> I already find Google's handling of their chat software utterly nonsensical, but this one arguably takes the cake for ridiculousness, considering they already have a chat product called "Hangouts".

Apparently this product ("Google Hangouts Chat") is meant for work-related text chat targeted at businesses (I guess like Slack).

Not to be confused with Google Hangouts Meet, which is Hangouts video chat, but branded for businesses. Google Hangouts Meet is also known as Hangouts Meet, or just Meet, and even their official website can't decide on which one to use, or even which one should show up in the Google search results: https://twitter.com/chimeracoder/status/968914718508371970

(Apologies for the self-link, but it's easier than reuploading the image).

Google is taking naming cues from Microsoft now. Microsoft's naming conventions are maddening if you are trying to search for documentation.

I have spent a lot of time developing for Access and Excel, and trying to search for VBA solutions is a madhouse. You could maybe chalk up the VBA|VB madness to decisions being made at a time when search engines were somewhat uncommon tools, but they have made this mistake so many times.

For instance, try figuring out the difference between all the Active Directory solutions on Azure. The documentation describing the differences between them is spread out all over the place, and it's not clear which option is necessary to achieve a given result. Plus several of the Azure AD solutions have nothing to do with the Active Directory protocol.

I would chalk it up to being unfamiliar with the Azure environment, but I'm working with a couple of Azure devs and even they were confused by the limitations of each version of AD and when you could use them.

Honestly, if business units within a company could sue for copyright infringement resulting in market confusion I would highly recommend the Active Directory team send a cease-and-desist to the rest of the company.

> I would chalk it up to being unfamiliar with the Azure environment, but I'm working with a couple of Azure devs and even they were confused by the limitations of each version of AD and when you could use them. Honestly, if business units within a company could sue for copyright infringement resulting in market confusion I would highly recommend the Active Directory team send a cease-and-desist to the rest of the company.

Sometimes what happens is that a certain brand name becomes popular, and other people (or departments) want to piggyback off the popular name. For example: Watson is literally a household name, thanks to Jeopardy, so IBM now uses the Watson brand pretty generously, even applying it to things that are only vaguely related to the project that created a computer which beat Ken Jennings.

I could believe that that's what's happening with Microsoft - Active Directory is a known entity to corporate IT departments, so tacking "AD" onto something makes it seem less threatening and more familiar.

But I don't think that's what's going on here with Google. Hangouts was never that popular a name with users[0]. And it doesn't even look like they're piggybacking, from the trail of names we see. It just looks like a chaotic mess. I'm really perplexed as to what's happening internally to cause this sort of confused word salad of branding. I can't figure it out.

[0] Amusingly, people still refer to it colloquially as "GChat", which was never one of the official names of the product! It was always "Talk" not "Chat" - look at the logo if you don't believe it - even though the records were stored in the "Chats" section on GMail.

Google certainly called it Google Chat: https://support.google.com/chat

But now you can have five Google IM apps in your phone! Allo, Duo, Hangouts, Hangouts meet, Hangouts chat... am I missing any? Definitely Franz Kafka is alive and well as Google's messaging PM.

It feels like they are doing A/B testing by releasing entirely different products rather than small changes within existing products. I wish they'd pick a name and iterate on features on one product that I can invest into using for a long time (like Gmail).

Totally, but at some point aren't they polluting their A/B data by exhausting user confidence and diluting their own market too much? At one point I had both Duo and Allo (and Hangouts and Messages and Voice) installed on my phone, and I never found a use for either. Allo never provided a compelling use case for my everyday life, and why would I try and convince someone I know to install Duo just to try it out, aside from pure curiosity? I just don't understand what their endgame with all this is

My experience with Duo is that the video chat quality is far better than Hangouts, especially on mobile devices and poor hotel wifi. Not sure what it's doing differently but I think it optimizes for lag-free video/audio vs quality.

Allo would have been nice as a plug-in for Hangouts. Maybe even an alternative GUI on phones.

Useless as a standalone service however.

Exactly! From the maybe five minutes I spent using Allo, it seemed like a totally fine messaging app with additional features. If Allo was released as the One True Google Messaging App (rolling in functionality of the other apps as well, i.e. Voice), REPLACING the others, I suppose people would've grumbled about change because change is scary, but I would've just been happy to have one Google messaging app on my phone again.

I had Google Voice before I had an Android phone. A big selling point of Android to me early on, especially stock Android phones like the Nexus One, was how, being a Google product, it would integrate with my SMS and phone apps, and provide a unified experience. Since then, they've released so many chat apps, most with SMS integration, that it's just frustratingly confusing and it makes me think less of the entire platform.

So I get they wanted to make a Slack competitor... why not make this new app FINALLY also double as the One True Google Chat App? Surely that would be good for adoption and stuff, plus it would finally solve their "too many chat apps" problem once and for all...

My guess is that the original hangouts will be deprecated, leaving:

Consumer:

- Video: Google Duo

- Messaging: Google Allo

Enterprise:

- Video: Hangouts Meet

- Messaging: Hangouts Chat

I use Hangouts on my phone and computer to chat with friends and family on phones, computers, and tablets. If Hangouts gets deprecated I won't switch to Allo (I don't even think it's available on tablets), I will switch to something without Google.

