[HN Gopher] Google's video chat merger begins: Now there are two...
___________________________________________________________________
Google's video chat merger begins: Now there are two "Google Meet"
apps
Author : leephillips
Score : 181 points
Date : 2022-08-04 17:53 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| throw7 wrote:
| I don't care about video, but the article notes that hangouts is
| being shutdown soon. I'm interested to know what they are doing
| with fi and the sms gateway.
|
| Personally, I switched to rcs chat (which disabled hangouts), but
| I would like to get back an rcs web gateway interface. And no,
| "device pairing" in messages is not the same. If google actually
| pulls that off I'd be impressed, but I'm not holding my breathe.
| zulu-inuoe wrote:
| Hangouts has been warning me that it will 'soon be replaced'
| since 2018. I still use it to this day as one of my favourite
| messaging apps..
| t_mann wrote:
| Hangouts, Talk, Meet, Duo, new Meet,... probably missing a few
| there as well - you can clearly tell what gets people promoted at
| Google.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Allo
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Eventually it's all gonna converge to a single app that does
| chat, video and calls.
|
| And it shall be called "hangouts".
| uoaei wrote:
| Everything old is new again
| mywittyname wrote:
| Maybe they will allow you to type/speak the thing you want to
| do and will call it "search."
| ayberk wrote:
| This is Google sharpening its focus ;)
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Sadly with no xmpp support :/
| dmitrygr wrote:
| An update on meet: we've decided to put more wood behind fewer
| arrows and sharpen our focus.
|
| (To any xooglers reading this, sorry for the dose of PTSD)
| philistine wrote:
| One thing I loathe about Android is the messy need for every
| app has to be a brandTM.
|
| Compare with iOS: Messages, Mail, Calendar, Wallet, Home.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I am honestly not sure what is the difference between
| iMessage and Messages. Is iMessage still a thing? I think I
| saw it somewhere just recently.
| happyopossum wrote:
| iMessage is the e2e protocol used by the messages app if
| you're texting another iOS user. Messages is the name of
| the app that does that, as well as SMS.
|
| It's really nothing that most end users notice or care
| about, as long as they get their blue bubbles and fun
| features.
| gpm wrote:
| Ok, comparing, here are the equivalent apps on my phone (A
| Pixel 6 from Google) Messages, Gmail (admittedly not "Mail",
| despite working with non Gmail email addresses), Calendar,
| Wallet, Home. That's a total of 1 character in difference.
|
| These have longer names, clarifying e.g. "Google Wallet" if
| you go look at them on play store or something, but the
| actually displayed names that you actually see when using
| your phone are pretty much identical to iOS.
|
| Other non-branded names include Calculator, Camera, Clock,
| Contacts, Docs, Files, Fit, Maps, News, Photos, Safety,
| Settings, Translate.
|
| Branded names that I believe came with include Chrome,
| Google, Google One, Google TV, Play Store, and YouTube.
| Frankly I think it's pretty appropriate that all of those
| come with branding.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| But these apps don't need to be branded due to being a
| monopoly. Google's approach is better (if they didn't butcher
| the naming every time and kill apps constantly) for the
| consumer as it indicates you have choices.
| wetpaws wrote:
| Hangouts is too verbose. Why not just "Google Talk"
| typeofhuman wrote:
| Does anyone else find the app icons[0] to be absolutely hideous?
|
| Google reskinned all of their app icons but there's no
| consistency. Some colors overlap with transparency (see Google
| Meet, Calendar) but others don't (see Maps, Play Store).
|
| 0: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/08/20.jp...
| phailhaus wrote:
| And they're completely indistinguishable from each other at a
| glance, which is like a cardinal sin of design.
| chaos_a wrote:
| Same thing happened with the windows 11 file explorer icons.
| I can't tell which icon from a glance is cut, copy and paste
| since they all look visually the same.
| fabian2k wrote:
| I use Google Meet at work with my work Google Account. It works
| reasonably well, and certainly better than some other solutions
| for my use case. I would prefer if they don't break this, but
| honestly I have no idea how this will affect me. It seems almost
| impossible to keep up with how Google chat apps work.
| slyall wrote:
| At work we use meet.google.com for our standard chats. I've read
| a few articles and I'm still not sure what is happening to that.
|
| Annoyingly meet.google.com kills my machine since Chrome on Linux
| has spotty hardware acceleration support and whenever I'm on a
| call it maxes out my CPU.
| 40acres wrote:
| Can anyone with experience at Google actually explain what's
| going on here? Assuming that social apps roll up to the same VP
| or whatever -- shouldn't there have been a decision long ago to
| simply their app offerings? I can understand separate orgs
| wanting to establish their turf by proposing a new app but isn't
| a leader there to stop the madness.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Everybody at G-corporation personally benefits from the
| redundancy so why fix it
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| The endless cycle of Google products being replaced by something
| else to no useful effect.
|
| I just don't bother with any of them anymore except Gmail, and
| that's mostly inertia on my part.
| justahuman74 wrote:
| Someone surely got a promo out of this
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| I can somehow understand how "Meet" is a better and more
| recognizable brand than "Duo". At least they didn't release a
| "Meet for Business" to add to the confusion.
| xnx wrote:
| They've come close to this situation in other areas as well.
| Google has a "Google Pay" app and a "GPay" app.
| https://9to5google.com/2022/03/11/the-difference-between-gpa...
| jjulius wrote:
| _And_ , they replaced Google Wallet years back with Google Pay,
| but now Google Wallet is back, so that you can do the same
| thing you already do with Google Pay, but with a few extra
| types of cards that Google Pay can't store because, I dunno,
| "reasons"? lol
|
| >Google Wallet's official rollout is the latest step in the
| long history of Google's payment app variations. The company
| combined Google Wallet and Android Pay in 2018 to create Google
| Pay, a single app that included tap-to-pay, tickets, and
| loyalty programs under one umbrella that worked across Android
| and Google Chrome. In 2020, Google Pay had a big app refresh to
| pull in peer-to-peer payments, deals, and other services.
