Hangouts Chat by Google (Early Access) - Bring your team together

They can pretty up the language as much as they want, but Google's messenger strategy has been off the rails for a while. I love Google and practically live inside the Google ecosystem, but they keep pushing users from one app to the next, & to the next.. reinventing, merging, unmerging, swapping, & splitting. G-chat, Messages, Messenger, Google Voice, Hangouts, Hangouts with Voice integration, Hangouts without Voice integration (you should use Messenger now), Messenger is now Android Messages, Allo, Duo... I really wish Google would just simplify and focus on a single "Messenger" app for consumers. One of the reasons it's so difficult to get family and friends to move off of apps like Facebook messenger is because in a year from now, I'll have to tell them to switch from Allo to whatever the new Google messenger flavor of the year will be. Just like now, after a couple years of convincing my friends Hangouts is better...

Unless they can match Slack's integrations, I'll not be migrating, no matter how much our boss refuses to migrate from Hangouts to Slack!

I was wondering what happened to Allo

Is it me or they could just have #1 do a big update of Hangouts #2 Just scrap all other options ? Is more important to have many ways to do team work (Trello, Jira, Asana, Wrike etc) than have a bazillion differents app to chat with our teamworkers. We want kill the email and it's not to replace it with 1000 chats that we are not invited yet or not shared by everybody. That's the beauty of email... everybody have it (still have it).

How many times has Hangouts been pivoted? 3 times now?

Any idea if this will be HIPAA compliant?

Not a G-Suite customer so I guess I'm missing out

"Introducing Slack, by Google" Good one!

I saw the notification "Introducing Slack, by Google" and I almost cried thinking "do companies really have no shame or originality anymore? 😢😭" but glad that isn't the case 🤗.

This looks great, if it's free or included with all GSuite subscribers, it'll be a game changer. I really like the look of the new Hangouts Meet - looks like it's going to disrupt paid services like join.me