441–450 of 504 posts
At this point it would be better if they would just discontinue Talk, Hangouts, Allo, Duo, etc, etc, etc and focus on a single communications app. Give them a 6 month deadline and for the love of God, have a single app that I can use for chat, voice and video.
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Why Google felt betrayed by Microsoft: Larry Page commenting about it at I/O 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pmPa_KxsAM&t=2h54m20s Strategist commenting about it: http://www.ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-strategie... Microsoft's one-way integration was them not exposing presence and typing notifications to services they federated with (but they were "taking" that data from others).
Microsoft does support full federation. As long as you federate Skype servers. I know that's a bit lame, but since they bundle most of their products with most of their other products in licensing, no one in business seems to care. Google doesn't do even that, as they don't offer anything on-site (anymore). They have seriously failed on business markets. I don't know about consumer market, because I mostly just send…
I don't get that people complain about Microsoft software being closed, and anti-competitive ... well any cloud software is more closed and anticompetitive than Microsoft ever was on it's worst days : it's not that you can't get good documentation that the application you're using uses ... you can't even get at the data at all, in most cases.
Google is the best at this out of all the cloud players, but it's still abysmal. And yes, you can download exports. And there's Google takeout. Is the data there all the data Google apps use to work ? No. Quite simply, no, it isn't. There's plenty more they won't ever give to you. And that's ignoring the fact that there's 1000s of developers making apps for Google and about 5 working on takeout. Why should Google be forced ? Well, that's the standard we're applying to microsoft, isn't it ?
And this is by far the most flexible cloud provider exporting data. They're not being jerks. I don't even think they're trying to be anticompetitive. Nevertheless, they're far more anticompetitive than Microsoft.
And of course, conveniently, the DRM-breaking is now a crime on things like iTunes and Hulu and ... because it involves actually creating access into someone else's computer system or at least changing their code (even though you're paying for it to do things and only getting it to let you exercise rights granted to you by law, like copying a movie). And the result is the same. iTunes, Hulu, even Play are ridiculously expensive, idiotically restrictive (buy movie on iTunes for a trip, go to Europe, log in to hotel wifi ... no movies. But no worries ! I copied that movie onto my device first. Nope, it won't play. WTF).
Same thing goes for app stores. There Apple is the big instigator of forced-incompatibility (or otherwise: your app won't run without Apple's permission hardware). Remember the flood of articles scaring people that microsoft might do this ? They're still at it, with the BIOSes that supposedly won't run anything but windows.
The dreaded "the right to read" scenario ( https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html ) is far, far closer on the cloud and mobile than it is on your own machines.
How do you manage to keep up with the latest messenger fashion ? I gave up when people changed from MSN to Skype. Then they changed to Facebook and now they are probably using Whatsapp or some other I don't know of. When I want to chat I use IRC. And I've also setup asterisk as a SIP server for voice calls.
used wechat because lived in China, but uninstalled everything Chinese after leaving that place, tried Facebook messenger (later Lite) for few months until decided i don't really need to have Facebook account and anything to do with Facebook, which means i ain't gonna install WhatsApp either, so there are not many other options left
OK, Google Talk was a dead man walking for some time now. Even if it's not a nice decision for open standards at least they made a final decision whether they are either improving it or killing it. However, Google have completely lost their mind with messengers. GTalk, Hangouts, Messages, Messenger, Allo, Duo, Chat, Meet. Some available only on mobile. Some supporting SMS, some working only with SMS. Allo having G as…
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My point is that companies forced to do this would create abstruse formats, and then even misimplement them, to thwart those trying to interoperate.
Oh yeah. They'll probably try that. That will either be defeated with tons of sweat as it largely was in products like OpenOffice or the legal recommendation modified to attempt to deal with it. It might also be handled in the courts if the law includes language that specifically instructs to attempt simple, readable protocols to "facilitate interoperability." Obfuscations could be argued as the opposite of that in c…
Then why do you need open standards? Every major proprietary IM protocol has been re-implemented by open source software, including Hangouts: https://bitbucket.org/EionRobb/purple-hangouts
It might also be handled in the courts if the law includes language that specifically instructs to attempt simple, readable protocols to "facilitate interoperability.
XMPP, the thing Google is being roasted for dropping support for, is often decried as being very complex and hard to implement correctly. If genuinely open protocols often end up like this, how can you possibly punish companies for writing complex, hard to implement protocols?
