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

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

arstechnica.com

295 pointsleephillips274 comments

> 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.

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.

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+.

Reader really was the turning point for me personally.

Before that I was a strong advocate for Google, I used any of their products that made sense and I would jump in and try anything new.

Then reader was shut down and I had to start re-evaluating the services I used. Slowly that meant distancing myself from anything google.

Same. One of the big things I don't think their management appreciated was how Reader's users skewed towards people who influenced others — journalists, libraries, the family “tech expert”, etc. — and how forcing them out of something which worked into something which simply wasn't ready to launch ensured that, unlike almost every previous Google launch, the coverage was predominantly negative. They'd had flops before (e.g. Buzz) but since nobody was forced to stop using something they liked to use the flop those didn't damage the brand anywhere near as much.

Yes, Reader was Google's Twitter, in the way that maybe it doesn't make money but it can be used to put the right info in front of the right people.

Throwing away that capability is demented. We were lucky, really.

Yeah I do think that was seriously under calculated.

It seems like reader comes up on nearly every article about google screwing up something like this.

What I never understood though, why did they cancel it in the first place. I always figured that the crawler likely used RSS for discovery. I mean why wouldn't it? I constantly find that RSS has articles before I see them on the website.

So how much extra data were they really storing for supporting Reader? I mean they had to support the UI but it just seemed like an odd removal.

I’ve heard it brought up by C-level executives considering GCP. The business models are different but the idea that things will be cancelled has been well linked to the brand.

My understanding on Reader is that it was less the data than that it was older code and the internal dependencies were rotting.

Google+ and circles were a good idea and should have been given a team with a lot of free rein and left to grow organically.

Google+ died because it was forced on everyone that had a Google and a Youtube account by psychopathic managers to "grow the numbers". This included forcing a realname policy on non-G+ users that explicitly did not want their online persona connected to their identity. It became the least cool platform on the internet overnight.

There were also some really bad decisions: for example, G+ on iOS would send you a push notification every time some rando who had you in their Gmail contacts joined G+ or added you to a circle. There was no way to turn that off other than disabling notifications entirely or deleting the app for something like half a year. I chose the latter long before they implemented it.

Circles were potentially interesting but if memory serves the first implementation was clumsy and I found it limiting because it required you to know what your followers were interested in and, if memory serves, didn't have a way to de-dupe shares so you'd see the same blog post shared by 20 people as separate notifications. My impression of that time was mostly seeing things I wasn't interested in or had seen before.

Yeah, that was the weirdest part, period

Forced increased followers + notification of every single one: creepy experience

Yeah, it was like something out of a cautionary short story.

Cool, I know them.

Oh, yeah, I haven’t talked with her in a while.

Wait, who’s that guy?

Huh, she responded to one Craigslist free stuff listing 3 years ago. Who cares?

That’s the landlord we sublet from for 3 months a decade ago.

… repeat for days …

Make it stop!

The mistake they made was having it be closed invites for so long. Facebook butchered Facebook Chat, and my whole friend group was ready to jump ship. Except Google wouldn’t let us, and then Facebook had enough time to get Chat/Messages kind of good enough again, and by the time anyone could get on Google+ no one cared to.

"Google+ and circles were a good idea and should have been given a team with a lot of free rein and left to grow organically. "

I mean, it was given a team with unlimited free rein. That org's leader did not just want to grow organically.

They were also pretty toxic and arrogant.

> Google+ and circles were a good idea

Facebook already had friend lists with identical functionality when Google+ Circles were created.

Circles are a good idea in theory.

In practice, for Circles to actually be useful, they need to be scrupulously maintained.

If you send a message to a certain circle about a pool party, and it turns out that you forgot to add a friend to the circle they will be insulted.

Or if you send a message to a circle that included someone who the message was not intended for, once again, you’re in trouble.

Group chats tend to work much better because they are simpler and are only created when you have a specific need. They can last beyond that need if the people in it end up being a useful grouping for the long term, but this filtering happens organically.

Google Buzz (which was their social network built on open protocols) was excellent and grew organically for a while.

It picked up where FriendFeed left off when it was acquired by FB. But then was killed by the G+ project.

>Google+ died because it was forced on everyone that had a Google and a Youtube account

Today I have two Youtube accounts despite every effort to not end up with a real name G+ account. And while all of my main activity is on my non-real name account - i.e. the one I actually want, I'm forced to use the other to connect to rewards (Overwatch League tokens to my Battle.net account for watching Overwatch League), because I'm not allowed to do that on my "branded" account. An account I never wanted to exist.

I was an intern at Google right around the time where Google+ (long before it was known under that name) became a thing for Google engineers internally. I sat next to a team that was majorly impacted by that.

It's all subjective of course, but I could practically "feel" Google changing. Before I started my internship and still during it for the most time, Google was this incredible company that people, including me, were in awe about. All their products were so good. So technically refined, so methodical, you could really see that the people working on them were really smart, and really cared about it all.

And then it changed and became this "corporation", and nowadays it's sometimes seen as almost the opposite of what it was, working there being boring but stable. Part of that is probably just a normal consequence of the immense growth, but personally I can't shake the feeling that Google+ had a large part in it.

Thanks for that perspective – your subjective impression certainly matches my outside experience. That seemed like the point where the halo faded.

It didn't so much fade as that it got switched off. Suddenly Google was just another evil US corporation when before you might have had the impression that they meant what they said. To be fair to your comment: there were some earlier signs but they could all explained away in one way or another, but that time the mask fell and they never managed to put it back on again.

