As with every other business market, google has the design, technical and market reach resources to clean up. However, as with every other business market, they never will due to their mysterious aversion to providing

a) actual support

b) product lifespans that businesses can rely on

Their penchant for "surprise! sunset"ing major products that users rely on, and showing no reluctance to do this for business customers as well means only scrappy small players who feel like the cost differential or some specific feature is worth the threat of having to migrate one fine weekend.

Specifically in the chat/videochat domain, Google has released and sunsetted

gchat (to...) google talk (to hangouts) duo allo voice

Their sales and support approach to Meet hardware is also abysmal. If they sold hardware direct, supported it through an official channel, and had reasonable documentation around it, they would slay, especially for customers who already have G Suite. Instead, it’s a confusing web of resellers bundling off-the-shelf hardware.

I say fuck google meet.

The mic doesnt work on mobile, their ability to get people to join easily sucks.

But i do like HighFive

I have a slack integration to create a highfive video conf i just /highfive (name of meeting) and then share that link.

Google has lost all goodwill in this space in my opinion. They’ve built, sunsetted, and rebuilt multiple solutions for video conferencing and at this point who can trust them with putting out a long-term product?

Can you explain which ones? The only product I know of is Hangouts and Google is right now rolling out updated Hangouts which is a compatible upgrade?

(Having said that, Hangouts is far from perfect.)

Hangout, Allo, Duo, Google Voice, Gtalk, Meet, Wave... (list to be completed, there's probably a dozen more which died I don't remember).

Of this list, only Hangouts is a video conferencing application, is it not? Allo's primary goal was chat, Duo's is 1-1 interaction, GTalk is simply the older version of hangouts, and so on.

> only Hangouts is a video conferencing application

btw, there are three different versions of Hangouts: Classic, Meet, and Chat. Hangouts Classic will be EOL'd later this year. Hangouts Meet is the video conferencing for business. Hangouts Chat is a Slack clone for business that includes video calling.

Google will transition Hangouts Classic users to Hangouts Chat, not Meet:

https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/01/upcoming-hangou...

Google Talk and Google Voice are two other Google products that (used to?) support video calling.

The fact that this is so confusing is part of the problem - consistency of product vision is not their forte and there are market economic consequences as a result.

Or they could have built a single application which does both chat/audio/video.

Which was/is Hangouts?

I dont know, its so confusing with so many options from Google.

What do you think Meets is for?

Hangouts Meet, as it's full name suggests, is a compatible upgrade.

And it's a bit of a wierd criticism since Hangouts actually predates Zoom and most of solutions suggested in this thread.

What solutions are you referring to?

Within our company we use Google for one person meetings, and BlueJeans for team meetings. Hangouts doesn't work well on anything other than Chrome. In Firefox it doesn't work with video on. It doesn't work well when other party is in China. We tend to use Skype for China calls.

> we use Google for one person meetings

Ah, Hangouts works splendid for one person meetings! Anything with two or more people I'd rather use something else ;)

Inadvertent mistake from my side but I upvoted you :)