[weareconvo]

It's hard to get promoted at Google unless you launch things, and the Internal Tools team never launched shit. So they just latch onto any excuse to launch whatever they can, even if it makes no fucking sense. You'll see this a lot with other Google products too, Gmail being one of the worst offenders (totally unnecessary UI changes that piss everyone off, changing Gtalk into Hangouts just to have a chance to launch a new app, etc).

The Gtalk one is particularly ridiculous if you buy into their disingenuous arguments about combining disparate forms of messaging, especially given the spectacular failure of Wave, which tried to do the exact same thing. But if you view it through the lens of "Gtalk hadn't launched anything in a while, and their engineers wanted to launch something" it makes perfect sense.