Now they get a lot of business because they are the least bad option. Which still makes Google useful but I'd love for some actual competition. But with the network effects at play any viable competition can be stifled.

I was a fulltimer there around the same time, and I agree. I ended up quitting fairly soon after the G+ real names fiasco blew up, and it felt like a lot of internal "social capital" got burned on that, which was never really recovered.

I don't think the whole place went to hell at that moment, or anything, and your description is maybe a little more dramatic than I'd go with, as to the role of G+... but it definitely seemed like one of the big turning points.

Sorry, I did not mean to imply a dramatic and sudden change either. I just perceived this as a turning point, like you say (and with only my limited first hand experience there, of course).

Google major revenue stream is and will always be search/ads. Everything else is marginal, irrelevant and that’s why I think they don’t care much.

I still can’t explain how Google got beaten at their own game (cloud / computing at scale) by an e-commerce site : Amazon.

That says it all.

Having many friends who work at Google, I think they have the wrong system of incentives in place. Rightfully, people optimize and prioritize based on their path to promotion rather than building products that people love.

It’s much easier to get a promotion if you build something new vs keep iterating on existing products making it better.

>I still can’t explain how Google got beaten at their own game (cloud / computing at scale) by an e-commerce site : Amazon.

But it wasn’t Google’s game at all: cloud computing is a low margin business (relatively speaking). Amazon knows how to run low margins businesses, and Google doesn’t.

Google was so unimpressed with cloud, that they got serious about it only around 2012, when it became obvious that other clouds will outgrow Google as a whole. I think it was Google’s Internet Explorer moment.

I don't understand how cloud computing is a low margin business.

I can rent a dedicated server at Heztner. 8 hyperthreads, 32 GB RAM, 4 TB HDD. €33.

Amazon EC2. t4g.2xlarge 8 cores, 32 GB RAM, $194. 2 TB EBS HDD $30. $224 total.

Also Amazon charges for traffic.

Surely Hetzner is not working at loss. Surely economies of scale allow AWS to have better deals.

I mean, AWS is literally 7x compared to Hetzner. How is it bad margin?

I'm curious, have you benchmarked both of these and seen if there's no real world difference? I've had major performance differences between clouds on what is supposedly similar hardware. If AWS is faster in nothing then why they're so expensive would be a very good question indeed.

My initial guess would be AWS is relying on its advantage that users who are currently using AWS heavily are unlikely to switch clouds if they suddenly have to go from VM's to dedicated servers, and thus they can profit off such capture. e.g. 7x cost is probably fine when you consider what the cost might be to employ people for a cloud migration.

A lot of it also comes down to reliability, security (not just at the platform level but also the tools for you to build on), and most importantly integration with other services which you’d have to build and maintain on your own.

You don’t buy AWS because it’s cheaper than a dedicated server but because you can get that Linux server using the same management services (API, authentication, monitoring & logging, etc.) that you use to get serverless functions & containers, object storage, managed ML services, normal and reporting databases, development tools, etc.

That’s not saying that either one is wrong, just different - it’s like asking why someone used a hotel for a conference when you had a great tent site on your vacation to the mountains.

The question is how much money Amazon spends on development of those services. What part of price is hardware expenses, what part of price is software expenses.

My gut feeling tells me, that it's not much.

There's definitely a healthy margin but don't underestimate how much time goes into making everything work smoothly. The major cloud providers do a lot of things like handling zero-downtime migration between failed physical hosts, monitoring for infrastructure issues, firmware testing/security/updates, etc. which is completely transparent to you until you realize that you haven't spent time in years on things like hardware or environmental failures (stuff like that SSD 40k hour bug which showed up here, recently, for example) or dealing with stuff like Spectre.

The big confound here is scale: AWS can amortize the cost of someone really digging into firmware security over millions of customers but a smaller provider can't. You might not notice that until you either need to get your environment certified or some kind of vulnerability / supply chain attack against a hardware vendor is revealed. That can mean that AWS is both making a hefty profit reselling those engineers' work to all of their customers but also that it's still cheaper to pay them than it is for you to do that work yourself.

If memory serves well that was also the time Wave was supposed to take our communication to the 21st century

Didn't Orkut actually have a good organic following in Brazil before they axed it for G+?

So much stupid.

They did, it has always surprised me that they threw away a market they were leading in.

Wave was never really pitched as a social network - although some people sort of talked about it like it was.

It was more an intergrated workplace thing - sort of a predecessor to Notion+Slack in a single app. But it was very flaky to use.

Oh sure, it wasn't a social network, but it was, like the GP said, the apex of what Google once was: innovation in the field with completely new, potentially useless, but ultimately eyes-opening tech

It was pretty innovative, but it also showed such incredible hubris.

The famous post (now gone but referenced from [1]) about how they spend who-knows-how-long reimplementing scroll bars in the browser when the app was so janky it barely worked was the kind of thing that doomed it.

The HN discussion at the time is interesting too[2]

[1] http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scroll...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943947

Web archive doesn't forget (some of those links):

https://web.archive.org/web/20091012020227/http://www.easier...

https://web.archive.org/web/20100308003557/https://www.compl...

Wave was two things.

- A public and open protocol that could have replaced email with structured messages if it got popular, and

- A series of self-love technical exercises like the scrollbars and the live-typing which nobody cared for and killed adoption (worked in Chrome only, very few people care to share half-composed emails with their correspondents).

