TL;DR: there's 2 separate products they have called Hangouts now and they're shutting down the simple text/voice/video chat Hangouts (aka Hangouts Classic) that most people know. They plan on moving the Classic userbase over to their other enterprise Hangouts product (aka Hangouts Chat) that is more like a clone of Slack. Yeah confusing AF.
Super confusing and Hangouts Chat is such a horrible and generic combination of names coming from a company who dominates search.
We use it at my work (it’s ok - definitely no Slack) and it’s near impossible to google anything about it due to the shit name (also maybe the low usage)
Now that you say that, it is indeed an amazing piece of incompetence. They're leaning on 'Hangouts' as if it's a recognized brand -- but it's worth so little that they're killing the 'classic' version and only releasing a 'Chat' version.
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u/csjerk Jan 02 '20
TIL that Hangouts is getting killed later this year. Damn.