Google’s product strategy: Make two of everything For Google, its entire product lineup is just a big series of A/B experiments.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/10/googles-product-stra...

I'll just wait until other users have figured out which ones are useful and which are a waste of time, let Google kill the ones that fail and iterate on the ones that don't until either everyone else adopts the same strategy as me or Google figures out what the heck they're doing. I'll set an alarm to remind myself to check back in 5 years.

For a self-identified "late adopter", you sure comment early on.

I've been early adopting Google products for years, many of which sadly nolonger exist. That's the problem.

AndroidPolice has an article today[1] that Hangouts has failed as an all-in-one messaging platform. They're going to focus it in on the enterprise - where usage is much more prevalent, apparently - whatever that means.

Hangouts is likely to become a Google Apps Slack competitor, I guess.

[1]: http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/08/16/google-planning-focu...

I guess it depends on the enterprise... lots of places outright block google services: drive, e-mail, hangouts, etc.

I guess they mean those that already pay for google apps.

Oh, finally they want to compete with Slack.

Google Talk group chat features were released in 2007.