A textbook example of losing sight of the goal and giving devs too much rope to hang themselves with.

Excuse me, there was Wave.

They've gone backward and the "spirit" of the old Google was literally killed when Sundar Pichai took over.

The only reason he's still CEO is that he's milked the Google brand for all its worth and has made everyone a shit ton of money.

Other than that, the direction he's been giving Google, as a brand, has been terrible.

To replace Pichai the two largest Google shareholders would have to give a shit about the direction of the company. But they've been absent for longer than Pichai has been CEO.

Yes. Normally people are too quick to attribute power and fault to individuals, or so everyone says, but here's a case where two individuals really seem to have something close to full power and ability to fix at least the more obvious and readily fixable problems—they simply choose not to—and yet people usually diffuse the blame among "Google" or "the incentives".

One of those individuals also solicited sexual favors from his subordinates in the Google offices during work hours [1].

I don't know if we should put them on a pedastal.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees...

> and yet people usually diffuse the blame among "Google" or "the incentives".

People are not wrong to do so. Those two are not causing the problems. They can carry some blame for inaction, sure, but not that much of the blame.

What has he milked, though? I thought Google's money just comes from preexisting businesses like search, ads, YT, etc. None of the new stuff introduced under Sundar went anywhere, but all boats rose over the years for tech, especially in 2020.

> They've gone backward and the "spirit" of the old Google was literally killed when Sundar Pichai took over.

What? That happened with Eric Schmidt. Coming from old-school Oracle, old corporate. He said "Brands is how you sort out this mess" and killed the variety in google search by prioritizing big brands. That's why you get search results from only the biggest corporate outlets in every other category. He succeeded in bumping shoe shopping searches and sales for Amazon etc, but killed the independent web.

According to Google, approximately nobody used the federation capabilities of Google Talk except inbound spammers. It was absolutely not "for the masses". The masses all stay entirely within the censored and pruned walled gardens, then and now.

It was all maintenance and antispam burden for no product benefit to users.

Hackers vastly overestimate the desire of users to use federated systems.

How is Google's share of the chat market doing these days?

This is how I feel when I get an SMS from an email address. There are 0 legitimate people who would message me that way.

I have an entire rant on XMPP in some other HN thread, but basically I agree, chat federation is for nerds. And if XMPP wanted its federation dream to come true, the core standard (not including extensions) needed to be more rigid and keep up with the times. Instead, every sever ended up supporting a very different feature set, usually lacking things you'd take for granted in other chat apps.

Approximately nobody used the federation capabilities because approximately nobody used Google Talk... LOL

In more seriousness, I know of quite a lot of people who chose to use Google Talk specifically because they could use it with their client of choice. (It also had a very wide reach for a while, thanks to its Gmail integration edit: and federation)

I honestly don't know anyone else who used Google Talk (other than whenever they checked their Gmail they'd also see any messages in it).

In other words, Google killed off the two reasons why people used it (edit: reach and choice of client). Since then they've "replaced" pieces of it with multiple different apps (Hangouts, Chat, Allo, Duo, Meet), some of which they're finally deciding to merge back together, and in the process all they've ever done (and all anyone expects them to do with this merger) is remove features. Usually exactly those features which were the only differentiation those services had from the competitors. Which means there's no difference from a competitor with a wider reach (Zoom, 100 different IM apps, iMessage/FaceTime, etc.). Which means it's doomed to be terminated (and probably reincarnated) by Google again in a few years.

(Maybe there was even a third reason to use Talk: it was the IM with Google accounts. I don't think there's been One IM To Rule Them All from Google at any point since then.)

Federation doesn't mean you can use any client. It means you can talk to clients on other (in this case non-Google) servers, which is a step further.

... oops :)

The two reasons were supposed to be reach and client choice. I got a bit side-tracked thinking about whether I should clarify that I was able to reach most of my contacts on it because of the "Gmail integration and federation".

Yeah, the client choice was very nice. I used it too, with iChat on my Mac.

I was a happy Google Talk user who had written a useful App Engine chatbot. It was really easy because App Engine had built-in XMPP support and each one had its own built-in address, so handling chat messages was even simpler than handling HTTP requests.

But then Google stopped supporting XMPP from other domains (including their own domains) in their chat apps, which meant that I could only use my Google App Engine chat bot from non-Google chat programs, and that was a ridiculous situation.

> It feels we've gone backward once Google became dominant and Nokia got taken over

It feels Capitalist.

And it was simple and everyone had it in their Gmail. I used to use it with friends all the time! Then Hangouts and every rebranded disaster took its place. Since then we all migrated to Facetime, Zoom, Discord, etc. There was too much friction to follow Google's video chat decisions. This current headline just makes it easier for me to decide to never try their new products.

This one is particularly insane. Google appears to want the branding from one app (old Meet) but the install base of the new app (Duo) and the best they've come up with is to call them both "Meet"? Is branding so critical that Duo can't be used? Or that it cannot at least do so until all of "old Meet's" functionality has been brought over?

This should be in the fucking interviews. It is such a predictable scenario. When you hire some PM or brand manager who will be responsible for things like this ask them precisely how they will navigate this situation.

> When you hire some PM or brand manager who will be responsible for things like this ask them precisely how they will navigate this situation.

This is good advice for most companies, but for Google itself who could be trusted to evaluate these answers? From what I can see, their current product management is inept.

The problem is brand management doesn't come up on leetcode, so they can't test for it in interviews

This doesn't even make sense. Why would a brand manager role interview have leetcode questions?

