[jacquesm]

Google really messed up their roll outs of new products so often that it is almost a meme.

You'd be hard pressed to pick a 'worst', between Google Glass, Google Plus, Google Wave and so on the list is long and getting longer all the time. It would be a lot smarter if they launched these separately so that they do not impact the trust relationship people have with their main brand. I don't know any other company besides Yahoo that has managed this in such a terrible way.

[barry-cotter]

Clear worst has got to be whatever they rolled out that was worse than GChat. Just astonishing to go from best in class to unusable in one go.

[soylentcola]

Ironically, it's now actually called "Google Chat". I still use it with plenty of people since it allows me to chat via browser, iOS, or Android without any device/brand restrictions.

But in just about every way, it is the same or worse than their previous offerings (the older "Talk" and the later "Hangouts"). They ditched the option to do SMS fallback in the same app instead of improving on integration. Can't just hit the little camera icon in a group chat to instantly start a group video call anymore. Individual and group chats are in separate tabs. Photo and video handling are worse (but at least not downgraded as badly as MMS between Android and iOS).

Honestly I only use it because it sucks to message with iOS users if you can't use iMessage and I/some of my friends don't use Facebook products like FB or Whatsapp.

[shakna]

That might have been Google Buzz? Which automatically followed people it thought you knew. Like automatically linking someone to an abusive spouse they'd run from, and exposing all their chats to them.

[justinclift]

> ... so often that it is almost a meme.

It became a meme a long time ago.