|
| >Now Google announced Wallet's comeback at its Google I/O event
| in May, splitting things up again to create a dedicated home
| for payment cards, airplane tickets, government IDs,
| vaccination proof, and even car keys.
|
| >Users will be able to use the app to pay at vendors where
| Google Pay is accepted.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/20/23270301/google-wallet-re...
| jsmith45 wrote:
| Part of the problem was that in 2020 they pushed out a new
| Google Pay, which was designed not based on google accounts,
| but using phone number tied login, specifically because that
| approach was necessary to get any real adoption in India. But
| after succeeding with the new app in India, the people behind
| the new app got approval to push it out on everyone else.
| (Calling it a "refresh" is a complete joke. It was a
| completely different app in all respects that shared only the
| name it stole from the older Google Pay).
|
| This went fairly poorly. For example, people in the rest of
| the world wanted to be able to use their google account. This
| approach had problems like not being able to support a
| website version. The wallet website still existed and was
| used to manage payment cards that chrome might suggest, but
| was no longer connected to the "google pay" service.
|
| The people behind the new Google Pay all resigned or were
| pushed out. And google decided to back peddle, and move to
| something more like the old Google Pay. But they wisely
| decided not to use the Google Pay name again. (It does not
| help that there is also yet another unrelated Google Pay
| service used for In app or website based purchases). So they
| decided to revive the Google Wallet name.
| zerocrates wrote:
| They were able to move to a somewhat-sane solution
| everywhere else, but in the few markets where the new GPay
| launched, Wallet is... sort of integrated into GPay, or
| something?
|
| GPay was/is also one of those nice services where they
| never made it work for Workspace/G Suite accounts.
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| The blurb ar the bottom about the Workspace GM focusing on
| communication apps in response to the pandemic, explains why the
| Workspace Addon ecosystem has been quietly abandoned by Google.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Why does Google always do such a terrible job at managing their
| products lol. Everything from names to overlapping features and
| meaningless rebrandings
| fleddr wrote:
| One of the great frustrations with Google is that they never ever
| face consequences for their gross mismanagement. They're Yahoo-
| level incompetent but without consequences as they simply
| continue to print money.
| brokenodometer wrote:
| Three if you count Google Meat.
|
| googlemeat.com
| TimCTRL wrote:
| Not forgetting the "meet" tab in the gmail app, for android. And
| I tend to use this most since meeting reminders come through mail
| 1270018080 wrote:
| I wonder how/if Google will un-Ballmer Microsoft themselves.
| varispeed wrote:
| I really like Google Meet. Never had trouble with it, doesn't
| seem to make my computer want to turn itself off, audio quality
| is excellent and so is the video. 30% of the time when there is a
| meeting on other platform, there is a point when someone says
| "shall we switch to Google?" and everyone replies with relief
| "yes, let's do this, see you in 5.".
|
| Seems like Google has amazing engineers, but the management is
| something else in a negative sense.
|
| One thing is good though - the inevitable fall of Google,
| hopefully will bring some breath of fresh air.
| Akinato wrote:
| I feel like they missed out by not saying "Meet the new Meet,
| same as the old Meet!".
| Apocryphon wrote:
| This is getting out of hand!
| [deleted]
| atonse wrote:
| Watching Google continue to fumble and trip over themselves over
| the past decade with all their horrendous messaging "strategy"
| used to be amusing. Now it's just cringy.
|
| What is going on over there? Why are they not able to make up
| their damn minds and come up with one app?
|
| Google reminds me of Ballmer's Microsoft. Factions on top of
| factions and no leadership anywhere to be found.
| acdha wrote:
| This is why I really think of advertising as tech's version of
| the resource curse, where countries with rich natural resources
| are prone to foundering because even incompetent rulers can
| stay rich as long as the oil keeps flowing. Both Google and
| Facebook hit this point where they have an enormous influx of
| cash to support all of these ventures where people can make all
| kinds of bad decisions without impacting the bottom line for
| years, if ever.
|
| As a [very small] shareholder I really think they'd be
| healthier if Alphabet siloed the finances more so e.g. the
| messages leadership got paid only if that project worked out.
| Right now they can just fiddle around and still be in the top
| couple percent income range without any feedback that they were
| making terrible calls.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Wasn't this largely the point of creating Alphabet? Trying to
| separate the money making segments from everything else?
| acdha wrote:
| I won't claim to be an expert on that but I think that was
| kind of the goal in the sense of having companies like Nest
| or Waymo be more independent, but given how little
| difference it's seemed to make I've generally assumed it
| was either some kind of accounting dodge or simply that
| they were too timid to break up Google itself. One of the
| reasons for that is no doubt that shareholders would ask
| why they're funding so many marginal ventures if those were
| broken out separately.
| philistine wrote:
| It was to keep Sundar Pichai and elevate him to the level
| of CEO of something.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| There's definitely a resource curse with the advertising
| dollars but how would chat/messaging be silo'd? Users don't
| pay for it (individually) and it doesn't show ads (afaik?).
| It doesn't make money. The only reasons to build it are so
| Google employees aren't using other companies
| meeting/chat/messaging apps, so users aren't lured into
| competitors ecosystems and... what else? Pride? Ego?
