Google Plans To Eventually Replace Duo With Meet

An anonymous reader shares a report: With classic Hangouts on the way out, Google today has two video calling apps. However, that is one too many for the company, and sources familiar with the matter tell us that Google Duo will eventually be replaced by Meet. This decision is the result of Google placing its consumer communication services -- Duo, Messages, and Android's Phone app -- under the leadership of G Suite head Javier Soltero. After the unified team was made public in May, Soltero announced to employees that it does not make sense for Duo and Meet to coexist. Following the rise of work from home and remote learning, Google has moved aggressively to make Meet a Zoom competitor. Like Duo, it's now "free for everyone" to use and going after the same market. With all the focus on Meet, the new messaging chief opted to have the service become Google's one video calling service for both regular and enterprise customers. Internally, this is being described as a merger of the two services that is codenamed "Duet" -- a portmanteau of Duo and Meet. We're told by sources that this new direction and the reduced interest in building a dedicated consumer service came as a surprise to the Duo team.

Taking bets

[Anonymous Coward]

How long, in months, will Meet last before Google shit cans it?

Because nobody is going to voluntarily use this.

Re:

[feranick]

Probably not. It will grow just like hangouts did before, to the point where they will start introducing several new apps doing the same, but "better". This bloat will grow again, and another reckoning will come along after that to something similar to Hangouts and Meet.

Re:

[skids]

Immediately when someone with a large legal department buys a small startup that has the same name in a different area of technology and they don't want to be arsed to deal with any litigation when their service eventually bloats out into that technology area. (Cisco bought the same-named Duo 2FA service recently.)

Re:

[MachineShedFred]

Google Chat, Google Hangouts, Google Voice, Google Allo, Google Duo, Google Meet... the next great Google chat / call / video solution is just around the corner!

Re:

[gl4ss]

yeah. look, nobody even knows what google duo is.
even if it's on their phone, for now anyways.

Re:

[Caedite Eos]

It's like DP in porns.

... And then Google with introduce "Howdy"

[dmay34]

Just before Duo is eaten by Meet, Google will introduce "Google Howdy", an alternative video app that basically functions the same as all of their other chat apps.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

I've lost track, I still use Hangouts for chat but I hear it's going away at some point. Why can't they just make Google Video Chat and incrementally improve it?

Re:... And then Google with introduce "Howdy"

[bill_mcgonigle]

> Why can't they just make Google Video Chat and incrementally improve it?

A large number of Google employees can change teams and work on projects they want, or start new ones.

This is a cool startup strategy when everybody is pulling for the good of the company.

Then ... Google abandons "Don't Be Evil", hires a bunch of young, woke, test-taking narcissists, the experienced people leave, teams are hollowed out, and nobody left wants to do maintenance. Starting new products, in SV, is the only way to climb the corporate ladder.

So now incentives are misaligned between employees, company, and users, and Google has 16 separate messaging platforms (none of which federate with XMPP).

It sounds like this G-Suite manager has huevos and is reigning in the kids who want to be popular with their friends. That's a start, at least. Upper management needs to make them do their homework too.

Re: ... And then Google with introduce "Howdy"

[dmay34]

I understand that, but it's also only half of the story. The whole story is that what you just described is exactly the company culture Google wants to promote. Google in the anti-apple in that way. Everything at Google is an A-B test. They don't care what the next big thing is so long as it comes from them. So they are willing to fund any idea because it might take off, and if not then they kill the project and start a new one. It's not a bad business strategy in paper, but it's super frustrating for use

From Hangouts to... Hangouts 2.0?

[feranick]

Funny this is. At some point in Messaging history, hangouts was supposed to be the one stop shop for Google, to include every possible service in the area for Google (SMS, Voice, etc), The bloat and Google love for internal competition started taking down hangouts internal dominance with the emergence of competing products, and from one we ended up at some point with several) (Hangouts Meet, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts, Duo, Allo, Messages, Voice). Now apparently, we are all in for a remerge back into one: Gmail with integrated Meet and Chat. Great. If rather than going through this stupid exercise and they re-engineerd hangouts from scratch to accomplish the same that would have been great. I still heavily use Hangouts classic. Why? It simply works on anything I run it, very low barrier of entry for communication, and it is what people know. I never transition to anything else, and people appreciate such stability.

Re:From Hangouts to... Hangouts 2.0?

[TheReaperD]

Yea, I've been using Hangouts with Google Voice since Google Voice became available in my area. I got my phone number the same day it became available. The service has been good overall. There's some usability issues and some bugs that are certainly solvable if Google put any focus on it after it was no longer their next great service. They finally did one window dressing refresh of the service that was a one and done 'fix' that caused as many problems as it solved and they've never touched the UI since. As soon as the paint dried, they walked away from it for newer, shinier projects because no one at Google wants to work on uncool 'legacy' products and code. They only want to work on what's trendy and new. They abuse their monopoly position to force people to tolerate this situation and governments have cowered in fear of angering silicon valley until this year.

