Earlier quoted context omitted.
> focusing on making actual useful products A 'product' is something you sell to clients. Google's only product is advertising, and they don't need to focus on making better advertising because they are a monopoly. Everything else Google does is just a smokescreen for investors and a creeping fear that they won't be able to exist in a post-monopoly world.
Google also sells hardware (phones, Nest), Cloud services, gSuite...Ads represent 80-85% of Google revenue but that share is decreasing over time.
The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts
341–350 of 402 posts
Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://meet.jit.si/
Never heard of this before, but it looks awesome! Do you know if rooms expire after a certain amount of time? If so I might install it on my server and have a forever running meeting.
Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was there when that happened. The whole rebranding/transition of GTalk/GChat was the result of some political muscle flex by Social and its army of PMs, then after Social lost its favorite child status Allo was born as a result, championed by another army of PMs, and I wonder if Duo had a similar story of birth. >Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from t…
This is exactly what I suspected Google to be like but I always assumed I was just stereotyping. A bunch of competing teams and internal politics frustrating the ability to have coherence and "synergy". I once worked at a startup that made the mistake of hiring an entire remote product team from silicon valley. All they did in the year before they mass resigned was inject drama and politics into everything and force…
Interesting, because it seems (from the outside) like that was what Microsoft was like internally for years. Blogs like mini-ms seemed to confirm some of that, but of course that was "just one side" of the story.
Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts
#344Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts
#345Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts
#346What gets me about the entire Google messaging ecosystem is how they manage to be so bad. My messaging system of choice is Signal, and it looks to be about three or four full time people that work on that. It manages to handle SMS, Grop Chat, Video Chat, and End to End encrypted chat for me. I imagine there are more Vice Presidents assigned to Allo then there are employees at Signal, and signal manages to out compete…
Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
There no polite way of expressing it: Hangouts Chat is a shitty product. We moved to Chat when Hipchat was closed. Because we’re using G-suite it seem sensible to go with Chat, but everyone hates it. The UI is useless, Google try to be clever about “conversation” and tries to group them together, but now people miss most conversations that happen when they aren’t looking. Notification is broken, you can only get to m…
To be fair, in Slack I also miss important conversations when they happen in threads while I'm not looking.
Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
I couldn't possibly disagree more. Voice comms are _hideously_ inefficient and limited compared to chats and virtually always an inferior option in a group context, in a professional context, and especially for a professional team. They always interrupt one person, and every additional person involved is a decision about how much more time and attention to take and how many more interruptions to make balanced against…
Try the two with a chess timer aside. I have done that many time and see the result. Doing a thing at a time, so being interrupted, prove to be FAR more productive than doing many thing at a time. Of course if you interact with professional people, if you have to interact with brainless individuals that can't even express themselves in their language well... It's another story, but even in this case it's wasted time.
Of course voice will be faster--eight out of ten times at least one involved party's main goal is just to get off the phone.
Optimizing for time is a mistake. Optimize for disruption (I can switch back to other work while waiting for a chat reply--there's context-switching overhead there, but not nearly as much as a phone call), retention (I can refer back to what someone said in chat, rather than "hey, Jane, what was that hostname again?", waiting for an atrocious speech-to-text conversion, or manually seeking around in a call recording), and mutual investment in communication (professional or not, a synchronous call usually has at least one participant that wants to be there less than the other[s]--in chat, people can participate when they're most interested in doing so, meaning that their contributions are less half-assed).
There are situations where sync is best (trying to pitch something or persuade colleagues of something is a big one--it's just easier to reject/be reluctant without engaging critically via chat for some reason). But a lot of the time chat is more efficient.
I've found that many people I've worked with who strongly dislike chat are not practiced or comfortable writers in general, and, after some training (if such folks are willing, I've had them take documentation, presentation-building, or RFC/RFO writing tasks as practice), they tend to be much, much happier about (and better at!) textual communication.
Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try https://preview.web.skype.com/ It is the universal Skype written in React (works natively on windows and electroned on other Desktop OSes)
> Browser not supported > Use Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome to access Skype for Web (Preview) experience. > Alternatively, download Skype on your desktop computer. That is on up to date Firefox on Debian unstable. Bravo.
Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use skype right now to chat with some friends and it actually works really well for me. Cross platform, video calls, captioning now available is really awesome.
... captioning? You mean, Speech-To-Text that gets forwarded to the NSA, otherwise used by Microsoft for who-knows-what while the transition to an ad company with Win10 ? Sounds great, but I don't think that's going to be a good alternative for the people who are looking to dump Facebook/WhatsApp/Google over privacy concerns.
Useful for people that are deaf and hard of hearing....