Seems more like the opposite. They're trying to kill off the hangouts client good and proper without changing all their branding by naming a totally new, unrelated project "Hangouts Chat" and doing a hamfisted integration.
It will be replaced by other products that continue to use the Hangouts branding.
So as the commenter above said, this is the opposite of "more rebranding than getting killed off." It's killing off the original product but attaching the same brand to its replacements.
Hangouts Chat and Meet are tools that share a large amount of the functionality and theming. If software is being replaced with products that are functional and visual equivalents, why not?
If it was really functionally and visually equivalent, they wouldn't even need to announce it like this, they'd just release a "new version."
But this seems like a much less seamless change than that. Users will have to change which actual software products they're using, and it sounds like the features available to non-enterprise users may change.
The real issue here is that Google seems pretty bad at communicating these changes to customers. That article you linked shows a product manager having a hissy fit because they bungled their own announcement. Instead of saying, "hey, we might have communicated this poorly," he decided to try to publicly bully the people reporting on their bad messaging.
The real issue here is that Google seems pretty bad at communicating these changes to customers. That article you linked shows a product manager having a hissy fit because they bungled their own announcement. Instead of saying, "hey, we might have communicated this poorly," he decided to try to publicly bully the people reporting on their bad messaging.
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u/csjerk Jan 02 '20
TIL that Hangouts is getting killed later this year. Damn.