen saying that I must use Chat with a link to Google Play. Of course, Google Chat is so much worse than Hangouts in every way. You can't send multiple images at once, you can't directly share to a particular contact without first going into Chat app, and you can't swipe from image to image. Literally nothing has been fixed in the year since I was forced to change over, and so many bad reviews on Play mention the same problems over and over and over again, with only canned worthless responses from the poor person assigned to reply. Google management are really brain dead.
fabian2k 4y ago
I use Google Meet at work with my work Google Account. It works reasonably well, and certainly better than some other solutions for my use case. I would prefer if they don't break this, but honestly I have no idea how this will affect me. It seems almost impossible to keep up with how Google chat apps work.
benmorris 4y ago
What an epic debacle. Since hangouts has been phased out there isn't even a way to one click video call someone anymore in google chat, it is a hacky meet link. There was a time when I used hangouts for everything, video, SMS, and chat. I could even do all of that from my desktop PC. Google needs to get it together and offer a comparable solution to iMessage.
- kfarr 4y ago
  They lost my whole extended family as customers, this nonsense confused the heck out of my parents and we gave up trying to figure it out. I just told my folks to get iPhones and we use facetime
  - danielbln 4y ago
    You could have just used Signal or something instead of moving everyone to a different hardware platform, just sayin.
    - uhxzdhnnj 4y ago
      Signal doesn't support Android tablets, WhatsApp doesn't allow multiple devices (don't mention web, didn't work on tablets either). Hangouts used to just work, especially for non-technical users, now it's a complete mess, as on some old devices it can't even be uninstalled.
    - kfarr 4y ago
      It's a valid point, but at the end of the day my family wanted something that "just works" and they look to me for guidance on hardware so when they were ready, iOS it is. I think Google misunderstood the critical importance of owning a high quality user experience for video calls on Android devices.
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
I sometimes wonder how so many intelligent people in one company can't figure out their chat app strategy. At one moment there were 7 competing messenger apps from Google. For the last few years I don't even bother opening any of them. (And I'm thankful that it is possible to turn off "Chat" tab shoehorned into their Gmail app - even though you have to do it separately for every account!)
- n8cpdx 4y ago
  The Google-style interview (not just Google but big tech in general) selects for a very specific kind of tactical narrow-focus intelligence. Thinking big picture or strategically doesn’t come up at all in an algorithms interview. And thinking big picture really is a detriment to succeeding in a leetcode grind unless the only picture you’re looking at is total comp. The type of person who works at Google probably isn’t well equipped to make good products, even if they’re great at writing software.
  - throwaway821909 4y ago
    Surely devs have very limited influence over this? I can't imagine everyone else also does leetcode?
    - phist_mcgee 4y ago
      Devs become managers, ever met a manager who seemed to not want to be there, but somehow was in charge? Same thing happens at google and perhaps has an ever bigger impact compared to at other companies based on the scale of the projects they work on.
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        I believe that eng managers are also not the ones making this call.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > I sometimes wonder how so many intelligent people in one company can't figure out their chat app strategy. Lack of social empathy in understanding their user base. Over-emphasis in engineering and treating it as if it was a religion causing omission of human-factor inherent in the Internet product and user ecosystems. Resulting in them not giving a zit about their users. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
riku_iki 4y ago
Curious if anyone has been fired because of this mess. Or promoted?..
spatulon 4y ago
I remember using something called Google Hangouts for video calls at my last job. What happened to that? I remember it being confusing because there was a seemingly unrelated Google Hangouts app for instant messaging.
- rrrhys 4y ago
  My last interaction with it they started showing dialogs telling me I was using the wrong chat tool now. So I clicked through, and the core functionality of "chat via IM and then spill out to video chat" was nowhere to be found* *I'm sure it was there somewehere, but I was trying to join a damn meeting not learn a new UI
- advisedwang 4y ago
  Google Hangouts got split apart[1] . For consumers, they created duo for video and Android Message (with RCS) for text (after briefly launching and deleting allo). For business, they created Hangouts Meet for video and Hangouts Chat for text, which rapidly got renamed to Meet and Chat. In 2020/2021 Google Chat was been opened up to consumers [2]. Now Meet and Duo are converging, the last nail in the coffin for the separate consumer/business app idea. [1] https://blog.google/products/messages/latest-messages-allo-duo-and-hangouts/ https://blog.google/products/messages/latest-messages-allo-d... [2] https://blog.google/products/workspace/latest-google-hangouts-and-upgrade-google-chat/ https://blog.google/products/workspace/latest-google-hangout...
typeofhuman 4y ago
Does anyone else find the app icons[0] to be absolutely hideous? Google reskinned all of their app icons but there's no consistency. Some colors overlap with transparency (see Google Meet, Calendar) but others don't (see Maps, Play Store). 0: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/20.jpg https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/20.jp...
- phailhaus 4y ago
  And they're completely indistinguishable from each other at a glance, which is like a cardinal sin of design.
  - chaos_a 4y ago
    Same thing happened with the windows 11 file explorer icons. I can't tell which icon from a glance is cut, copy and paste since they all look visually the same.
    - codalan 4y ago
      It's like the same toxic UI designers bounce between Google and MSFT and Apple and destroy any semblance of usable iconography.
  - deckard1 4y ago
    it's no surprise their video meet branding is going so swimmingly if you saw what they did to their other brands with the logo redesigns. They don't seem to understand the purpose of branding. You can't make individual apps part of a collective with icon themes and still retain strong brand identity among each individual app. It's like they tried to split the difference, and the result is a bunch of gibberish.
MattPalmer1086 4y ago
