On 2/13/2017 at 11:42 AM, Desslok said:

And so I asked my boss right after the Monday morning meeting - the sad news? The program coming in to replace hangouts doesn't really have the robust app support like Hangouts did. Perhaps later down the road, but for the short term - yeah, the infrastructure isn't really there.

Sorry to break the news.

Can you tell him a lot of people are extremely annoyed hangouts is being replaced with an inferior product. And no you can quote what ever specs you want. It is inferior as it is not useful with out app support. Which near as I can tell the new hangouts has none. near as i can tell after app support is lost usage will drop dramatically and wont pick up again. People use hang outs for the app support. If they wanted a skype clone they would just use skype.

On 2/13/2017 at 9:06 PM, themensch said:

And yet we somehow got a dice rolling app, go figure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now a dice rolling app that could share results with others, maybe that's where it becomes a game instead of a tool.

Probably something like that. The dice app without the RPG itself is useless. Interactivity with others, either by sharing rolls or having a larger online utility likely crosses the line from "accessory" to full-fledged "game."

1 hour ago, Daeglan said:

Can you tell him a lot of people are extremely annoyed hangouts is being replaced with an inferior product. And no you can quote what ever specs you want. It is inferior as it is not useful with out app support. Which near as I can tell the new hangouts has none. near as i can tell after app support is lost usage will drop dramatically and wont pick up again. People use hang outs for the app support. If they wanted a skype clone they would just use skype.

Oh, I could, but I'm just an itty-bitty little cog in a vast Google Machine. There's no way anyone would listen to me, even if my boss was behind me 1,000 percent. The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote.

20 minutes ago, Desslok said:

Oh, I could, but I'm just an itty-bitty little cog in a vast Google Machine. There's no way anyone would listen to me, even if my boss was behind me 1,000 percent. The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote.

Yup. And i see this leading to the death of hangouts.

I know plenty of people who use Hangouts without any apps, the edge of being a drop-in video chat service you can access through your browser with next to no setup makes it a lot more appealing than Skype to some people.

I mean, I agree the apps going away is sh*tty, but I wouldn't be singing the service's funeral dirge yet. Especially when Skype seems to actively be getting worse over time.

7 hours ago, Tom Cruise said:

I know plenty of people who use Hangouts without any apps, the edge of being a drop-in video chat service you can access through your browser with next to no setup makes it a lot more appealing than Skype to some people.

I mean, I agree the apps going away is sh*tty, but I wouldn't be singing the service's funeral dirge yet. Especially when Skype seems to actively be getting worse over time.

That's been exactly opposite of my findings. I've been using Hangouts video chat regularly for years now, and I just gave Skype a go again after having a similar opinion that it was crud. Well, color me surprised that it actually worked better, at higher quality for both audio and video, and was considerably more reliable over my slow internet. For example, Hangouts can't get the video decoded in HD for a single connection, but Skype got it done with 5. Hangouts would predictably corrupt the audio feed to garbage right around 30 minutes on the dot, my group had a timer for it. Skype? 4 hours and one brief audio hitch from one person. I was astounded by the difference. I've set up expensive video conferencing solutions as part of my work and found that Skype's quality and reliability over a meager internet connection performs as well or better than some of the big-name video conference providers. It even works better phone-to-phone. I remain impressed.