Dive Brief:
- Google is placing an enterprise emphasis on Hangouts, its embattled video chat product, and has divided the product into two main features: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat, according to a company blog post.
- Hangouts Meet is designed to make it easy to start a video meeting with only a link, without requiring an account, plugin or download. Meet integrates with G Suite, and G Suite Enterprise customers get a dedicated dial-in number to connect employees experiencing Wi-Fi or data issues.
- Hangouts Chat allows users to create virtual chat rooms for projects and is also integrated with G Suite so users can easily share documents, photos and videos. Chat also supports bots and custom scripting as well as third-party apps.
Dive Insight:
Google has long struggled with what it should do with Hangouts, which at launch might've seemed an easy win for such a connected, tech-oriented company, but has actually seen little traction on the user end. Following that, Google has appeared to redirect attentions away from Hangout products, launching a standalone video chat app called Duo and dropping Google+ Hangouts on Air to redirect users to YouTube Live instead.
Now, enterprise appears to be the answer to Hangouts' woes, though Google is entering an increasingly crowded market with the new offerings. Both Meet and Chat will directly rub up against early enterprise players including Slack and Hipchat. From the tech side of things, Microsoft and Facebook have also made significant moves into this space.
Microsoft's long-anticipated Teams chat product comes as part of its widely-used Office 365 suite, and Facebook's Workplace launched with both desktop and mobile apps, along with more than 1,000 business partners across communications operations. Google appears to be distinguishing itself through ease of use and accessibility, and is rolling out a relatively flexible platform that developers and marketers might find more appealing for its openness to third-party apps and bots.
The Google post presented PayPal's Braintree as a company using Hangouts Meet for the past three months. Jerome Knapp, manager of systems administration at Braintree, described Google's video conferencing product as the most "frictionless" the company had experienced to date, touting its sharing capabilities as well as the ease of starting a meeting.
Whether more independent, younger services such as Slack will be able to weather the competition from such established players which have massive, built-in audiences and a richer ecosystem of products to integrate with their enterprise businesses, remains to be seen.