The endless cycle of Google products being replaced by something else to no useful effect. I just don't bother with any of them anymore except Gmail, and that's mostly inertia on my part.
- codalan 4y ago
  I've long moved on to Proton Mail for my hosted email service. In the past year or two, they've really made it into a (mostly) polished product.
  - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
    Is there a good shared calendar as well? EDIT: I realise that question was a bit abrupt, sorry. I've looked at Proton mail in the past, and it does look good, but I can't tell if the calendar is any good (or even out of beta).
    - codalan 4y ago
      Haven't got there yet. I should try it out this weekend. I have a mess of different calendars (google, outlook) that need to be consolidated. I think the only thing that kinda sucked was desktop integration. You wind up running a service on your computer to allow Thunderbird/Outlook to sync back to the Protonmail server.
    - codalan 4y ago
      Ugh, no app for iOS. They do have a beta for Android. https://proton.me/blog/calendar-free-web-android https://proton.me/blog/calendar-free-web-android Looks like they support shared calendars: https://proton.me/support/share-calendar https://proton.me/support/share-calendar
      - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
        Thanks! Not quite there yet still unfortunately :( Ah well, maybe I just need to give a few of them a try and see what they're like. I'm increasingly uncomfortable with having Google be such critical part of my life.
princevegeta89 4y ago
Why does Google always do such a terrible job at managing their products lol. Everything from names to overlapping features and meaningless rebrandings
Akinato 4y ago
I feel like they missed out by not saying “Meet the new Meet, same as the old Meet!”.
1270018080 4y ago
I wonder how/if Google will un-Ballmer Microsoft themselves.
slyall 4y ago
At work we use meet.google.com for our standard chats. I've read a few articles and I'm still not sure what is happening to that. Annoyingly meet.google.com kills my machine since Chrome on Linux has spotty hardware acceleration support and whenever I'm on a call it maxes out my CPU.
- Sunspark 4y ago
  Part of that is because of the codec it is using. h264 would be nice because almost everything has hardware encoding/decoding of it, but they decided to go with VP9 instead and it wouldn't surprise me if they planned AV1 to replace it already even though not many machines have hardware decoding for it yet.
t_mann 4y ago
Hangouts, Talk, Meet, Duo, new Meet,... probably missing a few there as well - you can clearly tell what gets people promoted at Google.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Allo
fleddr 4y ago
One of the great frustrations with Google is that they never ever face consequences for their gross mismanagement. They're Yahoo-level incompetent but without consequences as they simply continue to print money.
- adrr 4y ago
  Thats the problem. They can print money with search ads. If that ever dries up, google will be at risk of failing. Google cloud used to be strong second place but they are now a distant 3rd. Gsuite or whatever they are deciding to call it this month is losing market share to Office365. I don't get how there hasn't been a management shake up.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > One of the great frustrations with Google is that they never ever face consequences for their gross mismanagement They started having consequences. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec... Not to mention that the Eu's new GDPR and gatekeepers regulations are the results of Google and various major US tech corps. turning the Internet into a monopolized spying machine...
brokenodometer 4y ago
Three if you count Google Meat. googlemeat.com
- brokenmachine 4y ago
  That seems like a risky click.
varispeed 4y ago
I really like Google Meet. Never had trouble with it, doesn't seem to make my computer want to turn itself off, audio quality is excellent and so is the video. 30% of the time when there is a meeting on other platform, there is a point when someone says "shall we switch to Google?" and everyone replies with relief "yes, let's do this, see you in 5.". Seems like Google has amazing engineers, but the management is something else in a negative sense. One thing is good though - the inevitable fall of Google, hopefully will bring some breath of fresh air.
- brokenmachine 4y ago
  >One thing is good though - the inevitable fall of Google, hopefully will bring some breath of fresh air. I don't see great things on the horizon... all I see is thousands of slowly marching zombies begging for more ̶b̶r̶a̶i̶n̶s data.
civilized 4y ago
Was there a meeting where this decision was made? Was anyone like "remind me why it's necessary to call two different apps the same name"? Did they receive dead-eyed stares, a long pause, and a "so, moving on..."
throwaw28487227 4y ago
eximius 4y ago
Google, why are you so bad at this? Why can't you fire the people making these horrible choices that gets you ridiculed and pushes you further and further from thought leadership?
binarysneaker 4y ago
/me carries on using Signal, oblivious. Seriously, f*k off Google, I've been waiting years for you to consolidate your chat/IM/meeting apps, and Apple showed you how it's done. Yet, here we are in 2022.
crossroadsguy 4y ago
For Google's sake I decided to assume this is not sheer stupidly but rather some intricate psych A/B testing. It's like one of those Z grade films which are so bad that they become so good. You know, the "artistically" bad. I think Google is going for that.
robertwt7 4y ago
I really don't understand the politics inside. as the CEO (Sundar or Larry), don't they see this happening at all? it's now a joke, they should have stopped it and unify the team instead of fighting over whose product is more relevant as the same company lol maybe they just have too many resources
KingOfCoders 4y ago
YMMV As a coach I'm forced to use Google Meet, Teams and Zoom. My impression is Zoom has the best video quality and least stutter. Google has the worst video quality. Is this only me?
- danielbln 4y ago
  We use Meet for our internal video calls and Zoom often for clients, I can't really tell much of a difference either way.
  - KingOfCoders 4y ago
    Thanks!
- perryizgr8 4y ago
  You're right. Zooms video quality is the best. Zoom screen sharing is also crisp af. Meet screen sharing is like looking at a 480p CRT monitor.
throwawaymanbot 4y ago
greatgib 4y ago
What is funny, is that Google would throw you off the Google Play Store if you were trying to push app doing this: deceptively have users confused about the app they are looking for, or pushing 2 different apps with the same name.
skyzyx 4y ago
I’ve been watching Google for a long time. And with all of the smart people they have working there, they sure are stupid. Who the hell is steering the ship?