...and this is why I no longer use any chat clients from Google... WhatsApp and Viber connect me to more than half the planet, and SMS, shitty as it is, works with just about everyone in the world. For everything else, we have email or file sharing.
personally i would not mind if we would use email as chat, there are already clients able to do that, it would solve lot of problems
Can somebody please explain to me Google's messaging strategy? As a Voice, Talk, Hangouts, SMS user for what feels like the last decade, I am so incredibly confused that I want to walk into Google and fire all 18 of the 19 messaging teams. That way at least we'll have one singular group to yell at when things go wrong. Here's the Google Messaging landscape as far as I know it: - Google Talk in Gmail: I think this is…
Add yet another one to that list: RCS https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/04/google-brings-rcs-the-next...
Can somebody please explain to me Google's messaging strategy? As a Voice, Talk, Hangouts, SMS user for what feels like the last decade, I am so incredibly confused that I want to walk into Google and fire all 18 of the 19 messaging teams. That way at least we'll have one singular group to yell at when things go wrong. Here's the Google Messaging landscape as far as I know it: - Google Talk in Gmail: I think this is…
Thank you. I think this was the most complete post I've seen of this and largely lines up with what I know of it as well. The worst part is they have tons of really great things, but rather than improving and working on getting more users they keep starting over. I feel like at one point they were working towards an experience where you could: * text, voice or video chat (and flip between them in any conversation at…
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I find it a very lame excuse. If they care about it, it shouldn't depend on others. In the end, it shows they didn't care enough.
Probably costs a bunch for not that much convenience though. Tragedy of the commons in action.
Google got talk working almost by accident. And it was the most feature-complete chat app for years, at least. And then, they abandoned it for years. This isn't to say it had many features, it had few. But it worked well, was integrated with gmail, was compatible with XMPP and geek's IMs, ...
After that, they killed all the compatibility before making an app that was yet again a lot more feature complete : hangouts. And hangouts got the best features for quite a while.
And then Hangouts started wildly bashing it's weight around. Forcibly taking SMS was one thing. Refusing federation. Forcing Google+ account and lots of extra info. And so on, and so forth. Hangouts was a good app, but created a lot of ill will in the process.
And then it was seemingly abandoned. Feature frozen, with the excuse that all these features had resulted in an extremely difficult to maintain app that they couldn't add features to. Chatting without having a gmail being a big one (whatsapp allowing you to chat with "everyone in your phonebook"), status, reliability (and showing clearly and timely when it isn't/cannot be reliable because disconnected, not 3h after connectivity gets restored), video call quality, adding non-gmail users or just screens to video chats, not allowing bot interaction, apps in the video chat, ...). And this lasted for years.
Inside of China, some chat apps demonstrate how chat apps can be monetized in a way that users appreciate : allow chatting with companies and give those companies the ability to show interfaces for transactions. E.g. buy a coffee. Line at starbucks ? Open up whatsapp, because you're in starbucks it shows starbucks as a contact (you can add it permanently) and there's a button "order coffee". Select what kind of buvaranicpoppafrappadongieccino you want, you pay through the app, and you've just skipped the queue. Next time you do it 5 minutes before arriving. App takes cut of transaction value (just like credit card payment does).
Next, other apps turn up. Whatsapp, Lyne, ... and so forth. And they caught up with Hangouts. Surpassing it in some ways, behind in others. Mostly they're superior in letting you find the people you can chat with. And then they passed it by. And then they left it far, far behind. It's not (yet) the case that they truly dominate hangouts in features, but it's getting close.
And lo and behold : people switched to the (sorry) better apps. I'm not entirely sure why anybody is either surprised or complaining. These changes look a lot like they're making it worse, not better, but we should give them the benefit of the doubt.
This blog post mentions following messenger technologies (Google has even more not mentioned here): - Google Talk - Hangouts Meet - Hangouts Chat - Android Messages (something new, never heard of it) (And non-google messenger technologies: SMS, RCS). How user is supposed to navigate all these? Given that all these things are inferior to even Facebook and is ICQ-grade.
But Facebook Messenger now wants to eat Snapchat's lunch and is offering Snapchat functionality. Great, that annoying cat lady who I'm "friends" with now can spam my Messenger app with pics of her cat. And I shared a picture with a friend and Messenger suggested I posted it to it's NotSnapChat. It's a single button inside the chat bubble, which makes me wonder if the publishing happens directly when I push that butto…