Despite the name, Hangouts Chat isn’t just a retread of what it has already tried.
Story by Nathan Ingraham, Engadget
It’s been almost a year since Google first mentioned Hangouts Chat — a totally redesigned messaging service that’s more like Slack than the Hangouts most consumers know today. As of now, Hangouts Chat is out of its “early adopter” program and will be available to all G Suite users over the next week, assuming their company enables it, of course.
To be clear, Hangouts Chat is a totally separate and distinct service from Hangouts proper, which still lives in your Google mail inbox. And while we’ll forgive you for rolling your eyes at yet another chat service from Google (the number of different chat apps the company has built is legendary at this point), Hangouts Chat does offer something potentially valuable to companies using G Suite — assuming they’re not on Slack already.