295 points by leephillips 4y ago

Another google product screw-up. 'Deprecations', rebrandings, weird, unintuitive mergers of products...

Seems like on mobile there will be one Google Meet app ? So not sure how there will be two meet apps ?? with that said, in terms of audio & video quality esp in poor connectivity conditions there is nothing that comes close to Duo - not whatsapp, not signal, not facetime

ceejayoz 4y ago
> Google has a help article detailing this extremely confusing situation, calling the two Meet apps "Google Meet (original): The updated Meet app" and "Google Meet: The updated Duo app." The "Google Meet (original)" app will someday be put out to pasture; it's just sticking around while Google rebuilds the meeting functionality on top of Google Duo. Did everyone follow that? Sounds like there's two in the store for now. On iOS, I can find both Google Meet and Google Duo in the App Store.
josteink 4y ago
> Seems like on mobile there will be one Google Meet app ? So not sure how there will be two meet apps ?? I just searched the iOS AppStore. There’s three apps: Google Meet, Google Chat and Google Duo. They just don’t get how this works, do they?
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  Google Chat is for messaging, with its own folly of Chat / Hangouts because Chat was the new Hangouts for business or something like that.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

> So Google Duo is being rebranded to Google Meet, and the existing Google Meet app is sticking around for a bit. That means there are now two apps called "Google Meet." Google has a help article detailing this extremely confusing situation, calling the two Meet apps "Google Meet (original): The updated Meet app" and "Google Meet: The updated Duo app." The "Google Meet (original)" app will someday be put out to pasture; it's just sticking around while Google rebuilds the meeting functionality on top of Google Duo. Did everyone follow that? I'm in stitches; dying of laughter over here. Folding together apps to reduce the number of chat apps if probably a good thing, but renaming them to an existing name while the old app is still around? Even Microsoft had the decency to tack on "for business" when they were butchering Skype's branding! On a more serious note, I'll be interested to see how this affects the business side of things; will Google Workspace keep Meet, and what Meet will it be? EDIT: Reading through the linked help article, they talk about Google Workspace under the section for the new "Meet" nee Duo and not under the section for "Google Meet (original)", so I guess they have or will transition it. Probably.