That being said, who the heck greenlit this change? This is parody level mismanagement.

The subtext is that Google's excessive emphasis on engineering over pretty much any other discpline is what led them into this mess. The parent comment was a joke

> Why would a brand manager role interview have leetcode questions?

I took the original poster to mean that there should be leet-marketing questions for brand manager positions, like there are leetcode questions for developer positions.

> Why would a brand manager role interview have leetcode questions?

(i think OP was making a joke)

It's not just that they greenlit this change, it's that it's far from the first time they've pulled something like this. It is utterly baffling to me that there isn't someone in senior management who can say "What? No, that's utterly stupid, you can't do that".

lol, i like how people cannot understand sarcasm...

>Is branding so critical that Duo can't be used?

Actually, if they keep both apps for a while, Duo is the better name.

Duo makes way more sense for a casual video call app you'd use with your grandma or girlfriend. I'm not gonna Meet™ with my grandma, she's not my coworker. Hell, you can't even tell it's a proper noun when spoken out loud.

"Skype me" - clear

"FaceTime me" - clear

"Duo me" - clear

"Meet me" - meet you where?

I Zoom with my Grandma. What's wrong with that?

It is easy:

"Google Meet me" - clear

I googled it, now what.

> "Duo me" - clear

There are perhaps homonymous reasons why this might appeal to the sophomoric sort.

Eh, don't disregard the amount of people who don't use English as their main language here, I'm not even sure I could construct such a weird scenario in German, for example - but could be my imagination, maybe a good chunk of people would still say "call me... via X"

One side has to switch.

Meet's fewer users have to do work to switch.

Duo's more users (and massive pre-install base) don't.

If you ignore everything, like most users do, then one day your app will either (Meet) tell you to to install the other app, or (Duo) change its name and logo.

Pretty simple.

The worst part is that the install base of Duo is, in my experience, fake.

Between the push for "identify yourself by your phone number! yeah, that's right, just pretend it's an unchanging identifier even though that's not even slightly realistic!" (which, IIRC, was mandatory to use it in the beginning, although apparently now you can use a Google Account intead). And the fact that they push people to use it by adding a "video call" option (which has actually never worked for me, maybe because the other party didn't have it installed yet? who knows) on the Android call screen. And the fact that they pre-install it on the phones of people who will never use it so that they can say it's installed on soooo many phones.

The only reason (I see) for them to combine Duo and Meet is because they want to be able to claim to have a decent market share (even though they have virtually no market share with either one, outside of perhaps Meet with Google Apps ^W^W G Suite ^W^W Google Workspace for Education).

> Google appears to want the branding from one app (old Meet) but the install base of the new app (Duo) and the best they've come up with is to call them both "Meet"?

At least they didn't combine the two words into "Meo", which appears to be Spanish for "I piss".

"Duet" could have been interesting though.

> Is branding so critical that Duo can't be used?

I'd be willing to bet someone in Google finally got tired of the jokes. "Google is so confused, have you seen how many IMs they have?" is literally a meme, so one day Big Exec probably blew his top and went "Right, we need to fix this for good" -- obviously not by changing the internal processes that produced the mess in the first place, but by tackling the meme. That's typical salespeople's reasoning. So the result was... a mess of a transition, and probably even more memes: "Google is so confused, have you seen how many IMs they have? They're so many, they ran out of names and started reusing them".

It's definitely hilarious that they literally have made so many different chat apps that they ran out of names they like! On the other hand, it's a bit confusing that upon realizing this, they've decided not only to just prune the number of chat apps but somehow end up duplicating names while doing this anyhow.

The Microsoft-acation of Google continues.

You mention butchering the Skype branding, but I also uninstalled one of the Teams apps so I would stop opening the wrong by accident.

The one I still have is called "Microsoft Teams (work or school)," I forget what the other was. "Microsoft Teams (friends and family)" or something.

Okay, in my defense I escaped that ecosystem just as the thing I knew as Teams was replacing SfB, and I was unaware that they'd pulled that... fascinating little twist.

I was wrong, the other one doesn't specify anything at all. So you have "Microsoft Teams" or "Microsoft Teams (work or school)".

And then the icons are barely different too.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/image/serverpage/imag...

What a stupid branding mess.

There's also the two OneNotes. I got quite confused the other day when the OneNote on my personal machine did not look like the one on my work machine.

Turns out there's OneNote for Windows 10 and OneNote (which also runs on Windows 10...)

OneNote for Windows 10 is also for Windows 11, but why plan ahead with version naming? (see also: Xbox)

This is very typical for Google. I still have no idea if I'm using Google Pay, GPay, Android Pay, Android Wallet, or Google Wallet. Maybe some of those old names didn't exist or even still exist? And good luck finding all those reward barcode cards that you added over the years.

I'm sure someone got a bonus for saving the company money by improving their focus, though.

I've told the "two different apps named Google Wallet" story for years to illustrate G's internal dysfunction, but didn't know there were so many brands/apps in addition to the two Wallets. Incredible.

Don't forget Google Pay Send and the Tez mobile payments app in India.

Google released this totally not confusing graphic to help you understand

https://i.imgur.com/liaNvzz.jpg

If you're in Singapore or US, Wallet & GPay. Everywhere else Google Pay (not to be confused with GPay) points to Wallet. And in India, you will continue to "enjoy" the current Google Pay app.

See? So simple!

