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I’m very puzzled by Google chat to be honest. It’s a massive missing piece in the Google workspace toolchest. Teams is the central place for companies on Micros
by czhu12 9mo ago
I’m very puzzled by Google chat to be honest. It’s a massive missing piece in the Google workspace toolchest. Teams is the central place for companies on Microsoft, and arguably the most sticky part of the MS cloud productivity stack. So it can’t be lost on Google how important it is to have something here.
Google slides, docs, sheets are fantastic products, but Google chat is so clunky and awkward that it seems hard to believe they really can recommend it as a slack / teams alternative. What’s keeping them from just
A: making it better?
B: buying one of the dozen other alternatives? All I really need is a log in with Google for our company domain.
- tormeh 9mo agoReally? Teams is the most sticky? Teams sucks. Excel and PowerPoint are the most sticky parts, and Teams just comes bundled with those.
- pedalpete 9mo agoI agree that Teams sucks, but speaking to people who are locked into the Microsoft environment, they love it.
- prmoustache 9mo agoI guess people love having a chat/videoconference tool available. As for loving Teams ni particular compared to other solutions, I think it is far from the truth.
- michaelt 9mo agoPerhaps he has a very narrow definition of "the MS cloud productivity stack" Windows? Office? Not cloud, in its roots. Active Directory? Entra? Azure? Not productivity. Github? Not MS. Copilot? Not sticky.
- ted_dunning 9mo agoYes in some ways. Teams being bundled means that Slack and other messaging apps have to justify against a sunk-cost solution. That makes teams very sticky.
- czhu12 9mo agoI mostly meant sticky as in the most touched surface for day to day usage. Maybe sticky is not the right word.
- m_km 9mo agoAnd Google Chat does not have a native Desktop app. I guess they're the only chat app that don't.
- surajrmal 9mo agoSince when does an electron app count as native? You can install the webapp and that seems to feel basically equivalent.
- PunchyHamster 9mo agoHistory of Google text/voice/video chat is frankly insane, they refuse to just have a product and develop it, instead every few years the new thing pops up and the old thing gets deprecated. They should've been dominating the space for near 2 decades now. Instead they had Google Talk (that even worked over XMPP!) then replaced it with google hangouts, and then Google Chat.
- happymellon 9mo agoAnd each iteration is basically worse. XMPP should be able to be a Slack replacement. Hangouts was a proprietary reimplementation, that had most of the features in an awkward way. Group chat in columns wasn't a great idea but was fine on mobile. Duo/Chat was weird, separation of communication for no great benefit, and wasn't really any better than Hangouts. More like Hangouts that they had given to an intern to fix up, but forgot to tell them that it still needed to work with Hangouts. Now we have Chat and Meet, Meet "replacing" Duo, while Duo is becoming Meet? All I know is that after Hangouts finally was retired and replaced with Chat, they hid the chat tab in gmail, and required you to unhide it, and then appeared to disable notifications so I never knew when the last couple of people using it messaged me. 1/10. Wouldn't recommend.
- PunchyHamster 9mo agoAnd don't forget Google Wave that did the whole "chat integrated with various multimedia elements" decade before the competition (and arguably, better, coz those could be interactive elements not previews of websites and embedded media)
- happymellon 9mo agoI never actually used Wave. I didn't understand it, and by the time I was going to try it was shutdown. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave Apparently it was generally available for 3 months. Probably why I missed it. I didn't try Buzz either.
- FeloniousHam 9mo ago