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nextos 4y ago
It's sad because Google Talk was good. Jabber/XMPP on a web, for the masses. It had good federation, as it followed the standard. And Google even contributed JINGLE, a XEP (standard extension) for videocalls. I was making videocalls from Google Talk using a Nokia 770 in 2007. It feels we've gone backward once Google became dominant and Nokia got taken over.
- acdha 4y ago
  There’s a certain dark humor in the way that Google Talk/Reader kind of marks the apex of their reputation - they sacrificed so much trying to beat Facebook at its own game, and all they got for that devil’s bargain was G+.
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago

fredley 4y ago

I love watching Google's attempts to unify/create/destroy messaging platforms, seeing them compete as if they are competitors on an episode of Takeshi's Castle.

trebbble 4y ago
> as if they are competitors on an episode of Takeshi's Castle. "It looks as if the two teams are merging, like two black holes: if both suck, surely they'll suck even more together." "Right you are, Ken!"
codethief 4y ago
After the article and this entire comment section, this mental image that you're drawing here caused me to fully break down. I mean I pinched a nerve in my back the other day (I feel it every time I breath), so now I'm more or less literally dying here laughing. Thank you! :)
codethief 4y ago
> seeing them compete as if they are competitors on an episode of Takeshi's Castle. Obligatory Video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=123&v=TZ-PeYaFniA https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=123&v=TZ-PeYaFniA

aeturnum 4y ago

The solution of solving your app branding problem by renaming the less used apps with the name of the most widely used app is something straight out of the Onion.

nneonneo 4y ago
But no, it’s even worse! They are renaming Duo to Meet, even though Duo has 10x more installs than (classic) Meet.
- cesarb 4y ago
  > even though Duo has 10x more installs than (classic) Meet. How many of these "10x more installs" are due to Duo coming preinstalled by default on Android, which AFAIK isn't the case for Meet? A quick look at two Android phones I have nearby showed both have Duo installed (and never opened), while none have Meet.
  - izacus 4y ago
    A lot, but being preinstalled is what makes Duo practical. It's effectively Androids' replacement for FaceTime, always there directly in the dialer. Last I checked it was quite popular in Asia.
- alephxyz 4y ago
  Isn't that because Duo comes installed on new Android phones but Meet doesn't? It might be that Meet has more daily users.
  - abraham 4y ago
    Meet is installed on all Android phones as part of the Gmail app. It just doesn't have an app icon.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      If that's true then there's no way in hell Duo has 10x more installs?

mupuff1234 4y ago

Eventually it's all gonna converge to a single app that does chat, video and calls. And it shall be called "hangouts".

uoaei 4y ago
Everything old is new again
ayberk 4y ago
This is Google sharpening its focus ;)
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Sadly with no xmpp support :/
dmitrygr 4y ago
An update on meet: we’ve decided to put more wood behind fewer arrows and sharpen our focus. (To any xooglers reading this, sorry for the dose of PTSD)
wetpaws 4y ago
Hangouts is too verbose. Why not just "Google Talk"
mywittyname 4y ago
Maybe they will allow you to type/speak the thing you want to do and will call it "search."
philistine 4y ago
One thing I loathe about Android is the messy need for every app has to be a brandTM. Compare with iOS: Messages, Mail, Calendar, Wallet, Home.
- Bilal_io 4y ago
  But these apps don't need to be branded due to being a monopoly. Google's approach is better (if they didn't butcher the naming every time and kill apps constantly) for the consumer as it indicates you have choices.

justahuman74 4y ago

Someone surely got a promo out of this

ASalazarMX 4y ago
I can somehow understand how "Meet" is a better and more recognizable brand than "Duo". At least they didn't release a "Meet for Business" to add to the confusion.

xnx 4y ago

They've come close to this situation in other areas as well. Google has a "Google Pay" app and a "GPay" app. https://9to5google.com/2022/03/11/the-difference-between-gpay-and-google-pay-which-one-should-you-use/ https://9to5google.com/2022/03/11/the-difference-between-gpa...

jjulius 4y ago
And, they replaced Google Wallet years back with Google Pay, but now Google Wallet is back, so that you can do the same thing you already do with Google Pay, but with a few extra types of cards that Google Pay can't store because, I dunno, "reasons"? lol >Google Wallet’s official rollout is the latest step in the long history of Google’s payment app variations. The company combined Google Wallet and Android Pay in 2018 to create Google Pay, a single app that included tap-to-pay, tickets, and loyalty programs under one umbrella that worked across Android and Google Chrome. In 2020, Google Pay had a big app refresh to pull in peer-to-peer payments, deals, and other services. >Now Google announced Wallet’s comeback at its Google I/O event in May, splitting things up again to create a dedicated home for payment cards, airplane tickets, government IDs, vaccination proof, and even car keys. >Users will be able to use the app to pay at vendors where Google Pay is accepted. https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/20/23270301/google-wallet-return-android-payment-cards-keys-id https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/20/23270301/google-wallet-re...
- jsmith45 4y ago
  Part of the problem was that in 2020 they pushed out a new Google Pay, which was designed not based on google accounts, but using phone number tied login, specifically because that approach was necessary to get any real adoption in India. But after succeeding with the new app in India, the people behind the new app got approval to push it out on everyone else. (Calling it a "refresh" is a complete joke. It was a completely different app in all respects that shared only the name it stole from the older Google Pay). This went fairly poorly. For example, people in the rest of the world wanted to be able to use their google account. This approach had problems like not being able to support a website version. The wallet website still existed and was used to manage payment cards that chrome might suggest, but was no longer connected to the "google pay" service. The people behind the new Google Pay all resigned or were pushed out. And google decided to back peddle, and move to something more like the old Google Pay. But they wisely decided not to use the Google Pay name again. (It does not help that there is also yet another unrelated Google Pay service used for In app or website based purchases). So they decided to revive the Google Wallet name.

