Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

(Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work on any of these products)

Hangouts was born out of Google+, and that merged with gchat. They rebooted it's UI a few times through all of this. Over the years they put more and more features onto it (like sms app integration, phone dialing, and many other things). If you used Hangouts as your sms app, you could txt from hangouts within Gmail. I think it became a franken-app that was just too hard to add to or improve anymore.

Duo / Allo: These were to be the consumer focused products. Allo obviously failed (I actually liked a lot about the UX of this app, I'm really sad it died). Duo seems to be a Facetime competitor. It focused on 1:1 video chats for a long time, with lots of fun little thing being added on (like the animation overlays), and leaving video messages. The UI is dead-simple, click a picture, get a video call. Tech wise there are a couple cool things. [1] it is end-to-end encrypted. [2] It is optimized for mobile. That means it adjusts very quickly to bandwidth and latency changes, which is great for cellular networks. Note that it has some group chat now, but only on mobile. (there is a desktop browser version, but that's still only 1:1). It also has integration with Google's phone app on android. EDIT: few other fun things: Duo and Allo can be used without a Google Account, only a phone # is needed. Allo had a web app so you could send/receive from your computer, this tech ended up being the foundation for the sms Messages app web client (both were available for a while and the UI and behavior was exactly the same [2.1]).

Chat: obviously a slack competitor. It has bot integration, threads, and probably some other things. As a daily user of this, I will say message delivery and notification are much better than what old hangouts used to provide (when you are on desktop and mobile a lot, notifications were sometimes not great. It seems better with Chat).

Meet: stand alone video. While it seems very similar to the old hangouts video product, I feel like it's been improving quickly and there are lots of smaller features that I enjoy. When a meeting gets to a certain size, it defaults to muting new people that join (this is minor, but proven to be nice). Desktop sharing on it works rather well (at least on chromebooks, I can share a tab, a window, or my whole desktop. Sharing just a tab is nice so I don't accidentally share my email with outside people for example). For enterprise, you can use Meet to do live streaming to really large crowds[3]. There will be a normal meeting for presenters, then everyone watching gets a youtube like video player, and this supports up to 100k people. It assume better bandwidth, so it doesn't degrade on low bandwidth as well (or so I read, but maybe it's better now). Meet has lots of other enterprise features[4], and has a focus on meeting rooms, hardware, UI and things that go with installing this product into rooms. They also have Jamboards, so you can do digital whiteboard that can be shared with everyone on a call.

All 4 of these products got to start somewhat fresh tech-wise, and you can see that they are able to move rather quickly now, which is something classic Hangouts just wasn't allowing teams to do. Was it the right call? /shrug. For GSuite, there is at least Chat+Hangouts interop, so there is a migration path between those products. And I believe it was announced long ago that Meet+Chat would replace Hangouts for consumer, just not clear if/when (talked about Jan 2019 [5]). They were meant to be consumer vs business focuses, which seems to allow PM/UX not to fight about which features and designs they should move towards. The old hangouts mobile app had TONS of buttons in the past, and it could get confusing for non-tech savvy people, and I think they wanted to avoid this.

[1] https://support.google.com/duo/answer/9280240?hl=en

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Duo

[2.1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/23/14721280/google-allo-chat...

[3] https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9308630?co=GENIE.Plat...

[4] https://roomdesignguide.withgoogle.com/equipment-locations/i...

[5] https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/22/18193303/google-hangouts-...

Can confirm, I can create a google account on android without phone number but I cannot do so on desktop. When using the android-created account on desktop, it requires (not optional) a phone number.

A phone number on a fully functional google account isn't optional, at least in western Europe (though I doubt another country is better because then people would just VPN to there).

I once did some work for Google that required accounts to do the project (existing accounts weren't a good fit for the project). They couldn't provide us with accounts because it was a huge hassle and another team, so I ended up standing in line for a long time getting my identity verified a half dozen times for various prepaid sim cards with throwaway phone numbers and I think we billed them for it. If there had been another way, they'd simply have told us...

In summary, they're a convoluted, catch-up merchant.

How about they stay out of a market unless they're innovating.

I've not seen them nail any of this stuff.

1) Is it really? Slack already has chat, and 1-1 calls. I don't see a huge UX leap to expand 1-1 calls to big meetings.

2) So what? If you have the technology for big meetings then you don't need to engineer anything else for 1-1 meetings. That's just UI at that point.

3) This makes sense and is probably the main reason hangouts failed. However, I wonder if they could have multiple sub-products under the hangouts umbrella but still keep it a unified piece of software.

I think the problem in this space is that expressed/accepted demand for Enterprise and Consumer offerings are very different, and the platform owners don't fundamentally respect the business. All platform companies saw these features as sideshows that drive engagement for something else. At work I talk about a "General Theory of Chat Clients Always Getting Worse" -- there is literally no messaging client on the market that is better than AOL/Yahoo/Google messenger of 20 years ago. That's because they aren't viewed as products.

Enterprises seem to be going for "collaboration" solutions that integrate video/audio with content like documents and chat. Think of a venn diagram of Slack/Files/Conferencing. Microsoft delivered Teams (aka Chat/SharePoint/1:1 or adhoc Calling/Group Conferencing, Google has Meet/Chat/Currents/Drive.

People just want to talk to people. Facetime and Facebook Messenger are great examples of that. But... even those platforms stick these functions in the ghetto of complementary products that a more like glue, they exist to keep you on the bigger platform. Google Duo is looking to be that kind of product.

The magic of Zoom is they made conferencing a standalone product got normal people to discover and adopt a vertically integrated, focused collaboration product that does one thing well. Zoom is really an iteration of Webex without Cisco bullshit, and is a demonstration of the beauty and magic of competition. My wife's circle of friends are now paid Zoom customers. That's unthinkable in other contexts... how many mom groups or PTOs were buying Webex? (And conversely, how many O365 enterprises skipped free SkypeForBusiness/Teams and buy Zoom!)