[peterbonney]

It’s wild that Google, despite being the leader in startup email/business software and literally giving their Slack competitor to everyone for free as part of their Google Business subscription, STILL has such low mindshare in this space that it didn’t even merit a mention in the blog post.

(Full disclosure: my company used Google Chat, and I find the integration ecosystem so pitiful that I’m constantly thinking about paying up for Slack. I don’t know how Google is screwing this market up so badly.)

[norman784]

I think the issue (read on HN a lot of comments about the subject) is that there is no unified vision/goal inside Google, there are a lot of teams with different goals and visions, but it seems that the most common goal for their employees is to get enough merits to get promoted, forget about the old project and jump into a new one (because new things give you merits to continue climbing).

I could be wrong, with no insight information this was my conclusion after reading comments and also seen too many products killed by Google, even releasing new worst products to replace old ones that were better.

[schimmy_changa]

Especially because they came so close so early with Google Wave! That was it, I think, but Google didn't have the confidence at the time to stick with it, and it was just too unpolished to keep out in the public at a time when everyone thought that whatever Google did was gold.

Seriously, I think the Wave ideas were the ones that hit the perfect feature-set for informal electronic business communication.

[mattwad]

For personal use, GChat has really been hurt ever since they merged it into Mail. It's much harder to share files and access now. Also they took away video for some reason

[renewiltord]

I literally have no idea which of Google’s numerous chat apps you’re talking about

[antifa]

Eh, but you remember the first one that around when AIM was around, and pretty much nothing used today performs as good as it or AIM did on the average computer 20 years ago.

[grandinj]

The original Google Chat (with the little Windows client that sat in your taskbar) was surpringly good.

And then, of course they killed it and made it a web UI thing and made it majorly worse at the same time