somehnacct3757 4y ago

The blurb ar the bottom about the Workspace GM focusing on communication apps in response to the pandemic, explains why the Workspace Addon ecosystem has been quietly abandoned by Google.

Apocryphon 4y ago

This is getting out of hand!

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

atonse 4y ago

Watching Google continue to fumble and trip over themselves over the past decade with all their horrendous messaging “strategy” used to be amusing. Now it’s just cringy. What is going on over there? Why are they not able to make up their damn minds and come up with one app? Google reminds me of Ballmer’s Microsoft. Factions on top of factions and no leadership anywhere to be found.

colechristensen 4y ago
It's like they are their own little marketplace where the currency is promotions. New apps get created because a new app is a way to get ahead. Old apps and features get abandoned because the small set of people who created them started working on something else and nobody is left to maintain the thing. There's nobody with vision setting direction at Google, it's an internal game with lots of players that results in products, kind of.
- snapcaster 4y ago
  I've heard this before about Google, I've never worked there so can't say it's true but if we assume it is: why wouldn't every other tech company also be like this? what makes google uniquely vulnerable to failure modes like this?
  - aerique 4y ago
    Eh, have you followed Microsoft in the past? It seems to be par for the course for very big companies. Apple's been doing strange things as well. IBM in the past.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
    Because Google has unique policies and culture that generate these outcomes?
    - cecilpl2 4y ago
      This is a tautological answer. What are those policies and culture?

solardev 4y ago

Lol, can't tell if Google is parodying itself right now.

joshstrange 4y ago

At this point I want to just create a copy/paste that I plop down everytime this happens (and yes, silly decisions like this happen at google often enough that I know I've typed it multiple times). Here we go: It will never cease to amaze me how much Google has bungled chat of any variety (text, audio, video). They seem completely incompetent from the outside looking in. Now I know a lot of it is due to the "People get promoted for launching a product not supporting one" and the fact that Google likes to throw things at the wall and see what sticks but this is getting absurd. Between the myriad of chat clients and mediums that Google has targeted to things like Wallet vs Pay (or the other iterations of this) I don't understand how the execs haven't just said "enough is enough" and removed the perverse incentives that have lead to this clusterfuck. I know this is not a Google-only problem and we can talk about other companies who reward similar behavior leading to less than desirable outcomes for the people using these products but Google seems to be the king dunce of this game where everyone loses except the people promoted for launching a PoC then riding off into the sunset. Do the Google execs just not see this? Are they oblivious to the issue? Are they trying (and failing miserably) to rectify it? I don't have answers to these questions but I sure hope someone at Google does because aside from a few "safe" products (Drive, Docs, Gmail) I don't feel comfortable using anything they put out with their track record (both of killing products, hello Reader, or leaving them in <1.0 state indefinitely). I feel bad for Android users, Apple has it's many faults but they coalesced on iMessage/Facetime very early on and haven't deviated from that path. Sometimes they are slow or unwilling to make changes but everyone knows they can trust those 2 services and that they are here for the long haul. It seems every other week we hear about green vs blue bubbles or how iMessage causes lock in. While lock in isn't great I guess I prefer that over the unstable ground that every Google-based chat program is built on.

jfim 4y ago
It's not isolated to Google, for example there's the whole Microsoft Skype, Lync, Communicator, Skype for Business, Messenger, Yammer, and Teams stuff that went on for years. Google is just more visible on the customer side, with people going through Google talk, Buzz, Hangouts, Allo, Duo, Messages, Wave, Google+ Huddle, back to Hangouts, Hangouts in Gmail, and I'm not sure where they're at now.