Seriously if there is a plan to deprecate Hangouts, then it should not use back the same brand for GSuite to confuse users.

Do not understand why the need to have separate app for video chat, especially the one consumer facing. WhatsApp, WeChat etc all combine text, voice and video chat in one.

They might deprecate hangouts and replace it with hangouts chat, and you might not really see the difference.

On your second point, I wonder that as well.

This seems right.

The tricky part is what will they do in Gmail? Gmail is used by businesses and currently has Hangouts Chat built in. But Gmail is also used by consumers so will they have allo integrated into that too?

Gmail seems like a big entry point for chat - not sure how they are going to solve that one if they split up the chat products as you suggested.

The point is that business and personal overlap for a lot of us. I don't want separate products.

Are my professional contacts business if we're socializing?

Are my personal contacts personal if they are also clients?

I don't segregate my life cleanly into business/personal and I certainly don't want to double the number of installed apps because marketing.

Counterpoint: I don't message my group of friends over Slack to socialize. And I don't message my teammates and coworkers over Whatsapp groups to organize projects.

Counter-Counterpoint: My group of friends has a slack channel that we use essentially as an IRC chatroom where we organize long term events, plan evening activities, and chat about an assortment of topics. Nothing about Slack makes it less useful as a personal communication tool as opposed to business communication.

Does something about this new app make it less useful as a personal communication tool as opposed to business communication, for the use case of how you communicate with your friends?

"Hey George, how are those TPS reports coming? Also, do you wanna get drinks after work?"

"I'll have those reports for you by EOD. Please send me a message on Facebook Messenger about that non-professional inquiry."

I just don't see it happening like that. I have people I contact on both Messenger and Slack, and while I tend to keep professional communications to Slack and personal to Messenger, they bleed over.

No reason why you can't have a product which is focused on enterprise, but has a free consumer version.

I'd guess that in the real world outside Hacker News and SV, very few people use email for consumer communication, that role has been taken over by messaging apps. Personal email became a personal business tool, and its usage isn't that different from the regular business usage.

So gsuite, which includes gmail, the new hangouts products and google drive/docs is now focused on enterprise with a free consumer version available.

I think you're underestimating email. My almost 70 yrs old mother constantly exchanges mails with her friends. None of them use any chats.

> My guess is that the original hangouts will be deprecated

The original Hangouts is not yet retired but I thought that Google was clear as far back as the 2016 enterprise focus announcement that the future of Hangouts was as a business communication platform within G Suite and that consumer Hangouts is deprecated.

Which is stupid. They have no consumer messaging application that works across devices to migrate to. If they kill off Hangouts, it will cause a bigger backlash than killing off Reader did.

Reader, and its shut down, were mostly irrelevant for Google.

Which is why I said it will cause a big backlash, not that it would impact revenues.

Allo works on Android/iOS/Web.

Hangouts can't be fully deprecated though unless they plan on killing off Google Project Fi.

They will certainly kill Fi. It will be of no use anymore soon. Already is in Europe.

Except they've started expanding their plans to include family plans, etc.

There is no indication that it will be getting killed off anytime soon. Also since they're a phone provider they can't just shut down. It'll take them years of bleeding money to finally shut down Project Fi.

Well there's also "Messages", which is the default Android SMS app. And even if you're on Fi and set Hangouts as your default SMS app, some things ignore that and open Messages anyway. This shit is so frustrating.

I have the opposite problem, I'm on fi and all SMSes end up in hangouts, even though I have signal set as default sms app.

- ChromeOS, Android, Fuchsia

- Android, PWA, Flutter, Chrome Apps

- Gradle, ndk-build, Gradle experimental plugin, blaze, Soong

It is not only the messaging team.

  > Definitely Franz Kafka is alive and well as Google's messaging PM.

Thank you for this!

Voice -> not technically IM, but forced upon people after functionality removed from hangouts (after originally being removed from Voice...)

Inbox -> Email

Gmail -> Email

Voice - You can 'text' to each other. Although ig you're both using Google Voice you're really just IM'ing.

Technically Google Talk is still around but yo have to use a third party Jabber server.

Each Google Document has whats left of Google Chat built into it which allows anonymous chatting.

Probably can count Android Messages as another Google chat app.

Duo and Meet are video, not IM.

You forgot Android Messages

I can't believe this isn't an April Fool's joke - it's just too ironic! Is google really not self aware enough to see what's going on?!

My whole office is having a good laugh right now, we really cannot fathom how google can be this blind.

(I'm a Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work on chat apps).

Hangouts Chat will sync with classic Hangouts, as called out on this page[0]. Copy/paste of that text here:

>How will this interact with the older version of Hangouts, the one that lives in my Gmail?

>To help make your chat experience seamless, all your Chat conversations will sync with your classic Hangouts experience.

Though to be clear, it's 1-to-1 chats that sync between the 2. So migration for existing companies will be much easier.

[0] https://gsuite.google.com/products/chat/

Hangouts can barely sync with itself. Does anyone really expect it to sync properly with the shiny new thing?

It must be one of those accelerated returns laws - the number of Google chat applications doubles every few years.

It looks like they're going to switch from Hangouts Chat to just Chat.

If you search for "Google Chat" the first result is Hangouts, and the sidebar card is for Google Talk. So, not even Google can keep up with their own rhythm