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.