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The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

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Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#371

Post by erentz »

jordanthoms wrote: post #164

This is just an utter mess. Google keeps ignoring and trying to kill Hangouts (which should still be called GChat, that was an incredibly stupid rebrand), and building new products instead of investing in the one which actually has some potential. Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from the early Gmail days and kept investing in it. It was great on the ear…

Is no one in charge of marketing or strategy in Google? Surely you can rewrite all the code underlying the product you like, forklift replace it if you want. But why endlessly rebrand existing products. Just keep the brand going. Or converge/consolidate branding even if the underlying software might be different between target markets, like Microsoft did with all its different messaging platforms over time. Now it’s Skype. And Skype for Business. (They’re very different.)

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#372

Post by blhack »

otabdeveloper1 wrote: post #258
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a PM? I am getting insight into how google works because this sounds like a bunch of idiotic internal wars between acronym teams instead of focusing on making actual useful products.

> 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's only product is advertising

Weird, because I pay them monthly for google play music, and for google apps, and for youtube red, and for youtube TV.

I also have several android devices, and look forward to paying them every time I get into a waymo.

Google has LOTS of products. The "you aren't the customer you're the product!" redditism is just wrong. It's something that sounds really insightful if you don't know anything about the company, or are trying to stir up drama.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#374

Post by zanny »

brendanmc6 wrote: post #51

I have lived back and forth between Europe and the USA over the last few years. Communication is always the most difficult part of the move. It's a reminder of how far off our tech is from the true ideal. In Europe, everyone has WhatsApp. For a while, this was great! One app, one "to reply" list. A taste of what messaging could be. I quickly found myself frustrated. WhatsApp relies on phone numbers, which muddies up…

And if your "Only One Messaging App" is a monoculture proprietary product with dubious profit goals than you can count me, and large swaths of tech minded people, out.

The only way forward is either Matrix or something like it. And even then you need enough momentum to bend all the walled gardens of Google / MS / FB / etc to have to play ball with a common federated protocol. Good luck getting that without the ludicrous budgets the market leaders have to throw at trying to force everyone into their own proprietary chat bubble.

We almost had that in the mid 2000s and the Google jumped ship first to Hangouts. They basically started this whole mess by going from a time where MSN Messenger, Facebook Messenger, and Google Talk were all speaking the same XMPP language. Since then all three have gone total proprietary with design decisions around locking people in than providing a useful product.

Some things are fine to have proprietary giants trying to fight for your eyeballs over, such as entertainment. But communication should be something we can agree on, as a society. This is the kind of thing we should have international interoperable standards on. Email was a lucky break that SMTP and IMAP ended up being mandatory, because even today Google is trying their damn hardest to implement Gmail in anything other but an interoperable way but know it would destroy their product to ever turn the compatibility off.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#375

Post by AJ007 »

chalupa-man wrote: post #248
xte wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small sidenote: chats are shitty concept in general. They have had a reason in a past era when voice coms are expensive and limited, they have a reason in terminals to broadcast few messages, no more. For real communication we have letter so in digital world mails or we have phone calls so in digital world VoIP one's extended with eventually video/screen sharing and conferencing capabilities, no more. Discord, Slac…

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…

As someone who hires and employees remote developers, it’s a massive red flag when a new developer wants to have a voice call.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#376

Post by danmaz74 »

stephenhuey wrote: post #365
danmaz74 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You need a trained and certified Master because otherwise people new to Scrum might not know to pick hats You certainly don't need a certified scrum master. Ideally, the scrum master should be somebody who is already in the team. A scrum master who does just that is really a project manager, and having a project manager is, IMHO, antithetical to doing scrum.

According to scrum, the scrum master is not the product owner and not a member of the dev team, but rather an objective person who does just the scrum master duties, e.g. facilitating when needed, e.g. making sure people are following scrum instead of getting distracted, not stalled by roadblocks, not taking marching orders from more than one product owner, etc. In scrum, the dev team organizes its time after priorit…

In my experience, and from what I remember from my own training, the scrum master can very well be part of the team. Having somebody external, objective, well trained, and available exactly when the team needs him looks very good... but pretty difficult to do in practice.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#377

Post by jjulius »

ryan_j_naughton wrote: post #200
bane wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's basically Hangouts. I sms more from my computer than my phone but it's all synced everywhere. I'm even smsing with a co-worker from my tablet right now.

Your "That's basically Hangouts" arrangements statement is true when it comes to: >It's also synced to all my devices flawlessly. But as for Hangouts being flawless messaging and not just some buggy app, I have to disagree. Often I'll type a message and hit send, it will stay in sending and never actually send. I'll need to kill the app and when I reopen, the message is gone but if I retype it and hit send, it sends…

>Often I'll type a message and hit send, it will stay in sending and never actually send. I'll need to kill the app and when I reopen, the message is gone but if I retype it and hit send, it sends immediately. This is on a Pixel 2 with Project Fi or WiFi.

I have a Pixel 2, with Project Fi, and haven't ever really had this issue.

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#379

Post by throw6457gd »

blhack wrote: post #370
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

G+. The slogan at the time was "one unified Google" -- to I think rightfully correct a mistake that Google had a very diverse set of products many of which did not properly interact. As I understand it, GChat wasn't seen seen as able to integrate well into G+. So Hangouts was built on the G+/social infrastructure. To that team's credit they did somewhat seamlessly move users over from GChat to Hangouts without many h…

There must be a name for a concept that seems like it would be obviously true, but actually isn't. I don't think it's a bad thing that google ha a diverse set of products that didn't work together. I don't need my google calc/excel to integrate with youtube, and I don't need google play music to integrate with gmail. Google should look at these things as individual companies, which it seems like is something that the…

Truthiness

Re: The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts

#380

Post by fastest963 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #207
ericabiz wrote: post #43

I count six different apps here: Allo Duo Messages Hangouts Hangouts Chat Hangouts Meet I’m technical and I follow news about Google, and I can still barely tell what app does what and for whom. How is the vast majority of the world supposed to keep up? This is ridiculous.

Don't forget the native Android SMS app.

That's Messages
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