Can someone tell me the difference between Google Meet, Google Hangouts, Google Duo and Google Chat?
Multiple of these support video and chat. I’ve used Hangouts and Chat and Duo before. Why the new brand “Meet”? And why have competing - even more importantly - confusing products at Google who seem to offer the same features?
I would like to, but cannot be bullish on Google as a video communications platform for this reason.
Google Hangouts = the original chat+video product which was semi-popular, but never got huge traction and mindshare the way WhatsApp, Slack, the original Skype, or the newer FaceTime did. And now Zoom and Teams.
So Google realized it had to compete better against all of those, all of those being very separate communications channels with different priorities. Hangouts could never be an awesome focused product if it had to be all things to all people.
So the competitor to Facetime/WhatsApp/FB Messenger is Google Duo. It's originally phone-based and designed primarily for 1-1, though it supports small groups.
The competitor to Zoom and Teams is Google Meet. It's enterprise-based for huge meetings.
The competitor to Slack is Google Chat.
And Google Hangouts is this zombie product that used to do everything, but never as well as any of the competitors, and still has moderate consumer usage so they can't kill it, though I'm sure they're doing their best to figure out how to get people to migrate eventually without losing them to a competitor in the process.
So despite all the flak Google gets for a fragmented messaging ecosystem, it's driven by extremely valid market reasons.
And Google isn't a video communications platform, it's a company. With several platforms, serving several totally distinct markets.
And they brand everything as a "tool for everyone" so no one can tell if they are the intended demographic until after they install the app or do an hour of research.
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.
Exactly, I can already create a Hangouts video call and share a link to invite others into the call. Doesn't make sense to create an entirely new service for this use case when Hangouts was designed for it (plus the new service will have a 60 minute limitation for free accounts). I agree with what GP said about Hangouts being a zombie product, but while there may be some valid market reasons for the product fragmentation, that fragmentation is also probably hurting them more than it's helping.
It's Slack + low-latency voice chat. With vastly less hassle than Teamspeak/Mumble/etc. Recipe for success right there, though I'm not sure how well their monetization has gone.
I haven't heard this term before, but I'm not sure it is a "rob and duplicate" if they are targeting a market segment that Slack never advertised towards nor was really designed for. Seems more like refreshing Slack for a niche, but it turns out to be a really big niche.
You would think Microsoft Teams would beat them, but they inflated it with Office 365 "Features". In comparison, Slack feels more like a complete product the first time you use it. Any other must-haves for your organization are treated as add-ons.
Funny ... none of those other "competitors" seem to feel the need to have 4 different products in order to operate in this space. Each of them is expanding its reach and capabilities, coming from a place of strength.
Google is just practicing "me-too"-ism and not really trying to solve a problem except some engineer is bored and some product person thinks these tools could become a threat to ad dollars if allowed to grow "unchecked".
Google owns YouTube (which you forgot to include YouTube Hangouts On Air). Google absolutely is a video comms company.
Microsoft keeps shooting own goals such as buying Skype, renaming the popular Lync product (not be confused with several other Microsoft products also named after corrupted versions of the work "link") to "Skype for Business" just to make everybody confused.
Then later "Microsoft Teams" comes out of nowhere. Maybe I live behind a rock but I see people using all kinds of chat programs, and all kinds of Microsoft software, but I've never known anybody who uses "Microsoft Teams" and I wonder if it is as popular as "Hipchat" but backed by a company which gives in more benign neglect than Atlassian can afford to.
One constant is that chat programs are constantly churning, another is that every chat program seems to get worse over time, the third is the level of functionality that chat programs have had since early 2000s. (I helped reskin Paltalk for Brazil and it seemed to do everything that Skype and Facebook Messenger did today) The fourth is that consumers and vendors seem to learn nothing from past successes and failures.
(e.g. AIM was great, but AOL failed. Chat clients are usually an attempt to lock you into using services from a particular company, so whether they "succeed" or "fail" has nothing to do with how they succeed or fail, but just a function of what state in the vendor lock-in cycle they are in.)
When I ask people what Instagram is for, they always describe it as Facebook, but without all the crap. Or as Facebook with posts sorted chronologically. Doesn't make me want to sign up with it, and end up with another Facebook.
For Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instragram they all started as distinct platforms and companies, so the question would be should they consolidate. IMO Facebook has made the right decision not to consolidate, as individuals bought into those platforms pre-acquisition and don't necessarily see themselves as part of a homogenous Facebook customer base.
> ...none of those other "competitors" seem to feel the need to have 4 different products in order to operate in this space.
So? Google wants to make more money than they do. What's wrong with that?
Also what's wrong with "me-too"-ism? Pepsi exists even though Coca-Cola is fine. Verizon exists even though AT&T works. What you call "me-too"-ism, I just call capitalism and healthy competition.
Google's strategy has nothing to do with ad dollars or anyone being "bored" and everything to do with making money in a different market.
You're basically arguing that Google shouldn't build more products to try to make more money? But that's not how public corporations work. Making money is their whole point.
Google is trying to kill off classic Hangouts, starting with G Suite and then later consumers. This was started in early 2019 [0] but late last year they shifted timelines.
>And Google Hangouts is this zombie product that used to do everything, but never as well as any of the competitors
So Google has Hangouts that is able to compete broadly in the consumer and business market but it's not quite good enough so the best answer is to let Hangouts slowly die and invent 4 new apps?
You should switch to Allo for IM. Oh, but if you want to send an SMS find something else, Hangouts might work. But if it is for work stuff you should use Chat. Well unless it's also for video then you should use Meet. But if it's for personal video then try Duo. Ah, well, nvm we killed Allo. Well now Meet is free for everyone so use that for personal use also, I guess.
Totally makes sense. What a cohesive strategy they have enacted to respond to market trends.