40acres 4y ago

Can anyone with experience at Google actually explain what's going on here? Assuming that social apps roll up to the same VP or whatever -- shouldn't there have been a decision long ago to simply their app offerings? I can understand separate orgs wanting to establish their turf by proposing a new app but isn't a leader there to stop the madness.

tmpz22 4y ago
Everybody at G-corporation personally benefits from the redundancy so why fix it

TimCTRL 4y ago

Not forgetting the "meet" tab in the gmail app, for android. And I tend to use this most since meeting reminders come through mail

avsteele 4y ago

I don't even know what I'm 'supposed' to be using. Which app goes with my google workspace account for work stuff? If I create a "Meet" room from within GMail and give my family the link as a text, now all of a sudden when they kick it asks to open the "Meet (original)", what does that even mean. How is a normal person supposed to understand this? I'm not even upset, it's just so goofy that this is the work product from one of the largest companies with the best engineers.

jsmith45 4y ago
My understanding is as follows: "Meet (original)" app is soon to be dead. Full interoperable Meet protocol support is being added to the old Duo (now called Meet). The original app is merely being kept around while the new duo roles out, and until they are sure that all relevant features have been added to the new app. Once this is all accomplished they plan to add a nag message to the old Meet app to convince people to move to the Duo based Meet app. If your family gets prompted to use Meet (original), it probably means they have received the recent update to the old meet app, but have not yet gotten the update to the old Duo app. It sounds like Google is doing phased rollout of the updates.

trasz 4y ago

Plot twist: they’ll eventually sunset both at the same time.

throw7 4y ago

I don't care about video, but the article notes that hangouts is being shutdown soon. I'm interested to know what they are doing with fi and the sms gateway. Personally, I switched to rcs chat (which disabled hangouts), but I would like to get back an rcs web gateway interface. And no, "device pairing" in messages is not the same. If google actually pulls that off I'd be impressed, but I'm not holding my breathe.

oefrha 4y ago
Didn’t Hangouts stop receiving SMS for Fi like two years ago? I was very mad because I’m an iOS user, and once that stopped working there was no way to receive SMS in places with WiFi but not cellular. That’s a constant theme of Google rebranding/mergers: beside confusion, good functional features fall through the cracks.
- throw7 4y ago
  The sms portion of hangouts was kept working just for Fi users (I assume this is still true to this day... sorry, I'm too lazy to switch and check), while it was switched off for everyone else. It is indeed the "Google Gold Standard" to "move on to my next promotion".

zulu-inuoe 4y ago

Hangouts has been warning me that it will 'soon be replaced' since 2018. I still use it to this day as one of my favourite messaging apps..

brokenmachine 4y ago
The Hangouts app won't work for me at all now, it just redirects to a screen saying that I must use Chat with a link to Google Play. Of course, Google Chat is so much worse than Hangouts in every way. You can't send multiple images at once, you can't directly share to a particular contact without first going into Chat app, and you can't swipe from image to image. Literally nothing has been fixed in the year since I was forced to change over, and so many bad reviews on Play mention the same problems over and over and over again, with only canned worthless responses from the poor person assigned to reply. Google management are really brain dead.

fabian2k 4y ago

I use Google Meet at work with my work Google Account. It works reasonably well, and certainly better than some other solutions for my use case. I would prefer if they don't break this, but honestly I have no idea how this will affect me. It seems almost impossible to keep up with how Google chat apps work.

benmorris 4y ago

What an epic debacle. Since hangouts has been phased out there isn't even a way to one click video call someone anymore in google chat, it is a hacky meet link. There was a time when I used hangouts for everything, video, SMS, and chat. I could even do all of that from my desktop PC. Google needs to get it together and offer a comparable solution to iMessage.

kfarr 4y ago
They lost my whole extended family as customers, this nonsense confused the heck out of my parents and we gave up trying to figure it out. I just told my folks to get iPhones and we use facetime
- danielbln 4y ago
  You could have just used Signal or something instead of moving everyone to a different hardware platform, just sayin.
  - uhxzdhnnj 4y ago
    Signal doesn't support Android tablets, WhatsApp doesn't allow multiple devices (don't mention web, didn't work on tablets either). Hangouts used to just work, especially for non-technical users, now it's a complete mess, as on some old devices it can't even be uninstalled.
  - kfarr 4y ago
    It's a valid point, but at the end of the day my family wanted something that "just works" and they look to me for guidance on hardware so when they were ready, iOS it is. I think Google misunderstood the critical importance of owning a high quality user experience for video calls on Android devices.

