Google will ‘increasingly focus’ Hangouts on business customers
Google’s VP of communication products, Nick Fox, was willing to talk about that when he gave me an early demo of Duo last week. As Google said earlier this year, Hangouts isn’t going away — but the company will now focus Hangouts on its business users. Going forward, Allo and Duo will be the company’s main consumer chat plays.”Because Hangouts is built on a Google account, because it’s deeply integrated with Google apps, the Apps suite [things like Drive, Docs, etc.], Gmail, Calendar and so on, it’s seen much more success in the enterprise,” Fox told me. “It will increasingly focus on that kind of group collaboration enterprise productivity space.”Duo’s focus is extreme simplicity, and anyone who’s used Hangouts for any length of time will admit it’s not the simplest of services. For example, you can do video calls with multiple participants in Hangouts, while Duo allows only one-to-one video calling. That need to make things easier is likely why Google wanted a clean break with the rollout of Allo and Duo — they aren’t tied to your Google account or any of its previous communication services.Fox also said Google recognized that it didn’t make sense to have one app do everything, something we’ve seen from companies like Facebook, which controversially broke messaging out of its main app. “We’ve historically tried to do a lot in a single app, but the reality is that are pretty different types of communication,” Fox says. “We see them differently, and we think we’ll be able to build the best experiences by building focused experiences that do what they’re intended to do really, really well.”That doesn’t mean there won’t be consumer confusion going forward, however. Hangouts will continue to exist, and many consumers will certainly still use “Gchat” when looking at their email in a browser. But when they go mobile, Allo and Duo are entirely separate experiences with no desktop equivalent. Google may be focusing Hangouts on the enterprise crowd going forward, but there isn’t a clear path to moving consumers from Hangouts to Allo and Duo.Of course, for lots of users, that likely won’t matter. Google is right to make mobile its focus because that’s clearly where consumers are. If Duo and Allo are successful, Hangouts will simply fade into memory, used by people who need its more-robust feature set. It’s not what Google had in mind when the product launched three years ago, but sometimes a reboot is necessary.
See the original post here: Google will ‘increasingly focus’ Hangouts on business customers
|
|||
404 Error File Not Found
The page you are looking for might have been removed,
had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
Web Hosting provided by Bluehost.com