I'm in the UK, so it doesn't affect me, but is there a reason the USA and Singapore are different?

I'd be very curious to hear the true story as well.

As an outsider, it looks like a classic process followed by many tech companies. GPay was probably the first attempt and the assignment was to build anything that works and just make it work in the US - we'll expand to other markets later. And then, because it's payments, they immediately learned that every assumption they made in the model fails to work in any other jurisdiction.

No idea why Singapore - maybe that was the first attempt at expansion where they learned supporting other regions wasn't going to scale.

From there, maybe they built Google Pay based on better assumptions that apply globally. But, of course, nobody bothered to tell the GPay team who kept cranking out new features in the meantime. Lo and behold, Google Pay could never reach feature parity with GPay so they perpetually have to support GPay in the US, while deploying Google Pay to the rest of the world.

But now we have to manage two apps. We'd better just build a brand new app to replace both. Enter: Wallet. It supports every region with all the critical features.

Oh, except Wallet's model can't ever support those 20-year old legacy APIs that are still used by tons of products nobody owns. So actually people who use GPay now get both GPay and Wallet.

That's my guess, at least...

There's some backstory in here:

>"Caesar [Sengupta] leaving was the capstone on a lot of frustration felt by employees. The product wasn't growing at the rate we wanted it to." Sengupta departed Google one month after killing the old Google Pay and making his new app mandatory for all users in the US.

> The new Google Pay app launched in November 2020 in the US, and for about four months, Google was running two "Google Pay" apps: the old Google Pay (which had been around since 2011, first as Google Wallet, then Android Pay, then Google Pay) and this new Google Pay, which was a ground-up rewrite the company started for the Indian market. April 2021 capped off the final death of the old Google Pay service, which had been winding down since January. The two services were both called "Google Pay," but other than that, they weren't related in terms of features, contacts, or accounts.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/google-pay-team-repo...

Further reading:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/google-pays-disastro...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/google-loses-two-exe...

Just the history I guess.

> If you're in the US or Singapore, Google Wallet is now the primary Android payment service and wallet to store your hotel keys, driver's license, boarding passes and more, as well as make contactless payments. Google Pay will stick around, but only as a service to send payments to friends and family.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/google-pay-vs-google-wallet...

Might be a regulatory reason, but also totally willing to believe it's just poor planning on Google's part.

I know which ones I'm using, none of them.

They've recently shoehorned "Chat" tab into Gmail, of all places! So no, folding together apps is not always a good thing.

Google's chat products have been integrated with gmail since the start, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk

No, it was different. It was never in the same app. Merging chat history into it was the best thing about it, and you could use it with any xmpp client (disclosure: I was developing one such client).

But it never wasted valuable screen estate in a mail app to make you know that you can also chat. There was a separate app for that.

> It was never in the same app.

Yes it was. Look at the last screenshot in this article from 2008:

https://techcrunch.com/2008/06/06/the-evolution-of-pre-launc...

Maybe I’m looking at the wrong screenshot, but they’re all web desktops. I assumed the previous poster was talking about mobile apps, where screen real estate is really at a premium.

The previous poster was probably talking about web Gmail where they recently added sidebar with Chat and Meet. The Gmail app, iOS and Android, doesn't have that. They did put "Chat" pane in the iPad Gmail app but seem to have removed it.

> web Gmail where they recently added sidebar with Chat and Meet

Chat has always been there though. I've used it every day for almost a decade on my work gmail account (I don't open the separate page or use a standalone client).

The web app used to have a Hangouts sidebar which was replaced by a Hangouts Chat sidebar which was eventually renamed to just Chat.

I was talking about mobile app. It has a tab bar at the bottom with now chat section, the option to remove it is buried rather deep in the settings.

Web version of Gmail did have a Gtalk widget, but it could be collapsed / hidden with a couple of easy clicks

That's not recent - I was using that in 2010...

There wasn't chat in Gmail Android app until recently. It appeared sometime during the pandemic.

Worse, I prefer to chat in a separate app on the phone, so I can more easily multitask between chat and email, but the separate Chat app has less functionality than Chat in the Gmail app.

Old Meet has a history of this. It's first iteration was called Hangouts - no relation or connection to the more well known Google Hangouts, the consumer messaging app. One was hosted at hangouts.google.com and the other at hangouts.google.com/_/ - hence why g.co/hangouts redirects to old Meet and not Google Chat which was the anointed consumer successor

This hurts my brain.

And this is after Hangouts was used as a replacement for Google Voice for years, and then they kicked out Google Voice from Hangouts forcing people to use the Google Voice app again, for Google Voice

The long-term plan makes sense, but it's absurd that they'll have 2 different apps with the same name at the same time. At first I thought this was an Onion article.

I hope this is just some misunderstanding. If not, this will be a great example of how to confuse everyone.

> Even Microsoft had the decency to tack on "for business" when they were butchering Skype's branding!

    1 Xbox (2001)
    2 Xbox 360 (2005)
        2.1 Xbox 360 S (2010)
        2.2 Xbox 360 E (2013)
    3 Xbox One (2013)
        3.1 Xbox One S (2016)
        3.2 Xbox One X (2017)
    4 Xbox Series X | S (2020)

On a tangent, MS really screwed up Skype when they bought it (by removing p2p supernodes).

Those names are far from good, but they're still different names for each generation. And you can skip the letter at the end for this comparison.

"Series" as a generation identifier (like 4 or 5 on PlayStation) is weird for me (but not English native). Is it natural for natives?

