Some companies have used it for language tutoring. There are a lot of things a language learner with a keyboard and mouse can productively do during a video chat that isn't built into hangouts, e.g. looking up words, saving vocab items, etc... And that's just one use case.
What this change will do is chop off those offering free services at the knees and drive the premium services to Twilio, etc.
Some companies have used it for language tutoring... What this change will do is chop off those offering free services at the knees and drive the premium services to Twilio, etc.
Google's a business. Why does it have the responsibility to pickup the tab for these businesses?
Aside from the fact that education has second order effects that powerfully benefit humanity as whole, good will is a boon for companies. The cost of running hangouts (which is essentially P2P) is a rounding error for Google. Why shut down those who are literally providing education for free?
Every time Google does something like this, it becomes a bit less beloved by consumers, loses a bit more of that halo it had in the early 2000s and finds itself having a bit harder time with regulators in the future.
In Google's IPO filing:
"We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place. With our products, Google connects people and information all around the world for free. We are adding other powerful services such as Gmail that provides an efficient one gigabyte Gmail account for free. By releasing services for free, we hope to help bridge the digital divide."
"We believe that our user focus is the foundation of our success to date. We also believe that this focus is critical for the creation of long-term value. We do not intend to compromise our user focus for short-term economic gain."
Who's surprised? Google has a rep for killing things off now - I think it damages their brand; but I have to assume they've thought about this and judged that its still worth it.
I'm just starting to wish that some of these good services would just freeze instead of constantly "improving" based on some "big data" that is being horribly misinterpreted.
Google's brand has plummeted since the era of blogger/google reader/google talk, etc.
It's just that they have powerful monopolies that fund pretty much anything they want to do and there are powerful network/lock-in effects for email, documents, calendars, chat, mobile app sales, etc and even YouTube.
You're free to join a different chat network but none of your friends are there. You can change to another calendar provider but you'll still have on in gmail and people will share things to it. You can upload your video to Vimeo, but it won't have anywhere near the ability to attract traffic as it would on YouTube and it probably won't do as well in search results. Feel free to write an app for non-Google Android users, but not many people will buy it or even encounter it (unless you're in a market like China and are on a local monopoly's platform).
Google has hurt their brand. They're just not that dependent on people liking them anymore. In a lot of ways it's like Microsoft was 20 years ago.
Yes it has. I've been burned by Google so many times that if they came out with $1000 flying cars tomorrow I'd say "Meh. I'll wait for Tesla to do it."
It definitely has, both for me personally and in my observation. The classic example is Google Keep. It was launched during while Google was killing off a number of other products and services. I don't know of any person who uses Google Keep for notes or to-do lists (of course, it helps that there are literally hundreds of other services that have superior functionality).
I think it has. People started to think twice about the switching costs before adopting a google service. The first question you hear whenever google starts a new cloud service is "how long is google going to offer this".
Those are questions that we need to ask of every service and vendor, especially free and low priced ones. If google has helped people recognize this then it's for the best.
Google has so many chat clients right no: Allo, Duo, Hangouts, and I also just discovered that they have Google Messenger (which I've yet so see).
I'm not sure what their strategy is, but they seem to be flodding the market with apps that nobody uses. Meanwhile, a few [other] 2-3 apps seem to be used 90% of the time.
Their best shot at this point, IMHO, is to buy some [very popular] existing product, and merge all their chat apps into that one.
Hangouts awesome app. It was my replacement for Skype for the last 7 years i suppose, since I had access to close beta. It's really great app. But There was a few issue with cpu/battery consumption for Hangouts. I did not understand why Google avoided development optimized desktop app and sticked with desktop only app then chrome extension only. It's crazy wrong, because video call drains my macbook battery unbelievable fast. Anyway Hangouts is great for companies/corporate chats, I wish to have conference call integrated inside as it was in beginning with user-conference .
I doubt they'll kill it completely, it is widely used as office messenger in companies that use Google Apps. In my company all the engineers use slack but everyone else uses hangouts.
Is there good alternatives to google hangouts ? That preferably works with gmail contacts and/or phone contacts in a native desktop app (i.e. not with an electron style app).
I was interviewed a couple times using http://appear.in. It worked pretty well both times I used it. I didn't have any problems with video or screen sharing.
appear.in is excelent for ad-hoc videocalls (especially with peolpe you don't have in your everyday chat client), but it's not very useful for people you frequently contact, or for quickly upgrading a text-chat into a videocall.
I wish Google would make Hangouts more Slack-like. Especially if they want to target the enterprise. It seems they really just need to add the concept of chat rooms.
The hangouts API was mostly for little widgets and extensions that would running the video chat platform on desktop only.
They haven't worked on the new UI for almost 6 months now, they never worked on mobile, and you could count the number of apps on 2 hands.
The only one I ever used was a thing where you could draw on a friend's face during a video call, and even that was a one time thing.
Hangouts isn't being shutdown, they aren't gutting it's functionality, they are simplifying the system.