| rurp wrote:
| Presumably any new product they are building is to increase
| revenue somewhere, even if it's in another product. They
| might expect that getting X usage in a chat app will
| translate to Y additional ads income; due to better
| tracking data, more chances to show ads, etc. In that case
| some of the ads revenue could be attributed to the new chat
| app, based on usage. Some assumptions would need to be
| made, but the allocations could be tracked, measured, and
| analyzed pretty well.
|
| Of course an approach like this would require some amount
| of direction and purpose, which is not at all a part of
| Google's core competencies.
| acdha wrote:
| That's basically the problem, isn't it? If it's effectively
| make-work, you get the kind of decisions we've seen. In the
| unlikely event that their hiring process failed badly
| enough to put me in a C-level position, I would have
| approached it as a revenue-generating service: invest some
| initial startup funds but have a plan that you're going to
| build a paid service around it, maybe with an ad-supported
| free tier but in either case you need a revenue model where
| the head person's performance is measured on people
| actively using the service.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| There's also the "commoditizing your compliment argument"
| for building a messaging platform but does that strategy
| make sense if all your competitors are doing the same?
| acdha wrote:
| Yeah, I don't want to claim that I have the secret for
| how to monetize these things well. My thought was just
| that they didn't consider the costs either to their brand
| of letting users down or by providing a path where entire
| groups of people could influence other parts of the
| company with no experience bringing in business.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Honestly it makes way more sense now than it used to.
|
| They have the enterprise GSuite brands that are actually kind
| of successful there - Google Chat and Google Meet - and they
| try to merge everything under those umber. And they gave up on
| consumer-specific branding.
|
| I ... think. At least.
| ArrayBoundCheck wrote:
| I'm pretty sure google jumped the shark 5years ago but somehow
| the pandemic caused googles stock to :rocket-ship-emoji:
| happyopossum wrote:
| Google's latest earnings were less bad than most of it's
| competitors - Facebook and Snap choked hard, while google
| just slowed a bit (and less than was expected), so it's not
| _just_ the stock that did well.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| In iOS there's still a "Google Duo" and a "Google Meet". If you
| install "Google Meet" it installs as "Meet (original)".
|
| They need a product manager manager.
| AareyBaba wrote:
| "When a company has a monopoly, it loses it incentive to
| innovate. The company then becomes driven by marketing and
| sales people to extract maximum profit from existing products.
| " - paraphrased from Steve Jobs
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM
| colechristensen wrote:
| It's like they are their own little marketplace where the
| currency is promotions.
|
| New apps get created because a new app is a way to get ahead.
| Old apps and features get abandoned because the small set of
| people who created them started working on something else and
| nobody is left to maintain the thing.
|
| There's nobody with vision setting direction at Google, it's an
| internal game with lots of players that results in products,
| kind of.
| snapcaster wrote:
| I've heard this before about Google, I've never worked there
| so can't say it's true but if we assume it is: why wouldn't
| every other tech company also be like this? what makes google
| uniquely vulnerable to failure modes like this?
| matwood wrote:
| IDK if they are unique, but Google is really big and feels
| like it lacks strong leadership and vision. Google has also
| never struggled or had a catalyzing moment that brings
| clarity to vision.
|
| Apple makes tons of money, but they still have many people
| in leadership positions who were around when they almost
| went out of business.
|
| FB has always been a bit paranoid, probably b/c they
| knocked off MySpace. They are having that catalyzing moment
| right now.
|
| MS has had a few of those moments over the years.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Google is really big, makes a lot of money on one thing,
| does a bunch of extra stuff on the side, and doesn't have
| strong central control. Those things are pretty unique. A
| few other large companies could do things like this, but
| don't.
| philistine wrote:
| Ultimately Google is an ad company. Owning Android is a
| distracting mistake.
| acdha wrote:
| It's not unique to them but I think it's common to
| companies with a strong cash cow but not a strong culture
| of accountability - Microsoft felt similar from around the
| turn of the century until a few years ago because Windows
| and Office just printed money. If they don't have some way
| other than profits to provide accountability, people who
| are good at playing politics can keep getting promoted
| because to a first approximation nothing they do will lower
| revenue.
| snapcaster wrote:
| I think you're onto something about strong cash cow being
| necessary but not sure it's sufficient by itself. Culture
| of accountability is interesting. It sounds like you have
| some experience, what does culture of accountability look
| like vs. not having one?
| acdha wrote:
| I think the cash cow creates the situation where this is
| possible: if all your company does is one thing, everyone
| _knows_ that they have to keep selling whatever that is
| to stay employed. Where I've seen things run off the
| rails is when managers' personal compensation and career
| trajectory aren't linked to something measurable like
| that.
|
| When I worked for a modest (~30 person) web development
| company in the late 90s we had much smaller version of
| this problem where we had regular customers who would pay
| us for design and new features on their sites but only
| one of the 4 founding partners was directly generating
| revenue (one of the best designers I've ever worked with,
| who was also good at managing a group). That wasn't
| Google-level cash flow but it meant there was no question
| of making payroll, etc. because we had major companies
| who liked us and were doing regular site design updates,
| marketing campaigns, etc. all of the time. Unfortunately,
| we also had two partners who loved haring off after
| whatever cool idea caught their fancy and weren't as good
| at negotiating deals as they thought (e.g. one guy would
| ask us for estimates and then tell us he signed the
| contract at 60% of what we quoted, with our actual cost
| inevitably being around the original estimate). They
| could get away with that for years because the company
| was cash-flow positive and money was pouring into the
| field from all of the companies moving their business
| online and/or burning VC funding (I still remember one
| guy bragging that they had several million dollars of Sun
| hardware & an Oracle license before they had started an
| application). Unfortunately, that let them tell
| themselves they were better at business than they
| actually were and that meant that they were really
| unprepared when the market got harder: there were many
| stories but the one which epitomizes it for me was one of
| them _turning down_ a massive monthly retainer from the
| local NFL team to create new designs, content, and games
| on their website because the team didn't want to put
| _our_ logo on _their_ homepage -- at a time where layoffs
| were imminent in the next month or two! What could have
| avoided that would have been judging performance deal by
| deal rather than company-wide -- if you're losing money
| on 80% of your contracts, the fact that you have a few
| which are very profitable doesn't mean you should rest
| easy.
|
| I've seen similar situations in .edu and .gov where the
| problems were different but came back to the underlying
| problem that how you got favorable reviews and promotions
| was not coupled to the mission, and as a support service
| there wasn't a direct negative feedback signal from that.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, that was insightful
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Because Google has unique policies and culture that
| generate these outcomes?
