[czhu12]

I’m very puzzled by Google chat to be honest. It’s a massive missing piece in the Google workspace toolchest. Teams is the central place for companies on Microsoft, and arguably the most sticky part of the MS cloud productivity stack. So it can’t be lost on Google how important it is to have something here.

Google slides, docs, sheets are fantastic products, but Google chat is so clunky and awkward that it seems hard to believe they really can recommend it as a slack / teams alternative. What’s keeping them from just

A: making it better?

B: buying one of the dozen other alternatives? All I really need is a log in with Google for our company domain.

[PunchyHamster]

History of Google text/voice/video chat is frankly insane, they refuse to just have a product and develop it, instead every few years the new thing pops up and the old thing gets deprecated.

They should've been dominating the space for near 2 decades now. Instead they had Google Talk (that even worked over XMPP!) then replaced it with google hangouts, and then Google Chat.

[happymellon]

And each iteration is basically worse.

XMPP should be able to be a Slack replacement.

Hangouts was a proprietary reimplementation, that had most of the features in an awkward way. Group chat in columns wasn't a great idea but was fine on mobile.

Duo/Chat was weird, separation of communication for no great benefit, and wasn't really any better than Hangouts. More like Hangouts that they had given to an intern to fix up, but forgot to tell them that it still needed to work with Hangouts.

Now we have Chat and Meet, Meet "replacing" Duo, while Duo is becoming Meet?

All I know is that after Hangouts finally was retired and replaced with Chat, they hid the chat tab in gmail, and required you to unhide it, and then appeared to disable notifications so I never knew when the last couple of people using it messaged me.

1/10. Wouldn't recommend.

[m_km]

And Google Chat does not have a native Desktop app. I guess they're the only chat app that don't.

[surajrmal]

Since when does an electron app count as native? You can install the webapp and that seems to feel basically equivalent.

[tormeh]

Really? Teams is the most sticky? Teams sucks. Excel and PowerPoint are the most sticky parts, and Teams just comes bundled with those.

[michaelt]

Perhaps he has a very narrow definition of "the MS cloud productivity stack"

Windows? Office? Not cloud, in its roots. Active Directory? Entra? Azure? Not productivity. Github? Not MS. Copilot? Not sticky.

[pedalpete]

I agree that Teams sucks, but speaking to people who are locked into the Microsoft environment, they love it.

[ted_dunning]

Yes in some ways. Teams being bundled means that Slack and other messaging apps have to justify against a sunk-cost solution.

That makes teams very sticky.

[czhu12]

I mostly meant sticky as in the most touched surface for day to day usage. Maybe sticky is not the right word.