No.

Nope. It sounds like it refers to the "franchise" "lineage" of xboxes.

It's really like that old Abbott and Costello skit "Who's on first" (especially the "Xbox One" and the "X" suffix. Which Xbox? the X one.)

Nope, it's a very strange and awkward sounding name.

Old pre MS Skype was pretty amazing for its day.

In mid 2000s Skype was dominant. Pretty much all chat/talk flowed through Skype with corresponding interest in monitoring from pretty much any government.

There is a plausible conspiracy theory that part of why Microsoft bought Skype was to have everything centralized on US servers. Sort of devil's bargain.

I remember reading Microsoft's defense of centralization here on HN some years ago and it was extremely unconvincing.

> There is a plausible conspiracy theory that part of why Microsoft bought Skype was to have everything centralized on US servers. Sort of devil's bargain.

I heard back in those days that they got a grant from the government for purchasing Skype... that sure doesn't help deny conspiracy theories.

I don't know why they bother. I have never once used Google Meet, or Google Duo, or Google Hangouts. I have never heard of anyone else using them. I have never been asked to contact someone or join a meeting using one of these apps.

Google: just change the name, change the code, do whatever. Nobody will notice.

Your bubble is not representative of reality. Google Meet may not be as popular as Zoom but it’s a strong second. It’s very popular in the business space especially, so it’s mostly used for work. I also sometimes use it with friends when I want a reliable, easy video call with screen share.

Agree.

Google Meet (the current one) is a pretty decent app. Not as good as Zoom but much better than Teams or any other alternative.

And the number of meeting requests mirrors that. First Zoom, then Meet, then Teams, and then random other things which basically barely work long enough for us to switch to Zoom.

It's so unintuitive to use for personal calls that I don't think I could ever convince one of my friends or relatives to use it. Having to create a meeting, send the link to someone, then hope they read it while I join the meeting and wait for them is so much more akward than just pressing a video call button like every other app does it.

Google Meet (original) has an excellent accessibility feature, it supports real-time computer generated captions. Duo never had that, or if it does, only recently. The only other big app that could do that back then was MS Teams which was not at all as accessible or pleasant to use as Meet.

Hangouts is disappearing, but Hangouts Dialer is still around? And then there's Hangouts Meet, and now two Google Meet, Google Chat, ...

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.

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.

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?

Because Google has unique policies and culture that generate these outcomes?

This is a tautological answer. What are those policies and culture?

Google is really big, makes a lot of money on one thing, does a bunch of extra stuff on the side, and doesn't have strong central control. Those things are pretty unique. A few other large companies could do things like this, but don't.

Ultimately Google is an ad company. Owning Android is a distracting mistake.

owning Android meant they didn't get locked out of mobile. it would be a lot easier for Microsoft, RIM, or Apple especially to set terms if Google couldn't say it would appear on 80% of the world's smartphones regardless.

Owning Anfroid is many things, but saying it's a mistake is borderline laughable.

It’s not unique to them but I think it’s common to companies with a strong cash cow but not a strong culture of accountability - Microsoft felt similar from around the turn of the century until a few years ago because Windows and Office just printed money. If they don’t have some way other than profits to provide accountability, people who are good at playing politics can keep getting promoted because to a first approximation nothing they do will lower revenue.

I think you're onto something about strong cash cow being necessary but not sure it's sufficient by itself. Culture of accountability is interesting. It sounds like you have some experience, what does culture of accountability look like vs. not having one?

I think the cash cow creates the situation where this is possible: if all your company does is one thing, everyone _knows_ that they have to keep selling whatever that is to stay employed. Where I've seen things run off the rails is when managers’ personal compensation and career trajectory aren't linked to something measurable like that.

When I worked for a modest (~30 person) web development company in the late 90s we had much smaller version of this problem where we had regular customers who would pay us for design and new features on their sites but only one of the 4 founding partners was directly generating revenue (one of the best designers I've ever worked with, who was also good at managing a group). That wasn't Google-level cash flow but it meant there was no question of making payroll, etc. because we had major companies who liked us and were doing regular site design updates, marketing campaigns, etc. all of the time. Unfortunately, we also had two partners who loved haring off after whatever cool idea caught their fancy and weren't as good at negotiating deals as they thought (e.g. one guy would ask us for estimates and then tell us he signed the contract at 60% of what we quoted, with our actual cost inevitably being around the original estimate). They could get away with that for years because the company was cash-flow positive and money was pouring into the field from all of the companies moving their business online and/or burning VC funding (I still remember one guy bragging that they had several million dollars of Sun hardware & an Oracle license before they had started an application). Unfortunately, that let them tell themselves they were better at business than they actually were and that meant that they were really unprepared when the market got harder: there were many stories but the one which epitomizes it for me was one of them _turning down_ a massive monthly retainer from the local NFL team to create new designs, content, and games on their website because the team didn't want to put _our_ logo on _their_ homepage — at a time where layoffs were imminent in the next month or two! What could have avoided that would have been judging performance deal by deal rather than company-wide — if you're losing money on 80% of your contracts, the fact that you have a few which are very profitable doesn't mean you should rest easy.

I've seen similar situations in .edu and .gov where the problems were different but came back to the underlying problem that how you got favorable reviews and promotions was not coupled to the mission, and as a support service there wasn't a direct negative feedback signal from that.

Thanks for sharing, that was insightful

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.