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| This is a tautological answer. What _are_ those policies
| and culture?
| aerique wrote:
| Eh, have you followed Microsoft in the past?
|
| It seems to be par for the course for very big companies.
| Apple's been doing strange things as well. IBM in the past.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| This is what you get when there's an infinite cash cow (i.e.
| ads) that just keeps pumping money into a system. Like a
| particle simulation for which you set friction to zero, and
| keep injecting energy into it - there won't be a steady
| state, just all sorts of chaotic self-oscillations.
| wingmanjd wrote:
| It's frustrating experiencing all these changes. Naming
| confusions aside , many features I was using in the older apps
| kept getting dropped as the new hotness would be released. I've
| all but stopped using their messaging platform due to all these
| changes.
| riku_iki wrote:
| Curious if anyone has been fired because of this mess. Or
| promoted?..
| trasz wrote:
| Plot twist: they'll eventually sunset both at the same time.
| benmorris wrote:
| What an epic debacle. Since hangouts has been phased out there
| isn't even a way to one click video call someone anymore in
| google chat, it is a hacky meet link. There was a time when I
| used hangouts for everything, video, SMS, and chat. I could even
| do all of that from my desktop PC. Google needs to get it
| together and offer a comparable solution to iMessage.
| kfarr wrote:
| They lost my whole extended family as customers, this nonsense
| confused the heck out of my parents and we gave up trying to
| figure it out. I just told my folks to get iPhones and we use
| facetime
| bilal4hmed wrote:
| Seems like on mobile there will be one Google Meet app ? So not
| sure how there will be two meet apps ??
|
| with that said, in terms of audio & video quality esp in poor
| connectivity conditions there is nothing that comes close to Duo
| - not whatsapp, not signal, not facetime
| josteink wrote:
| > Seems like on mobile there will be one Google Meet app ? So
| not sure how there will be two meet apps ??
|
| I just searched the iOS AppStore. There's _three_ apps: Google
| Meet, Google Chat and Google Duo.
|
| They just don't get how this works, do they?
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Google Chat is for messaging, with its own folly of Chat /
| Hangouts because Chat was the new Hangouts for business or
| something like that.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Google has a help article detailing this extremely confusing
| situation, calling the two Meet apps "Google Meet (original):
| The updated Meet app" and "Google Meet: The updated Duo app."
| The "Google Meet (original)" app will someday be put out to
| pasture; it's just sticking around while Google rebuilds the
| meeting functionality on top of Google Duo. Did everyone follow
| that?
|
| Sounds like there's two in the store for now. On iOS, I can
| find both Google Meet and Google Duo in the App Store.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I sometimes wonder how so many intelligent people in one company
| can't figure out their chat app strategy. At one moment there
| were 7 competing messenger apps from Google. For the last few
| years I don't even bother opening any of them.
|
| (And I'm thankful that it is possible to turn off "Chat" tab
| shoehorned into their Gmail app - even though you have to do it
| separately for _every_ account!)
| n8cpdx wrote:
| The Google-style interview (not just Google but big tech in
| general) selects for a very specific kind of tactical narrow-
| focus intelligence. Thinking big picture or strategically
| doesn't come up at all in an algorithms interview. And thinking
| big picture really is a detriment to succeeding in a leetcode
| grind unless the only picture you're looking at is total comp.
|
| The type of person who works at Google probably isn't well
| equipped to make good products, even if they're great at
| writing software.
| throwaway821909 wrote:
| Surely devs have very limited influence over this? I can't
| imagine everyone else also does leetcode?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > So Google Duo is being rebranded to Google Meet, and the
| existing Google Meet app is sticking around for a bit. That means
| there are now two apps called "Google Meet." Google has a help
| article detailing this extremely confusing situation, calling the
| two Meet apps "Google Meet (original): The updated Meet app" and
| "Google Meet: The updated Duo app." The "Google Meet (original)"
| app will someday be put out to pasture; it's just sticking around
| while Google rebuilds the meeting functionality on top of Google
| Duo. Did everyone follow that?
|
| I'm in stitches; _dying_ of laughter over here. Folding together
| apps to reduce the number of chat apps if probably a good thing,
| but renaming them to an _existing_ name _while the old app is
| still around_? Even Microsoft had the decency to tack on "for
| business" when they were butchering Skype's branding!
|
| On a more serious note, I'll be interested to see how this
| affects the business side of things; will Google Workspace keep
| Meet, and what Meet will it be?
|
| EDIT: Reading through the linked help article, they talk about
| Google Workspace under the section for the _new_ "Meet" nee Duo
| and not under the section for "Google Meet (original)", so I
| guess they have or will transition it. Probably.
| [deleted]
| wlesieutre wrote:
| You mention butchering the Skype branding, but I also
| uninstalled one of the Teams apps so I would stop opening the
| wrong by accident.
