Amazon Chime - Hackdot

Re:Amazon Chime by ajmurmann on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @12:50AM (#13641489)

Hangouts is so strange to me (like many Google products I guess). They got a ton of traction; first release immediately was super solid and then nothing. Nothing has changed in ages. No obvious features get implemented. I would love so much to have s tile view of all participants. Ideally we would get a codec that's actually supported by hardware instead of this battery draining mess. I'd love to have an option for the video not to be cropped. I can't count the confusion that has caused over the years with people in meeting wondering why someone is only showing their forehead out why everybody but them can see multiple people on camera but they only see someone in the center. All the hard work seems to be done, but Google refuses to polish and properly maintain it. It's bizarre.

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Re:Amazon Chime by deong on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @01:01PM (#13645555)

Google desperately needs an "Executive Vice President of People Actually Using Shit". Someone who's entire job is to go to demos of products that are about to ship and cancel them until they at least work well enough to pass the laugh test.

Nearly everything Google makes is just some version or another of Google Home telling your Android phone not to handle that voice prompt to add a calendar entry (which your phone can do) because Google Home is there, so that Google Home can tell you that Google Home can't add calendar entries yet.

Hey, here's Allo. We think you're going to love it. I mean, it doesn't have SMS support, so no one is actually going to use it, but other than being pointless, ain't it great?

My EVP there would have walked in, saw the first slide about a new messenger, and said, "Let me stop you here. Does it transparently bridge IP chat and SMS into one conversation like iMessage? No? OK, I'm going to lunch. I'm sure your stickers are cool and all, but pass."

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Re:Amazon Chime by joelx on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @03:59PM (#13647118)

Why all the hate for Hangouts? I have used it for five years to build and run my company. There is never an issue with Hangouts unless someone in the meeting has a hardware problem (meanwhile everyone else can handle the meeting). It's fast and easy for anyone to use screenshots or video. If you use YouTube Live Events, you can even have a company meeting with every person joining. We have done these once a week for years for fifteen minutes prior to lunch.

Hangouts has been amazing for us.

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Re:Amazon Chime by deong on Wednesday February 15, 2017 @09:43AM (#13652295)

Hangouts was (is?) pretty good. But it hasn't been immune to Google's inability to figure out how to make a thing people want.

Initially it was IP only. Then it added SMS support. Then it added merged conversations between SMS and IP. Then it unmerged those conversations. All the while only really working well on the desktop inside a weird Chrome extension that burned through battery like kindling because there was no hardware support for encoding and decoding the video.

I still use it on my phone, but again, the only actual feature anyone really wants from a text/chat/IM program is the one that enables "I just want to send a message to Alice. You figure out how to get it to her appropriately" -- a.k.a. iMessage. If you put stickers and crap in there, sure, people will use them I guess, but the one absolute core feature anyone should expect for at least five years now is still the one Google can't figure out how to do.

And they were actually close with Hangouts at one point. Close enough, in my opinion. It lacked the automatic routing of iMessage, but just showing any message I've received from my wife in one conversation and giving me the ability to toggle how I send a reply right there in the conversation view was fine.

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Re:Amazon Chime by ajmurmann on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @04:05PM (#13647181)

I think Hangouts is absolutely a viable product as it is. It just seems like it got released and then everyone moved on instead of making it better.

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Re:Amazon Chime by ChuckMcM on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @12:58AM (#13641525)

At one time this was a function of how Google did promotions/pay raises. I'm not sure if Hangouts got caught in that catch 22 or not but it did kill a lot of decent projects.

Had that team remained relevant they could have conceivably done a "Chromebox" Hub like the Surface Hub and given Microsoft some competition in that space.

EDIT: Ok so as is pointed out there is a chromebox for meetings. Pretty nice. Seems to be out of the Enterprise group though, is that still part of Google or is it an 'Other Bet' now?

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Re:Amazon Chime by jsolson on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @02:43AM (#13641940)

It's out of Google "other". Accounted along with Cloud all under Diane Greene.

Also, modern GVC is fucking amazing.

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Re:Amazon Chime by tschwimmer on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @01:11AM (#13641583)

We had it at my old company and it was garbage. Super frustrating to join meetings (type your automatically generated, super long meeting name on a tiny keyboard), random crashes freezes and relatively poor video quality. Another super annoying thing was screensharing had an extremely low bitrate. It was so bad that it was pretty pretty useless to demo any nice UI features or animations. The framerate was 2-5 fps.

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Re:Amazon Chime by dzhiurgis on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @01:38AM (#13641674)

Completely opposite experience. Where Skype and Gotomeeting would lag, Hangouts was 99% smooth. Perhaps you've got terrible firewall?

The only problem I used to have is audio would die whenever I mess with browser plugins (disabling that WebRTC feature that leaks your internal IP for privacy, and some other Googlyeish feature).

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Re:Amazon Chime by parasubvert on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @08:34AM (#13643364)

We use Hangouts pretty extensively (2300 employees) but for anything involving more than 4 people we've switched to Zoom; all of the OP's problems creep up quickly and intermittently in Hangouts.

Also we keep WebEx around for screen control, it seems still best bang/buck for that.

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Re:Amazon Chime by kbar13 on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @01:38AM (#13641676)

we use it at work. it hooks into meeting rooms' calendars and you just have to use the chromebox remote to select the right hangout in the agenda. no typing involved (unless you were doing an ad-hoc meeting, then you'd just type one of our names as the hangout name). It works quite well.

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Re:Amazon Chime by seanalltogether on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @02:00AM (#13641764)

Yeah we have the same experience, I'm surprised hangouts works so badly for others. As long as you invite the chromeboxes to the same meetings as everyone else, it's super simple to operate and for everyone to join.

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Re:Amazon Chime by Roritharr on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @02:09AM (#13641817)

Does it work with non-google Calendars?

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Re:Amazon Chime by JoBrad on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @07:04AM (#13642924)

Yes. We use it with clients frequently.

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Re:Amazon Chime by droopyEyelids on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @02:38PM (#13646442)

Most everything you're describing is a part of the new beta hangouts.

If you're a part of a large Google Cloud account, have your IT person contact your gCloud account manager and get on the beta. Actually, if you're a part of a large account and your IT team is risk tolerant.

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