IDK if they are unique, but Google is really big and feels like it lacks strong leadership and vision. Google has also never struggled or had a catalyzing moment that brings clarity to vision.

Apple makes tons of money, but they still have many people in leadership positions who were around when they almost went out of business.

FB has always been a bit paranoid, probably b/c they knocked off MySpace. They are having that catalyzing moment right now.

MS has had a few of those moments over the years.

As an outsider, it seems like Google makes it easier to start something new. And, it's also heavily encouraged through promotions, "20% time" that doesn't quite exist anymore, etc. There doesn't seem to be a process anywhere that stops people from making another messenger. Or stops a lot of other things.

Working at other big internet companies, it was a lot harder to get a new thing going, and promising ideas would get abandoned after a while unless there was a way to work it into an existing product.

This is what you get when there's an infinite cash cow (i.e. ads) that just keeps pumping money into a system. Like a particle simulation for which you set friction to zero, and keep injecting energy into it - there won't be a steady state, just all sorts of chaotic self-oscillations.

It's frustrating experiencing all these changes. Naming confusions aside , many features I was using in the older apps kept getting dropped as the new hotness would be released. I've all but stopped using their messaging platform due to all these changes.

In iOS there's still a "Google Duo" and a "Google Meet". If you install "Google Meet" it installs as "Meet (original)".

They need a product manager manager.

I think that's called a Program Manager.

This is why I really think of advertising as tech’s version of the resource curse, where countries with rich natural resources are prone to foundering because even incompetent rulers can stay rich as long as the oil keeps flowing. Both Google and Facebook hit this point where they have an enormous influx of cash to support all of these ventures where people can make all kinds of bad decisions without impacting the bottom line for years, if ever.

As a [very small] shareholder I really think they’d be healthier if Alphabet siloed the finances more so e.g. the messages leadership got paid only if that project worked out. Right now they can just fiddle around and still be in the top couple percent income range without any feedback that they were making terrible calls.

Wasn't this largely the point of creating Alphabet? Trying to separate the money making segments from everything else?

I won't claim to be an expert on that but I think that was kind of the goal in the sense of having companies like Nest or Waymo be more independent, but given how little difference it's seemed to make I've generally assumed it was either some kind of accounting dodge or simply that they were too timid to break up Google itself. One of the reasons for that is no doubt that shareholders would ask why they're funding so many marginal ventures if those were broken out separately.

It was to keep Sundar Pichai and elevate him to the level of CEO of something.

There's definitely a resource curse with the advertising dollars but how would chat/messaging be silo'd? Users don't pay for it (individually) and it doesn't show ads (afaik?). It doesn't make money. The only reasons to build it are so Google employees aren't using other companies meeting/chat/messaging apps, so users aren't lured into competitors ecosystems and... what else? Pride? Ego?

That's basically the problem, isn't it? If it's effectively make-work, you get the kind of decisions we've seen. In the unlikely event that their hiring process failed badly enough to put me in a C-level position, I would have approached it as a revenue-generating service: invest some initial startup funds but have a plan that you're going to build a paid service around it, maybe with an ad-supported free tier but in either case you need a revenue model where the head person's performance is measured on people actively using the service.

There's also the "commoditizing your compliment argument" for building a messaging platform but does that strategy make sense if all your competitors are doing the same?

Yeah, I don't want to claim that I have the secret for how to monetize these things well. My thought was just that they didn't consider the costs either to their brand of letting users down or by providing a path where entire groups of people could influence other parts of the company with no experience bringing in business.

Presumably any new product they are building is to increase revenue somewhere, even if it's in another product. They might expect that getting X usage in a chat app will translate to Y additional ads income; due to better tracking data, more chances to show ads, etc. In that case some of the ads revenue could be attributed to the new chat app, based on usage. Some assumptions would need to be made, but the allocations could be tracked, measured, and analyzed pretty well.

Of course an approach like this would require some amount of direction and purpose, which is not at all a part of Google's core competencies.

Chat and email activity are great ways to distinguish real humans from clickbots. At least in theory you can mine that data for ad preferences, too.

The way it makes money is through Google Workspace.

You have to pay for a higher priced plan (maybe Business Plus) in order to get Meet features like recording and other extended host controls.

> resource curse, where countries with rich natural resources are prone to foundering

Steve Jobs calls this out wonderfully here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

> [...] the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people. And they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. [...] the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to the monopolistic position gets rotted out. By people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers.

I'm pretty sure google jumped the shark 5years ago but somehow the pandemic caused googles stock to :rocket-ship-emoji:

Google's latest earnings were less bad than most of it's competitors - Facebook and Snap choked hard, while google just slowed a bit (and less than was expected), so it's not just the stock that did well.

Honestly it makes way more sense now than it used to.

They have the enterprise GSuite brands that are actually kind of successful there - Google Chat and Google Meet - and they try to merge everything under those umber. And they gave up on consumer-specific branding.

I … think. At least.

> Ballmer’s Microsoft

"Google Meet Premium v3.1 Personal Edition - 2022 August Update™"?

Huh... I guess it actually could be worse.

Until the money dries up, being an incompetent organization is perfectly fine. They are driven by Ads, not good products, and their Ads are all over the place; your email, your phone, your apps, your maps, your search engine, your videos, on websites peppered all over the internet. It's like panning for gold with a billion pans.

Search is still their bread and butter, so they couldn't give a crap if a chat app is embarrassing. They won't lose a cent from it. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-money-a...

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-gpa...

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-re...

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.

