They've held their Slack competitor announced nearly a year ago in EAP so long you wonder if the damn thing will ever see the light of day...
> To join the video meeting
> Install the current version of Google Chrome
Google is the new Microsoft.
Also, don't forget Google Spaces. Although you might as well, it lasted less than a year.
Oh, that one's already gone. Why on earth would anyone jump on board a new Google product when they have the lifespan of fruit flies?
Running a bunch of your own competitors is self-defeating when it ensures you don't have the network effect. Google Talk worked mostly because it was in Gmail, and everyone had Gmail. People who never used it had it, because Gmail.
Quick, someone should register it and publish a book and make a career giving talks about it...
They could have a seamless bridge between them, though. They sort of tried: you can dial a phone from Hangouts, but not back, or you can receive your Voice text messages in the email, but not send a reply back (afaict).
Google is notoriously bad at cohesive product management. They have a number of bright ideas, but no visionary in the consumer product space, so apparently no coordination.
The latest iteration of Google Voice has chat, for example, while SMS support inside the Hangouts Android App was removed on purpose and users told to use yet another app, first called Messenger, now called Messages.
All their communication products suffer from convergent evolution, yet remain in dizzyingly varying states of integration with each other.
[1] https://blog.google/products/google-voice/ringing-2017-updat... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13463940
I use google voice and hangouts. I can both send and receive voice calls using my google voice number via hangouts. I can also send and receive sms message using my google voice number via hangouts. Both of these have been true for at least 4 years, maybe 5. They started trying to phase sms out of hangouts a few years back, but never removed it for google voice users.
I find Ron Amadeo's articles are often much more critical of Google than others writing about them. If I were to summarize his attitude in much of his writing it'd be "Come on, you need to do better than this, Google." It's refreshing because normally writers who cover a particular company almost always view them through rose colored glasses and minimize all the mistakes.
[1]Google had months of notice under coordinated disclosure, and it took them a couple months after it went public for the fix to finally make it to Pixel devices (which is to say, most other Android devices still aren't patched). Since ROM authors fixed this in like two days, the fact that Google couldn't do it in five months is inexcusable. I actually suspect this may be part of why the Android Security Lead just shifted to a massively less important position at Google around the end of the year.
People chide Apple for not moving fast enough, but in many cases, being stable is more important than refactoring every 2 years.
Tech companies are trying to become outright banks, but with none of the FDIC insurance or other safeguards that goes along with it lol. Innovation...
Not all -- Apple Pay doesn't do the balance on their platform thing.
There are gas stations near me that post a credit and a cash price.
I’m guessing you’re American: much of Europe doesn’t bother with credit cards, myself included.
That's before you get into the whole "you gotta build credit" perversion that has Americans go into debt en masse and pay horrid fees on that.
Debit cards have some protections; the basic difference is that a credit card is spending someone else's money, which you have to pay back to them if it was actually authorized by you; a debit card is spending your money, which you can recover from the bank in certain circumstances if it is accepted to be unauthorized.
It’s accurate to say that the U.S. operates on credit moreso than it does on cash, but the rating methods genuinely favor those who have the means to manage credit wisely and pay off revolving balances in full, which is antithetical to the notion of societal “regressions”.
The Google Pay API developer site https://developers.google.com/payments/ has the audacity to call it "The newest way to pay with Google." I wouldn't be surprised to see yet another brand (and yet another API) within the next three years.