|
| The one I still have is called "Microsoft Teams (work or
| school)," I forget what the other was. "Microsoft Teams
| (friends and family)" or something.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Okay, in my defense I escaped that ecosystem just as the
| thing I knew as Teams was replacing SfB, and I was unaware
| that they'd pulled that... fascinating little twist.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I was wrong, the other one doesn't specify anything at all.
| So you have "Microsoft Teams" or "Microsoft Teams (work or
| school)".
|
| And then the icons are barely different too.
|
| https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/image/serverpage/ima
| g...
|
| What a stupid branding mess.
| koyote wrote:
| There's also the two OneNotes. I got quite confused the other
| day when the OneNote on my personal machine did not look like
| the one on my work machine.
|
| Turns out there's OneNote for Windows 10 and OneNote (which
| also runs on Windows 10...)
| dwheeler wrote:
| The long-term plan makes sense, but it's absurd that they'll
| have 2 different apps with the same name at the same time. At
| first I thought this was an Onion article.
|
| I hope this is just some misunderstanding. If not, this will be
| a great example of how to confuse everyone.
| jsight wrote:
| This is very typical for Google. I still have no idea if I'm
| using Google Pay, GPay, Android Pay, Android Wallet, or Google
| Wallet. Maybe some of those old names didn't exist or even
| still exist? And good luck finding all those reward barcode
| cards that you added over the years.
|
| I'm sure someone got a bonus for saving the company money by
| improving their focus, though.
| hbn wrote:
| Google released this totally not confusing graphic to help
| you understand
|
| https://i.imgur.com/liaNvzz.jpg
|
| If you're in Singapore or US, Wallet & GPay. Everywhere else
| Google Pay (not to be confused with GPay) points to Wallet.
| And in India, you will continue to "enjoy" the current Google
| Pay app.
|
| See? So simple!
| frameset wrote:
| I'm in the UK, so it doesn't affect me, but is there a
| reason the USA and Singapore are different?
| junon wrote:
| Just the history I guess.
|
| > If you're in the US or Singapore, Google Wallet is now
| the primary Android payment service and wallet to store
| your hotel keys, driver's license, boarding passes and
| more, as well as make contactless payments. Google Pay
| will stick around, but only as a service to send payments
| to friends and family.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/google-pay-vs-google-
| wallet...
|
| Might be a regulatory reason, but also totally willing to
| believe it's just poor planning on Google's part.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| I'd be very curious to hear the true story as well.
|
| As an outsider, it looks like a classic process followed
| by many tech companies. GPay was probably the first
| attempt and the assignment was to build anything that
| works and just make it work in the US - we'll expand to
| other markets later. And then, because it's payments,
| they immediately learned that every assumption they made
| in the model fails to work in any other jurisdiction.
|
| No idea why Singapore - maybe that was the first attempt
| at expansion where they learned supporting other regions
| wasn't going to scale.
|
| From there, maybe they built Google Pay based on better
| assumptions that apply globally. But, of course, nobody
| bothered to tell the GPay team who kept cranking out new
| features in the meantime. Lo and behold, Google Pay could
| never reach feature parity with GPay so they perpetually
| have to support GPay in the US, while deploying Google
| Pay to the rest of the world.
|
| But now we have to manage two apps. We'd better just
| build a brand new app to replace both. Enter: Wallet. It
| supports every region with all the critical features.
|
| Oh, except Wallet's model can't ever support those
| 20-year old legacy APIs that are still used by tons of
| products nobody owns. So actually people who use GPay now
| get both GPay and Wallet.
|
| That's my guess, at least...
| hot_gril wrote:
| I know which ones I'm using, none of them.
| deepdriver wrote:
| I've told the "two different apps named Google Wallet" story
| for years to illustrate G's internal dysfunction, but didn't
| know there were so many brands/apps in addition to the two
| Wallets. Incredible.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Don't forget Google Pay Send and the Tez mobile payments app
| in India.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| This one is particularly insane. Google appears to want the
| branding from one app (old Meet) but the install base of the
| new app (Duo) and the best they've come up with is to call them
| both "Meet"? Is branding so critical that Duo can't be used? Or
| that it cannot at least do so until all of "old Meet's"
| functionality has been brought over?
|
| This should be in the fucking interviews. It is such a
| predictable scenario. When you hire some PM or brand manager
| who will be responsible for things like this ask them precisely
| how they will navigate this situation.
| NPtzH9DW9Ejxxa9 wrote:
| The worst part is that the install base of Duo is, in my
| experience, fake.
|
| Between the push for "identify yourself by your phone number!
| yeah, that's right, just pretend it's an unchanging
| identifier even though that's not even slightly realistic!"
| (which, IIRC, was _mandatory_ to use it in the beginning,
| although apparently now you can use a Google Account intead).
| And the fact that they push people to use it by adding a
| "video call" option (which has actually never worked for me,
| maybe because the other party didn't have it installed yet?
| who knows) on the Android call screen. And the fact that they
| pre-install it on the phones of people who will never use it
| so that they can say it's installed on soooo many phones.
|
| The only reason (I see) for them to combine Duo and Meet is
| because they want to be able to _claim_ to have a decent
| market share (even though they have virtually no market share
| with either one, outside of _perhaps_ Meet with Google Apps
| ^W^W G Suite ^W^W Google Workspace for Education).
| rurp wrote:
| > When you hire some PM or brand manager who will be
| responsible for things like this ask them precisely how they
| will navigate this situation.
|
| This is good advice for most companies, but for Google itself
| who could be trusted to evaluate these answers? From what I
| can see, their current product management is inept.
| game-of-throws wrote:
| The problem is brand management doesn't come up on
| leetcode, so they can't test for it in interviews
| gundmc wrote:
| This doesn't even make sense. Why would a brand manager
| role interview have leetcode questions?
|
| That being said, who the heck greenlit this change? This
| is parody level mismanagement.