They were able to move to a somewhat-sane solution everywhere else, but in the few markets where the new GPay launched, Wallet is... sort of integrated into GPay, or something?

GPay was/is also one of those nice services where they never made it work for Workspace/G Suite accounts.

Google should pay me a 8 figure salary as a product manager to tell them to add phone number login to their existing app and put it behind a region restriction if required rather building a second parallel app since apparently no one there is willing to say it. And before people point out the benefits of having a clean slate I'll point out all the cash they burned doing it this way, which they could have saved by just giving me 10 or 15 million dollars.

DMs open for anyone else who wants my genius-level advice.

I think there was an Android Wallet app too at some point.

Eventually it's all gonna converge to a single app that does chat, video and calls.

And it shall be called "hangouts".

Everything old is new again

This is Google sharpening its focus ;)

Sadly with no xmpp support :/

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)

Hangouts is too verbose. Why not just "Google Talk"

Maybe they will allow you to type/speak the thing you want to do and will call it "search."

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.

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.

I am honestly not sure what is the difference between iMessage and Messages. Is iMessage still a thing? I think I saw it somewhere just recently.

iMessage is the e2e protocol used by the messages app if you're texting another iOS user. Messages is the name of the app that does that, as well as SMS.

It's really nothing that most end users notice or care about, as long as they get their blue bubbles and fun features.

No one outside one country in the world really uses SMS anymore.

At least two countries, I think. You're probably thinking of the US, but SMS is alive and well in Canada. (FB Messenger is #1 but far from monopolizing Canadian habits.)

Outside the US by more than 100 miles, then.

eh it’s still used for 2FA where I’m from

Ok, comparing, here are the equivalent apps on my phone (A Pixel 6 from Google) Messages, Gmail (admittedly not "Mail", despite working with non Gmail email addresses), Calendar, Wallet, Home. That's a total of 1 character in difference.

These have longer names, clarifying e.g. "Google Wallet" if you go look at them on play store or something, but the actually displayed names that you actually see when using your phone are pretty much identical to iOS.

Other non-branded names include Calculator, Camera, Clock, Contacts, Docs, Files, Fit, Maps, News, Photos, Safety, Settings, Translate.

Branded names that I believe came with include Chrome, Google, Google One, Google TV, Play Store, and YouTube. Frankly I think it's pretty appropriate that all of those come with branding.

I wish someone would make a platform that takes that idea to the next level:

Your spreadsheets? No, they're not in Excel® or numbers.app or OpenOffice. They're in "Spreadsheets".

Same with documents: Not in Word or pages.app or w/e. They're in Documents.

Want to browse the web? No Safari or Firefox or Chrome names. Click on the icon that says "Web browser".

Your e-mail? Click the shiny "e-mail" icon.

(note: this is more about shielding/releasing the user from having to worry about underlying technologies. Basically, the "it just works" taken to the next level)

Lol. This reminds me of the Windows days where you'd make desktop shortcuts and you could rename them. Why can't I rename my android home shortcuts?

*hangouts plus

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.

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.

Isn't there something called Gmail Chat as well?

I think we need to look at this the other way - Apple (and some other successful companies) are special for NOT falling into this trap of exec infighting, rebranding and personal glory seeking.

Most other companies fall into this trap but, turns out, they're not successful because of it and Apple continues to dominate markets.

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.

> 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!"

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! :)

> 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

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.

But no, it’s even worse! They are renaming Duo to Meet, even though Duo has 10x more installs than (classic) Meet.

> 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.

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.

Isn't that because Duo comes installed on new Android phones but Meet doesn't? It might be that Meet has more daily users.

Meet is installed on all Android phones as part of the Gmail app. It just doesn't have an app icon.

If that's true then there's no way in hell Duo has 10x more installs?

Fair, but those don't count as downloads on the Play store.

Oh lol I guess that's true.

I think of Duo as "one of the google apps I will never open" whereas I have meetings in Meet. I guess I figured that Meet got a pandemic bump? But when you put it that was it does indeed make even less sense.

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.

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

You could have just used Signal or something instead of moving everyone to a different hardware platform, just sayin.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Everybody at G-corporation personally benefits from the redundancy so why fix it

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.

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.

> 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-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...

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.jp...

And they're completely indistinguishable from each other at a glance, which is like a cardinal sin of design.

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.

It's like the same toxic UI designers bounce between Google and MSFT and Apple and destroy any semblance of usable iconography.

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.

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!)

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.

Surely devs have very limited influence over this? I can't imagine everyone else also does leetcode?

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.

I believe that eng managers are also not the ones making this call.

> 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-deprec...

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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Ugh, no app for iOS. They do have a beta for Android.

https://proton.me/blog/calendar-free-web-android

Looks like they support shared calendars:

https://proton.me/support/share-calendar

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.

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.

>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.

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

Allo

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

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.

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.

Someone surely got a promo out of this

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.

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..

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.

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.

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

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-d... [2] https://blog.google/products/workspace/latest-google-hangout...

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

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.

/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.

This is getting out of hand!

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

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.

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.

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".

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.

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?

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..."

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.

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

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

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?

We use Meet for our internal video calls and Zoom often for clients, I can't really tell much of a difference either way.

Thanks!

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.

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

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

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

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

Three if you count Google Meat.

googlemeat.com

That seems like a risky click.

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

> 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.

> 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?

Google Chat is for messaging, with its own folly of Chat / Hangouts because Chat was the new Hangouts for business or something like that.

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