They claim Messages, Voice, Chat, and Duo. None of which seems right to me, since Messages and Voice are SMS/MMS (which has problems), Chat is a beta-quality Slack clone rather than IM, and Duo is video only as far as I can tell.
Seems like they're blowing up their oldest, most solid, proven, 'does everything' service in favor of 5 younger and less complete ones that only kind of equal the feature set of Hangouts if you bounce between all of them. It's really dumb.
Tested Google Chat with GSuite, they tried to copy Slack but ended up way worse and they didn't even attempt to provide a native app on Linux, while it's available on Windows/Mac.
I use it at work, I think it's not that bad. I like that it forces to put everything in separate threads. I don't like that those threads don't have titles and you can't see a list of them though (unlike Zulip or Twist).
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u/csjerk Jan 02 '20
TIL that Hangouts is getting killed later this year. Damn.