| baobob wrote:
| The subtext is that Google's excessive emphasis on
| engineering over pretty much any other discpline is what
| led them into this mess. The parent comment was a joke
| wolpoli wrote:
| > Why would a brand manager role interview have leetcode
| questions?
|
| I took the original poster to mean that there should be
| leet-marketing questions for brand manager positions,
| like there are leetcode questions for developer
| positions.
| [deleted]
| closedloop129 wrote:
| >Is branding so critical that Duo can't be used?
|
| Actually, if they keep both apps for a while, Duo is the
| better name.
| hbn wrote:
| Duo makes way more sense for a casual video call app you'd
| use with your grandma or girlfriend. I'm not gonna Meet(tm)
| with my grandma, she's not my coworker. Hell, you can't
| even tell it's a proper noun when spoken out loud.
|
| "Skype me" - clear
|
| "FaceTime me" - clear
|
| "Duo me" - clear
|
| "Meet me" - meet you where?
| tintor wrote:
| It is easy:
|
| "Google Meet me" - clear
| JadeNB wrote:
| > "Duo me" - clear
|
| There are perhaps homonymous reasons why this might
| appeal to the sophomoric sort.
| gowld wrote:
| gowld wrote:
| Rackedup wrote:
| wnevets wrote:
| The Microsoft-acation of Google continues.
| saghm wrote:
| It's definitely hilarious that they literally have made so many
| different chat apps that they ran out of names they like! On
| the other hand, it's a bit confusing that upon realizing this,
| they've decided not only to just prune the number of chat apps
| but somehow end up duplicating names while doing this anyhow.
| Macha wrote:
| Old Meet has a history of this. It's first iteration was called
| Hangouts - no relation or connection to the more well known
| Google Hangouts, the consumer messaging app. One was hosted at
| hangouts.google.com and the other at hangouts.google.com/_/ -
| hence why g.co/hangouts redirects to old Meet and not Google
| Chat which was the anointed consumer successor
| yieldcrv wrote:
| And this is after Hangouts was used as a replacement for Google
| Voice for years, and then they kicked out Google Voice from
| Hangouts forcing people to use the Google Voice app again, for
| Google Voice
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| They've recently shoehorned "Chat" tab into Gmail, of all
| places! So no, folding together apps is not always a good
| thing.
| happyopossum wrote:
| That's not recent - I was using that in 2010...
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Google's chat products have been integrated with gmail since
| the start, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| No, it was different. It was never in the same _app_.
| Merging chat history into it was the best thing about it,
| and you could use it with any xmpp client (disclosure: I
| was developing one such client).
|
| But it never wasted valuable screen estate in a mail app to
| make you know that you can also chat. There was a separate
| app for that.
| munificent wrote:
| _> It was never in the same app._
|
| Yes it was. Look at the last screenshot in this article
| _from 2008:_
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2008/06/06/the-evolution-of-pre-
| launc...
| nextos wrote:
| It's sad because Google Talk was _good_. Jabber /XMPP on a web,
| for the masses.
|
| It had good federation, as it followed the standard. And Google
| even contributed JINGLE, a XEP (standard extension) for
| videocalls.
|
| I was making videocalls from Google Talk using a Nokia 770 in
| 2007. It feels we've gone backward once Google became dominant
| and Nokia got taken over.
| mtgx wrote:
| They've gone backward and the "spirit" of the old Google was
| literally killed when Sundar Pichai took over.
|
| The only reason he's still CEO is that he's milked the Google
| brand for all its worth and has made everyone a shit ton of
| money.
|
| Other than that, the direction he's been giving Google, as a
| brand, has been terrible.
| HeyItsMatt wrote:
| To replace Pichai the two largest Google shareholders would
| have to give a shit about the direction of the company. But
| they've been absent for longer than Pichai has been CEO.
| leoc wrote:
| Yes. Normally people are too quick to attribute power and
| fault to individuals, or so everyone says, but here's a
| case where two individuals really seem to have something
| close to full power and ability to fix at least the more
| obvious and readily fixable problems--they simply choose
| not to--and yet people usually diffuse the blame among
| "Google" or "the incentives".
| hot_gril wrote:
| What has he milked, though? I thought Google's money just
| comes from preexisting businesses like search, ads, YT,
| etc. None of the new stuff introduced under Sundar went
| anywhere, but all boats rose over the years for tech,
| especially in 2020.
| sneak wrote:
| According to Google, approximately _nobody_ used the
| federation capabilities of Google Talk except inbound
| spammers. It was absolutely not "for the masses". The masses
| all stay entirely within the censored and pruned walled
| gardens, then and now.
|
| It was all maintenance and antispam burden for no product
| benefit to users.
|
| Hackers vastly overestimate the desire of users to use
| federated systems.
| NPtzH9DW9Ejxxa9 wrote:
| Approximately nobody used the federation capabilities
| because approximately nobody used Google Talk... LOL
|
| In more seriousness, I know of quite a lot of people who
| chose to use Google Talk specifically because they could
| use it with their client of choice. (It also had a very
| wide reach for a while, thanks to its Gmail integration
| _edit:_ and federation)
|
| I honestly don't know anyone else who used Google Talk
| (other than whenever they checked their Gmail they'd also
| see any messages in it).
|
| In other words, Google killed off the two reasons why
| people used it ( _edit:_ reach and choice of client). Since
| then they've "replaced" pieces of it with multiple
| different apps (Hangouts, Chat, Allo, Duo, Meet), some of
| which they're finally deciding to merge back together, and
| in the process all they've ever done (and all anyone
| expects them to do with this merger) is _remove_ features.
| Usually exactly those features which were the _only_
| differentiation those services had from the competitors.