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago

I sometimes wonder how so many intelligent people in one company can't figure out their chat app strategy. At one moment there were 7 competing messenger apps from Google. For the last few years I don't even bother opening any of them. (And I'm thankful that it is possible to turn off "Chat" tab shoehorned into their Gmail app - even though you have to do it separately for every account!)

n8cpdx 4y ago
The Google-style interview (not just Google but big tech in general) selects for a very specific kind of tactical narrow-focus intelligence. Thinking big picture or strategically doesn’t come up at all in an algorithms interview. And thinking big picture really is a detriment to succeeding in a leetcode grind unless the only picture you’re looking at is total comp. The type of person who works at Google probably isn’t well equipped to make good products, even if they’re great at writing software.
- throwaway821909 4y ago
  Surely devs have very limited influence over this? I can't imagine everyone else also does leetcode?
  - phist_mcgee 4y ago
    Devs become managers, ever met a manager who seemed to not want to be there, but somehow was in charge? Same thing happens at google and perhaps has an ever bigger impact compared to at other companies based on the scale of the projects they work on.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      I believe that eng managers are also not the ones making this call.
unity1001 4y ago
> I sometimes wonder how so many intelligent people in one company can't figure out their chat app strategy. Lack of social empathy in understanding their user base. Over-emphasis in engineering and treating it as if it was a religion causing omission of human-factor inherent in the Internet product and user ecosystems. Resulting in them not giving a zit about their users. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

riku_iki 4y ago

Curious if anyone has been fired because of this mess. Or promoted?..

spatulon 4y ago

I remember using something called Google Hangouts for video calls at my last job. What happened to that? I remember it being confusing because there was a seemingly unrelated Google Hangouts app for instant messaging.

rrrhys 4y ago
My last interaction with it they started showing dialogs telling me I was using the wrong chat tool now. So I clicked through, and the core functionality of "chat via IM and then spill out to video chat" was nowhere to be found* *I'm sure it was there somewehere, but I was trying to join a damn meeting not learn a new UI
advisedwang 4y ago
Google Hangouts got split apart[1] . For consumers, they created duo for video and Android Message (with RCS) for text (after briefly launching and deleting allo). For business, they created Hangouts Meet for video and Hangouts Chat for text, which rapidly got renamed to Meet and Chat. In 2020/2021 Google Chat was been opened up to consumers [2]. Now Meet and Duo are converging, the last nail in the coffin for the separate consumer/business app idea. [1] https://blog.google/products/messages/latest-messages-allo-duo-and-hangouts/ https://blog.google/products/messages/latest-messages-allo-d... [2] https://blog.google/products/workspace/latest-google-hangouts-and-upgrade-google-chat/ https://blog.google/products/workspace/latest-google-hangout...

typeofhuman 4y ago

Does anyone else find the app icons[0] to be absolutely hideous? Google reskinned all of their app icons but there's no consistency. Some colors overlap with transparency (see Google Meet, Calendar) but others don't (see Maps, Play Store). 0: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/20.jpg https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/20.jp...

phailhaus 4y ago
And they're completely indistinguishable from each other at a glance, which is like a cardinal sin of design.
- chaos_a 4y ago
  Same thing happened with the windows 11 file explorer icons. I can't tell which icon from a glance is cut, copy and paste since they all look visually the same.
  - codalan 4y ago
    It's like the same toxic UI designers bounce between Google and MSFT and Apple and destroy any semblance of usable iconography.
- deckard1 4y ago
  it's no surprise their video meet branding is going so swimmingly if you saw what they did to their other brands with the logo redesigns. They don't seem to understand the purpose of branding. You can't make individual apps part of a collective with icon themes and still retain strong brand identity among each individual app. It's like they tried to split the difference, and the result is a bunch of gibberish.

MattPalmer1086 4y ago

The endless cycle of Google products being replaced by something else to no useful effect. I just don't bother with any of them anymore except Gmail, and that's mostly inertia on my part.

codalan 4y ago
I've long moved on to Proton Mail for my hosted email service. In the past year or two, they've really made it into a (mostly) polished product.
- MattPalmer1086 4y ago
  Is there a good shared calendar as well? EDIT: I realise that question was a bit abrupt, sorry. I've looked at Proton mail in the past, and it does look good, but I can't tell if the calendar is any good (or even out of beta).
  - codalan 4y ago
    Haven't got there yet. I should try it out this weekend. I have a mess of different calendars (google, outlook) that need to be consolidated. I think the only thing that kinda sucked was desktop integration. You wind up running a service on your computer to allow Thunderbird/Outlook to sync back to the Protonmail server.
  - codalan 4y ago
    Ugh, no app for iOS. They do have a beta for Android. https://proton.me/blog/calendar-free-web-android https://proton.me/blog/calendar-free-web-android Looks like they support shared calendars: https://proton.me/support/share-calendar https://proton.me/support/share-calendar
    - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
      Thanks! Not quite there yet still unfortunately :( Ah well, maybe I just need to give a few of them a try and see what they're like. I'm increasingly uncomfortable with having Google be such critical part of my life.

princevegeta89 4y ago

Why does Google always do such a terrible job at managing their products lol. Everything from names to overlapping features and meaningless rebrandings

Akinato 4y ago

I feel like they missed out by not saying “Meet the new Meet, same as the old Meet!”.

