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How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

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Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#41
post #22

It is remarkable how thoroughly Google has munged their communications platforms. Especially as an iPhone user, I am constantly befuddled trying to get a semblance of a well organized contact list between my google apps, never mind a correspondence between the iPhone native contact list. I have a google voice number, and generally I assume that messages get to me one way or another. The most recent baffled was finall…

It’s not just Google. Have you tried Skype for Business lately? Meetings are incomprehensible.

Teams is supposed to fix everything... but my O365 tenant doesn’t have it yet.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#42
post #40

All these people bemoaning the loss of jabber. Xmpp is awful for mobile connections. There's a reason no one else is using it. Google tried the longest and they get the most flack for it.

> There's a reason no one else is using it.

because they cannot own the client, and therefore, cannot completely collect the valuable part of the service - user data and activity data etc.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#43
post #32
post #23

>So you have to use the Google Hangouts on a separate tab in the browser, or it gets juxtaposed to your Gmail, which will slow your lastest i5 laptop down and makes your fan whirr like crazy just to have one conversation. Fucks sake, this annoys me to no end. Here is a product that's clean, lean, and fast. 5 years of development later and you have a bloated, energy-chugging, slow and irritating piece of shit, with ab…

But Google+. Do you not realize the value of Google+??

I suspect you wouldn't been downvoted so far if there was a sarcasm marker on this, of some sort.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#44
post #23

>So you have to use the Google Hangouts on a separate tab in the browser, or it gets juxtaposed to your Gmail, which will slow your lastest i5 laptop down and makes your fan whirr like crazy just to have one conversation. Fucks sake, this annoys me to no end. Here is a product that's clean, lean, and fast. 5 years of development later and you have a bloated, energy-chugging, slow and irritating piece of shit, with ab…

The story of basically every native Windows app that got rewritten as a web app. It'll run in Chrome on Linux, but good luck writing a GTK+ or Qt app that will interface with the underlying protocol.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#46
There is a running joke within Google that the best way to get promoted is to create another chat or video conferencing app.

Is it really a joke at this point, though?

Googler engineering leaders and teams engaging in the replacement of good chat tech with worse happens every year or two. All to demonstrate "cross-org impact" and climb the promo ladder. This is in fact the driving force behind many of the complaints mentioned in the article.

A sad and systemic failure, indeed.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#47
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voice/Hangouts has felt like an abandoned application for many years, even though it's potentially one of the best products Google has ever made. They really seem to stop at v1 for almost all of their products and have not the slightest idea how to monetize them.

> Voice/Hangouts has felt like an abandoned application for many years, even though it's potentially one of the best products Google has ever made. That's probably WHY Google Voice was one of the best products Google put out.

it was originally a company called grandcentral and eventually acquired by google. they basically left it as it for YEARS

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#48
post #39
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meet though is exclusively Chrome. They have now cut Safari out of the picture as well... https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7317473

Wow, not even Firefox support? Hasn't Google heard of something called the open web?

Firefox was first to go. I'm sure they were ecstatic to have an excuse to end support when Firefox changed how their add-ons work.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#49
post #32
post #23

>So you have to use the Google Hangouts on a separate tab in the browser, or it gets juxtaposed to your Gmail, which will slow your lastest i5 laptop down and makes your fan whirr like crazy just to have one conversation. Fucks sake, this annoys me to no end. Here is a product that's clean, lean, and fast. 5 years of development later and you have a bloated, energy-chugging, slow and irritating piece of shit, with ab…

But Google+. Do you not realize the value of Google+??

Yeah, generating lots more page views and clicks, because I can no longer effectively search for what I want and instead have to manually sort through a ton of poorly targeted and differentiated results.

Re: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?

#50
post #22

It is remarkable how thoroughly Google has munged their communications platforms. Especially as an iPhone user, I am constantly befuddled trying to get a semblance of a well organized contact list between my google apps, never mind a correspondence between the iPhone native contact list. I have a google voice number, and generally I assume that messages get to me one way or another. The most recent baffled was finall…

It’s not just Google. Have you tried Skype for Business lately? Meetings are incomprehensible. Teams is supposed to fix everything... but my O365 tenant doesn’t have it yet.

Teams is a joke. It’s an alpha level product at best. At worst it’s black hole on the user voice forums for features that were in IRC and a constant memory leak. The vscode team needs to teach the teams team how to properly write an electron app.
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