| Which means there 's no difference from a competitor with a
| wider reach (Zoom, 100 different IM apps,
| iMessage/FaceTime, etc.). Which means it's doomed to be
| terminated (and probably reincarnated) by Google again in a
| few years.
|
| (Maybe there was even a third reason to use Talk: it was
| _the_ IM with Google accounts. I don 't think there's been
| One IM To Rule Them All from Google at any point since
| then.)
| hot_gril wrote:
| Federation doesn't mean you can use any client. It means
| you can talk to clients on other (in this case non-
| Google) servers, which is a step further.
| NPtzH9DW9Ejxxa9 wrote:
| ... oops :)
|
| The two reasons were supposed to be reach and client
| choice. I got a bit side-tracked thinking about whether I
| should clarify that I was able to reach most of my
| contacts on it because of the "Gmail integration and
| federation".
| axus wrote:
| How is Google's share of the chat market doing these days?
| hot_gril wrote:
| This is how I feel when I get an SMS from an _email
| address_. There are 0 legitimate people who would message
| me that way.
|
| I have an entire rant on XMPP in some other HN thread, but
| basically I agree, chat federation is for nerds. And if
| XMPP wanted its federation dream to come true, the core
| standard (not including extensions) needed to be more rigid
| and keep up with the times. Instead, every sever ended up
| supporting a very different feature set, usually lacking
| things you'd take for granted in other chat apps.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I was a happy Google Talk user who had written a useful App
| Engine chatbot. It was really easy because App Engine had
| built-in XMPP support and each one had its own built-in
| address, so handling chat messages was even simpler than
| handling HTTP requests.
|
| But then Google stopped supporting XMPP from other domains
| (including their own domains) in their chat apps, which meant
| that I could only use my Google App Engine chat bot from non-
| Google chat programs, and that was a ridiculous situation.
| acdha wrote:
| There's a certain dark humor in the way that Google
| Talk/Reader kind of marks the apex of their reputation - they
| sacrificed so much trying to beat Facebook at its own game,
| and all they got for that devil's bargain was G+.
| rakoo wrote:
| If memory serves well that was also the time Wave was
| supposed to take our communication to the 21st century
| nfhshy68 wrote:
| Didn't Orkut actually have a good organic following in
| Brazil before they axed it for G+?
|
| So much stupid.
| anyfoo wrote:
| I was an intern at Google right around the time where
| Google+ (long before it was known under that name) became a
| thing for Google engineers internally. I sat next to a team
| that was majorly impacted by that.
|
| It's all subjective of course, but I could practically
| "feel" Google changing. Before I started my internship and
| still during it for the most time, Google was this
| incredible company that people, including me, were in awe
| about. All their products were _so good_. So technically
| refined, so methodical, you could really see that the
| people working on them were really good and really cared.
|
| And then it changed and became this "corporation", and
| nowadays it's sometimes seen as almost the opposite of what
| it was, working there being boring but stable. Part of that
| is probably just a normal consequence of the immense
| growth, but personally I can't shake the feeling that
| Google+ had a large part in it.
| acdha wrote:
| Thanks for that perspective - your subjective impression
| certainly matches my outside experience. That seemed like
| the point where the halo faded.
| nerdjon wrote:
| Reader really was the turning point for me personally.
|
| Before that I was a strong advocate for Google, I used any
| of their products that made sense and I would jump in and
| try anything new.
|
| Then reader was shut down and I had to start re-evaluating
| the services I used. Slowly that meant distancing myself
| from anything google.
| acdha wrote:
| Same. One of the big things I don't think their
| management appreciated was how Reader's users skewed
| towards people who influenced others -- journalists,
| libraries, the family "tech expert", etc. -- and how
| forcing them out of something which worked into something
| which simply wasn't ready to launch ensured that, unlike
| almost every previous Google launch, the coverage was
| predominantly negative. They'd had flops before (e.g.
| Buzz) but since nobody was forced to stop using something
| they liked to use the flop those didn't damage the brand
| anywhere near as much.
| HeyItsMatt wrote:
| Google+ and circles were a good idea and should have been
| given a team with a lot of free rein and left to grow
| organically.
|
| Google+ died because it was forced on everyone that had a
| Google and a Youtube account by psychopathic managers to
| "grow the numbers". This included forcing a realname policy
| on non-G+ users that explicitly did not want their online
| persona connected to their identity. It became the least
| cool platform on the internet overnight.
| acdha wrote:
| There were also some really bad decisions: for example,
| G+ on iOS would send you a push notification every time
| some rando who had you in their Gmail contacts joined G+
| or added you to a circle. There was no way to turn that
| off other than disabling notifications entirely or
| deleting the app for something like half a year. I chose
| the latter long before they implemented it.
|
| Circles were potentially interesting but if memory serves
| the first implementation was clumsy and I found it
| limiting because it required you to know what your
| followers were interested in and, if memory serves,
| didn't have a way to de-dupe shares so you'd see the same
| blog post shared by 20 people as separate notifications.
| My impression of that time was mostly seeing things I
| wasn't interested in or had seen before.
| spatulon wrote:
| I remember using something called Google Hangouts for video calls
| at my last job. What happened to that? I remember it being
| confusing because there was a seemingly unrelated Google Hangouts
| app for instant messaging.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Google Hangouts got split apart[1] . For consumers, they
| created duo for video and Android Message (with RCS) for text
| (after briefly launching and deleting allo). For business, they
| created Hangouts Meet for video and Hangouts Chat for text,
| which rapidly got renamed to Meet and Chat.
|
| In 2020/2021 Google Chat was been opened up to consumers [2].
| Now Meet and Duo are converging, the last nail in the coffin
| for the separate consumer/business app idea.