Re:

[grep -v '.*' *]

There's some usability issues and some bugs that are certainly solvable

THAT. I'd use Google Voice as my primary phone number (they can mine me for all it's worth -- spoiler: not much) but since I don't pay for it and it's not a direct-profit making thing, I can't call anybody to fix it if it ever breaks. I don't near real-time support, but I'd like near-YEAR support if possible.

Not that it has broken to my knowledge; I use it maybe once every 2 months and as a tertiary or spammy phone number, but I dare not depend on it as a primary or even a secondary.

Here's an enjoyabl

How long before that too is nixed?

[Bearhouse]

How an organisation with allegedly so many smart people, and certainly so many dollars, continues to screw up social media / messaging / audio video collaboration escapes me. MS teams and zoom are nothing special...how hard can it be? Stop jumping around like a grasshopper on speed, establish a roadmap that people can believe in and stick to it...

Re:How long before that too is nixed?

[rtb61]

It has to jump around, it has to be obfuscated. Free when Google says it, is free to data mine your privacy, to target your relentlessly with psychologically manipulative messaging, to preach the religion of mass consumption. There is no free when dealing with Google, you are giving away your personal life and when they mine you business, you are giving away competitive proprietary secrets to be sold to the highest bidder of used internally by Google to compete against you.

There is no free with Google, except what you give away freely without even stopping for a moment to consider it's future worth and how it can be used against you.

Make Messaging Great Again

[martynhare]

Bring back MSN Messenger so I can be ogling random chicks in glorious 240p while rapidly bashing on an unlocked nudge button Ahhhh, the good old days.

Dating Apps?

[Retired ICS]

Are these dating apps? Should it not be called Meat?

Makes sense

[steveha]

Meet can do more than Duo can, and I think both are about equally easy to use.

The only reason Google needed to have both Duo and Meet was that Google was charging money for Meet. It was part of the corporate GSuite, not free for anyone.

Now, in the age of COVID-19, Google decided to make Meet free for anyone. Thus there is no reason left to have both.

I have a cunning plan!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Maybe if Google put some resources into a search engine they could use it to locate their strategy.

You know what this means? Break up Google

[RightwingNutjob]

is what it means. If they don't even know they're competing with themselves, they're too big for their own good, let alone for the free market and the consumer.

Duo is E2E Encrypted & Meets is not

[sasparillascott]

This is a bit surprising since Duo has been relatively successful in the Marketplace and was one of the only E2E encrypted communication apps Google put out there.

Prediction for the following years

[GuB-42]

2020: Duo an Meet merge to become Duet
2021: Allo splits into Hola and Hi
2022: Duet is discontinued as Hi takes over
2023: Message merges with Hola and is discontinued
2024: Mingle comes out, it like Hi and Hola combined, but all three coexist (but are incompatible with each other)
2025: Mingle turns out to be really great, it is discontinued
2026: Hi merges with YouTube and becomes YouTube Talk. It also supports eBooks.
2027: Hola is discontinued, YouTube Talk now requires you to use your credit card number as an identifier, support for ride sharing is added.
2028: Because YouTube Talk is now a 50GB download and takes 5 minutes to start up (the flight simulator feature didn't help), there is now a lightweight app called Text that is only able to sent 64 character text messages using ASCII characters to residents of the same country.
2029: Because of the limited success of their offering, Google buys successfull startup Showtime and discontinues YouTube Talk, purchases you made with YouTube Talk will be lost unless you register on December 24, between 11pm and midnight.

Re:

[luvirini]

There are some posts that should definitely have a combined funny/insightful tag and that one definitely qualifies.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

> 2025: Mingle turns out to be really great, it is discontinued

This may be the best post you've ever made.

Nothing will beat Google Wave

[dmay34]

Nothing will ever come close to the lost potential of Google Wave.

Re:

[Shades72]

Google Wave...laughed away by so many, while it was an interesting concept and Slack was allowed to run away with it eventually.

Now there are many very similar systems. Google only had to wait 6 months to a year before pulling the plug and it would have been on the forefront of those tools.

And with an extra year of fine-tuning, chances are Google would have had a serious communication tool. Back then they were still operating under the 'Don't be evil'-moniker, so who knows.

So yeah, I agree, Google killed of

Re: Nothing will beat Google Wave

[dmay34]

It was so much better than Slack because it was an open sourced platform. It was intended to be an open source email upgrade. Any company could have (and technically still could) create a wave interface. But the Gmail team pulled their company politics weight and refused to integrate it into Gmail and refused to allow for backwards compatibility with email. It want evil that killed it, it was just regular ol' corporate politics and corporate fiefdoms.

They should just use open standards

[dbojan]

They should just use open standards for communicating, or open up the format of the app(s) they use now, and allow people to login with phone number or gmail. Then it wouldn't matter what app you use.

Re:

[MaXMC]

They did with Google Chat (XMPP), but no other vendor (except for AOL) wanted to use"open" part of the protocol to make it possible to speak between platforms.

Already?

[xorbe]

Google *just* integrated Duo into the default Android text message app!