Google is a large company with many products. But its naming schemes were never really praised.
As the search engine of the web, that also has products like Android, AI platforms, messaging apps, productivity solutions, email, cloud, and many more, Google has to name them all. While their names are easy to remember, there are redundancies that happen throughout many of Google's products.
One of which, is the 'Hangouts' branding.
For users, it has been difficult enough to find a chat and video tools with the varieties of options the market offers. But researching for Google's solution can be even more confusing.
Google Hangouts, is it really still a thing? What's the difference between Hangouts and Hangouts Chat? What is Google Meet? What's the difference then with Duo? And other related questions that may come to mind.
To make things easier for users, Google is ditching the 'Hangouts' branding scheme, and stick to just Chat and Meet.
Google Hangouts is one of Google's longest-running messaging and video chat service.
It was released as a communication platform which includes instant messaging, video chat, SMS and VOIP features. What Google did, was replacing three messaging products that Google had implemented within its services, including Google Talk, Google+ Messenger (Huddle), and Hangouts, a video chat system present within Google+.
While Duo is meant to directly compete with Apple's FaceTime, Hangouts was to unified its messaging offers where before was fragmented. Hangouts was also the face of the company in the growing competition in the messaging industry against Facebook Messenger, iMessage and WhatsApp.
Google Hangouts Chat was Google's paid team chat service, provided as part of G Suite. it was spun out of the infamous Google+ social network back in 2013.
Users using Gmail with their company's email address for example, are already paid G Suite users, meaning that they can use Hangouts Chat. This app includes direct messaging, just like the consumer Hangouts, but with additional offers to make it similar to Slack.
Google Hangouts Meet on the other hand, is Google's paid video conferencing software, provided as part of G Suite. It's similar to the video chat service provided in the consumer Hangouts, but supports a lot more participants.
In a blog post, Google explained how Google Meet keeps video conferences protected, and how the product supports two million new users every day, but without even once mentioning “Hangouts Meet”.
The company later confirmed that the service has been renamed, and the “Hangouts” branding has been retired from Google’s business suite.
The move marks the complete removal of the Hangouts brand from the enterprise version of G Suite, but rather confusingly, the Hangouts name will still live on as part of Google's consumer-facing chat software.
In other words, the Hangouts brand is not completely dead yet. The name will remain a brand within the consumer version of the Hangouts “classic” chat app.
However, knowing how Google loves to rename or even kill its own projects, it's nothing new that things can get confusing.
For example, the rebranding of Hangouts Chat to just Chat may cause some initial confusion, as Google gave the same moniker to its RCS-based Android messaging service, announced only a few months prior.
Users shouldn't be surprised to see Google in changing the naming and branding schemes of its products, whenever it sees fit.