1270018080 4y ago

I wonder how/if Google will un-Ballmer Microsoft themselves.

slyall 4y ago

At work we use meet.google.com for our standard chats. I've read a few articles and I'm still not sure what is happening to that. Annoyingly meet.google.com kills my machine since Chrome on Linux has spotty hardware acceleration support and whenever I'm on a call it maxes out my CPU.

Sunspark 4y ago
Part of that is because of the codec it is using. h264 would be nice because almost everything has hardware encoding/decoding of it, but they decided to go with VP9 instead and it wouldn't surprise me if they planned AV1 to replace it already even though not many machines have hardware decoding for it yet.

t_mann 4y ago

Hangouts, Talk, Meet, Duo, new Meet,... probably missing a few there as well - you can clearly tell what gets people promoted at Google.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
Allo

fleddr 4y ago

One of the great frustrations with Google is that they never ever face consequences for their gross mismanagement. They're Yahoo-level incompetent but without consequences as they simply continue to print money.

adrr 4y ago
Thats the problem. They can print money with search ads. If that ever dries up, google will be at risk of failing. Google cloud used to be strong second place but they are now a distant 3rd. Gsuite or whatever they are deciding to call it this month is losing market share to Office365. I don't get how there hasn't been a management shake up.
unity1001 4y ago
> One of the great frustrations with Google is that they never ever face consequences for their gross mismanagement They started having consequences. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec... Not to mention that the Eu's new GDPR and gatekeepers regulations are the results of Google and various major US tech corps. turning the Internet into a monopolized spying machine...

brokenodometer 4y ago

Three if you count Google Meat. googlemeat.com

brokenmachine 4y ago
That seems like a risky click.

varispeed 4y ago

I really like Google Meet. Never had trouble with it, doesn't seem to make my computer want to turn itself off, audio quality is excellent and so is the video. 30% of the time when there is a meeting on other platform, there is a point when someone says "shall we switch to Google?" and everyone replies with relief "yes, let's do this, see you in 5.". Seems like Google has amazing engineers, but the management is something else in a negative sense. One thing is good though - the inevitable fall of Google, hopefully will bring some breath of fresh air.

brokenmachine 4y ago
>One thing is good though - the inevitable fall of Google, hopefully will bring some breath of fresh air. I don't see great things on the horizon... all I see is thousands of slowly marching zombies begging for more ̶b̶r̶a̶i̶n̶s data.

civilized 4y ago

Was there a meeting where this decision was made? Was anyone like "remind me why it's necessary to call two different apps the same name"? Did they receive dead-eyed stares, a long pause, and a "so, moving on..."

throwaw28487227 4y ago

eximius 4y ago

Google, why are you so bad at this? Why can't you fire the people making these horrible choices that gets you ridiculed and pushes you further and further from thought leadership?

binarysneaker 4y ago

/me carries on using Signal, oblivious. Seriously, f*k off Google, I've been waiting years for you to consolidate your chat/IM/meeting apps, and Apple showed you how it's done. Yet, here we are in 2022.

crossroadsguy 4y ago

For Google's sake I decided to assume this is not sheer stupidly but rather some intricate psych A/B testing. It's like one of those Z grade films which are so bad that they become so good. You know, the "artistically" bad. I think Google is going for that.

robertwt7 4y ago

I really don't understand the politics inside. as the CEO (Sundar or Larry), don't they see this happening at all? it's now a joke, they should have stopped it and unify the team instead of fighting over whose product is more relevant as the same company lol maybe they just have too many resources

KingOfCoders 4y ago

YMMV As a coach I'm forced to use Google Meet, Teams and Zoom. My impression is Zoom has the best video quality and least stutter. Google has the worst video quality. Is this only me?

danielbln 4y ago
We use Meet for our internal video calls and Zoom often for clients, I can't really tell much of a difference either way.
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  Thanks!
perryizgr8 4y ago
You're right. Zooms video quality is the best. Zoom screen sharing is also crisp af. Meet screen sharing is like looking at a 480p CRT monitor.

throwawaymanbot 4y ago

greatgib 4y ago

What is funny, is that Google would throw you off the Google Play Store if you were trying to push app doing this: deceptively have users confused about the app they are looking for, or pushing 2 different apps with the same name.

skyzyx 4y ago

I’ve been watching Google for a long time. And with all of the smart people they have working there, they sure are stupid. Who the hell is steering the ship?