|
| [1] https://blog.google/products/messages/latest-messages-
| allo-d... [2] https://blog.google/products/workspace/latest-
| google-hangout...
| rrrhys wrote:
| My last interaction with it they started showing dialogs
| telling me I was using the wrong chat tool now.
|
| So I clicked through, and the core functionality of "chat via
| IM and then spill out to video chat" was nowhere to be found*
|
| *I'm sure it was there somewehere, but I was trying to join a
| damn meeting not learn a new UI
| avsteele wrote:
| I don't even know what I'm 'supposed' to be using.
|
| Which app goes with my google workspace account for work stuff?
| If I create a "Meet" room from within GMail and give my family
| the link as a text, now all of a sudden when they kick it asks to
| open the "Meet (original)", what does that even mean. How is a
| normal person supposed to understand this?
|
| I'm not even upset, it's just so goofy that this is the work
| product from one of the largest companies with the best
| engineers.
| jsmith45 wrote:
| My understanding is as follows:
|
| "Meet (original)" app is soon to be dead.
|
| Full interoperable Meet protocol support is being added to the
| old Duo (now called Meet). The original app is merely being
| kept around while the new duo roles out, and until they are
| sure that all relevant features have been added to the new app.
| Once this is all accomplished they plan to add a nag message to
| the old Meet app to convince people to move to the Duo based
| Meet app.
|
| If your family gets prompted to use Meet (original), it
| probably means they have received the recent update to the old
| meet app, but have not yet gotten the update to the old Duo
| app. It sounds like Google is doing phased rollout of the
| updates.
| fredley wrote:
| I love watching Google's attempts to unify/create/destroy
| messaging platforms, seeing them compete as if they are
| competitors on an episode of Takeshi's Castle.
| trebbble wrote:
| > as if they are competitors on an episode of Takeshi's Castle.
|
| "It looks as if the two teams are merging, like two black
| holes: if both suck, surely they'll suck even more together."
|
| "Right you are, Ken!"
| codethief wrote:
| After the article and this entire comment section, this mental
| image that you're drawing here caused me to fully break down. I
| mean I pinched a nerve in my back the other day (I feel it
| every time I breath), so now I'm more or less literally dying
| here laughing. Thank you! :)
| codethief wrote:
| > seeing them compete as if they are competitors on an episode
| of Takeshi's Castle.
|
| Obligatory Video:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=123&v=TZ-PeYaFniA
| joshstrange wrote:
| At this point I want to just create a copy/paste that I plop down
| everytime this happens (and yes, silly decisions like this happen
| at google often enough that I know I've typed it multiple times).
| Here we go:
|
| It will never cease to amaze me how much Google has bungled chat
| of any variety (text, audio, video). They seem completely
| incompetent from the outside looking in. Now I know a lot of it
| is due to the "People get promoted for launching a product not
| supporting one" and the fact that Google likes to throw things at
| the wall and see what sticks but this is getting absurd. Between
| the myriad of chat clients and mediums that Google has targeted
| to things like Wallet vs Pay (or the other iterations of this) I
| don't understand how the execs haven't just said "enough is
| enough" and removed the perverse incentives that have lead to
| this clusterfuck.
|
| I know this is not a Google-only problem and we can talk about
| other companies who reward similar behavior leading to less than
| desirable outcomes for the people using these products but Google
| seems to be the king dunce of this game where everyone loses
| except the people promoted for launching a PoC then riding off
| into the sunset.
|
| Do the Google execs just not see this? Are they oblivious to the
| issue? Are they trying (and failing miserably) to rectify it?
|
| I don't have answers to these questions but I sure hope someone
| at Google does because aside from a few "safe" products (Drive,
| Docs, Gmail) I don't feel comfortable using anything they put out
| with their track record (both of killing products, hello Reader,
| or leaving them in <1.0 state indefinitely).
|
| I feel bad for Android users, Apple has it's many faults but they
| coalesced on iMessage/Facetime very early on and haven't deviated
| from that path. Sometimes they are slow or unwilling to make
| changes but everyone knows they can trust those 2 services and
| that they are here for the long haul. It seems every other week
| we hear about green vs blue bubbles or how iMessage causes lock
| in. While lock in isn't great I guess I prefer that over the
| unstable ground that every Google-based chat program is built on.
| jfim wrote:
| It's not isolated to Google, for example there's the whole
| Microsoft Skype, Lync, Communicator, Skype for Business,
| Messenger, Yammer, and Teams stuff that went on for years.
|
| Google is just more visible on the customer side, with people
| going through Google talk, Buzz, Hangouts, Allo, Duo, Messages,
| Wave, Google+ Huddle, back to Hangouts, Hangouts in Gmail, and
| I'm not sure where they're at now.
| aeturnum wrote:
| The solution of solving your app branding problem by renaming the
| less used apps with the name of the most widely used app is
| something straight out of the Onion.
| nneonneo wrote:
| But no, it's even worse! They are renaming Duo to Meet, even
| though Duo has 10x more installs than (classic) Meet.
| cesarb wrote:
| > even though Duo has 10x more installs than (classic) Meet.
|
| How many of these "10x more installs" are due to Duo coming
| preinstalled by default on Android, which AFAIK isn't the
| case for Meet? A quick look at two Android phones I have
| nearby showed both have Duo installed (and never opened),
| while none have Meet.
| alephxyz wrote:
| Isn't that because Duo comes installed on new Android phones
| but Meet doesn't? It might be that Meet has more daily users.
| aeturnum wrote:
| Oh lol I guess that's true.
|
| I think of Duo as "one of the google apps I will never open"
| whereas I have meetings in Meet. I guess I figured that Meet
| got a pandemic bump? But when you put it that was it does
| indeed make even less sense.
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