Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

1) A product has to have simple UX to achieve primary use cases easily. Even if all features can be engineered, building a simple intuitive UI that works for Slack chat, 1-1 calls, and big meetings is probably impossible.

2) Engineering-wise they're also very different. The behind-the-scenes architecture for 1-1 or small groups, versus huge meetings, is also totally different. Similarly whether chat persists in long-lived "rooms", or only for the length of a video call, or only between two people.

3) Finally, people making corporate buying decisions want a product that fits easily into their conceptual understandings. Slack created a category. Google had to respond with a product branded specifically for that category, not a mega-product that also does the things in that category, because people don't "get" that for whatever psychological reason.

You're right that Hangouts did all this previously. But that's also why Hangouts failed. It was a "jack of all trades, master of none."

I would love to see how a branding team continues to justify this "Google $generic_word" branding model to the brass at Alphabet. People were unlikely to make "Hangout" a verb like "Zoom", and they definitely won't do that with "Meet". The only thing this seems to accomplish is reinforce Google's reputation for rushing things to market and pulling support too early.

I really think these rushed entries by tech giants only benefit the Zooms and Slacks in the specific space. When potential customers are bogged down by choosing between Teams, Discord, Telegram, Messenger, or whatever other chat app is out there, they are more inclined to choose the familiar incumbent.

From a back-end perspective there is a real difference between a platform where a teacher can lecture to 500 students, as opposed to one where people talk to each other over an ad-hoc WiFi network.

However, the story of messaging applications is that something new comes along, like CuSeeMe, people are blown away by it, that thing inevitably deteriorates over time technically (why?) and often deteriorates socially (I switched from Skype to a real SIP phone since ever since I went to Montreal I get these ladies calling me up who want to speak French and I think show me something I don't know what to see.)

It's not easy to see progress. Facebook messenger doesn't seem that different from AIM except one of them is tied to Facebook and the other is tied to AOL.

Many of these video chat programs use WebRTC and related standards, but messaging applications have resisted any kind of standardization. (XMPP is popular for cops, firefighters, and soldiers, but ordinary people see those angle brackets and you've lost them)

Most people don't understand the real differences between the platforms and the benefits they get from them, but they know that every time your company partners with a customer or vendor that uses Slack you end up logging into multiple instances of Slack. Often they make you a channel to talk about your project, but for them it is one of 50 channels they monitor on Slack that are about anything from cat photos to immediate crises, so you might not get any replies if you hop in a week later.

Some people I talk to want me to install WhatsApp, other people want me to install everyone else.

The rest of the world gets it: I don't need to buy an iPhone to call other iPhone users, I don't need to have a Verizon plan to call an AT&T customers.

The reason why chat clients don't improve is that they aren't really competing -- if you had a common protocol then chat clients could compete on being better at helping you with your workload. Instead they remain a mechanism for enforcing platform lockin. In the end that's what's likely to happen to Zoom if it runs into any financial turbulence -- company X will buy it because they think they can use it in some way to lock in customers.

If the EU wanted to do something to improve digitial ecosystems it would be making standardized messaging a thing, but it is hard to do that: you can't stop a few high school students from making a walled-garden chat systems, but you really have to stop billion dollar companies from doing it.

Facebook doesn't seem to be secure.

I bet people don't want to have hours of recordings attached to their real name, so creating random account on something like Zoom seems like an great.