Why would anyone in their right mind trust a Google chat, video, or conferencing app? They reinvent the wheel every 3 years and set fire to their user base every time.
Hangouts was absolutely fine. They just needed to add more features and business tiers. Instead of updating Hangouts they invented a convoluted mess that is destined to fail.
The real problem is that there are too many chat servers period.
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.
So I'm going to disagree with you for three reasons here.
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."
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.
> If you have the technology for big meetings then you don't need to engineer anything else for 1-1 meetings.
Unfortunately not. A framework for large video meetings is necessarily routed through a central server which can add tremendous latency, even between two people near each other.
The architecture for 1-1 meetings tends to be peer-to-peer and focus on minimizing latency.
There are a lot of architecture tradeoffs between the different models. Choosing an optimal architecture for each product turns out to be quite necessary.
>Despite the fact that FB Messenger is explicitly designed for non-professional use and can do group chats people are still gravitating to Zoom.
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.
We use Meet at work. As far as I can tell, it's just Hangouts, but with a lot of stuff removed like the good chat integration that Hangouts previously had. I think they rebranded it B2B to try to kill it off to not compete with their new Duo and whatever else consumer offerings no one likes.
Bet they are kicking themselves now that Zoom ate their lunch in the pandemic. If they hadn't killed their consumer offering, they would have been well placed like Zoom was for a massive traffic boost. Bet whoever wrote Duo to replace Hangouts got a promo, though!
Hangouts used to be a single product that combined video, voice, direct, and group chats. It was quite good, especially with Google Voice layered in.
Google split that in to Meet (video/voice) and Chat (direct/group) in a half-hearted effort to compete with Slack and Microsoft Teams. You could also say they split it further via Google Voice, which became a standalone paid offering.
The issue is they still haven't solved for external chat in Hangouts Chat, which is a critical feature many rely on in legacy Hangouts, so that feature keeps the legacy version running I think.
They really botched the launch of Google Chat. The original deprecation timeline for legacy Hangouts was something like last June.
Meet was originally enterprise focused, with features like being able to record video, tight calendar integration, etc. Chat is also enterprise focused, similar to Slack.
Duo is targeted at consumers, and has e2e encryption among other things. It similar to Apple's FaceTime.
Hangouts was a brand that had both text and video. It has split into Chat (for text) and Meet (for video); both now revolve more around "rooms" as well as 1:1, and as such are primarily targeted at business users. Hangouts will now be going away and the legacy platforms migrated to the new.
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!)
(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.
Google Hangouts, Google Chat: Products that worked real well, had a lot of 3rd party integrations built for it and now deprecated because Google does not want to deal with legacy services. Their incentive structure there is to build the "next thing". Both were pretty "groundbreaking" apps when they came out. Hangouts managed to figure out and resolve a lot of issues of team chats and voice/video streaming issues over poor/unreliable connections. A lot of the novel UI and features they developed is now taken for granted.
Google Meet: An attempt at Zoom. Will soon be deprecated because Google does not want to deal with legacy services and the incentive structure there is to build the "next thing". Maybe Google Conference. Meanwhile Zoom is laser focused.
Google Duo: An attempt at Whatsapp with a whiff of FaceTime. Will soon be deprecated because Google does not want to deal with legacy services and the incentive structure there is to build the "next thing". Maybe Google Trio. Meanwhile Whatsapp, FaceTime are laser focused.
> Google Meet: An attempt at Zoom. Will soon be deprecated because Google does not want to deal with legacy services and the incentive structure there is to build the "next thing".
No way. Google Meet is how basically all meetings within Google happen, and is widely used by large G Suite enterprise customers. Create a calendar entry at work and you get a corresponding Google Meet meeting by default. It has integration with stand-alone videoconferencing units too, so the list of meetings for the given unit shows up on that unit and one tap and you're in the right meeting for the current time.
What's up does chat / does duo? We use zoom at work despite being on Google - meet really doesn't always work across even Google account tyoes. Ie Gmail vs gsuite vs some admin left some setting off for an external users domain and they cannot join.
Zoom I can host a no account conference that everyone can join (waiting rooms driving us all crazy)
> The only remaining question marks are around what happens with classic Hangouts, and what additional features is Chat going to get that make it more consumer-oriented before it replaces Hangouts in Gmail.
Google is killing off Hangouts slowly and surely. Over time it will start showing its age so bad, that people will move on.
I loved the Hangouts Dialer integration. Had to replace it with Voice.
I loved the Hangouts/Voice - GMail integration where I could send/receive texts from within GMail. Had to replace it with Voice.
Before I could do most tasks from within GMail. Now I HAVE to use atleast 3 different apps that don't talk to each other.
The competition on the other hand is going the opposite direction with great integrations in place.
> For one thing, you can't purchase Meet by itself -- it's an entitlement within G Suite
Have been using Meet ever since it came out.
Free/personal tier users could always join a Meet (not create one).
Before this announcement, Meet could only be hosted by a G Suite customer
> the Meet announcement this week explaining availability for "all users", you should see it as a side-effect of the business product's maturity, not as a consumer-first offering.
It's a knee jerk reaction to Zoom.
Everyone on this planet has a GMail account and if Google understood what customers want, Meet would have had Zoom for lunch.
Today, anyone who works remotely and is not tied into Teams, have heard of Zoom.
I also trust Google about as much as I’m capable of picking up the entire organization and throwing it; not at all. Any product Google releases has a half life of about a year at this point, betting even the tiniest bit of my business on them is a non starter.
Multiple of these support video and chat. I’ve used Hangouts and Chat and Duo before. Why the new brand “Meet”? And why have competing - even more importantly - confusing products at Google who seem to offer the same features?
I would like to, but cannot be bullish on Google as a video communications platform for this reason.