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I gave up on most Google instant messaging some years ago when the stories appeared about how enabling Hangouts was somewhat of a one-way process, with many people complaining about their existing functionality being hosed in one or another fashion. (E.g. Hangouts wants to take over SMS responsibilities, but borks them.) Google Voice languished, with message forwarding sometimes taking many minutes or even a few hours. Then this year, a new Voice push of some sort was announced, and now message forwarding is mostly back to nearly instantaneous. One fucking product, Google. That works. Fine, add new functionality to it, but don't make me keep chasing down and and installing new apps, wondering whether and how this integrates with what I already have and what is going to get hosed. (By the way, do you guys ever try to use your public help pages, yourself? Hahaha...) So, that little sidebar in Gmail? I'll still use that, when it happens to work and to be convenient. I recently used Hangouts -- setting up an entire account under my domain for the other party -- in a case where Skype had proved to be crap in terms of quality and holding the connection (what they typically use, and what I've refused to use since moving to a new machine). That's about it, for my current Google IM-ish experience. Gmail, I use. Calendar, I use. Docs, I use. They change -- I can keep up with this. Pick a name, and a front door, and leave that the fuck alone. Your schizophrenic branding -- and sometimes dueling functionality -- is not doing you any good, here. Cheers. |