Amazon And Google Saddle Up To Take On Slack
Look out Slack, sleeping tigers are rousing!
Slack where all work communication happens for most of the 21st-century organisations, dominates not only the enterprise setup, but also today’s startups, has some competition brewing.
Google and Amazon both are vying to take on Slack and carve out sizeable pieces of the burgeoning work space.
Amazon, last month acquired a startup called Do.com and converted it to Chime.
Just two days after this acquisition, Do.com on its official website announced that it had been acquired and would discontinue its service entirely on all platforms including its web, mobile and Apple Watch apps by the end of February. While Do never disclosed the name of its buyer but a hawk-eyed reader brought it to the attention of a news house that the company’s LinkedIn profile now mentioned that the startup was “now a part of Amazon Chime”. A similar change was noticed on the profile of Do’s employees as well, thus confirming the acquirer.
To add spice to the story, as soon as some of the tech websites published the news of Do being acquired by Amazon, Do quickly removed all the evidences that pointed towards this conclusion — the official blog post from Do that announced its acquisition was removed and the LinkedIn profiles that had given away the secret were also modified. But the cat was already out of the bag.
Amazon officially launched Chime on February 13th, as part of it’s Amazon Web Services’ cluster.
All this hush-hush and coyness reminds me of our Bollywood celebrities who attempt to keep their relationship status under wraps. Amazon and Do are now trying to conceal this association from the world as there is no official announcement at Amazon’s end and no one knows what part of Do.com was acquired and at what cost. Curiouser and curiouser!
What does Do actually do? And how is it going to help Chime?
Do.com was a startup that had created a platform that aimed increasing the productivity of meetings by providing services like managing advance notes made in preparation for the meeting and even generating notes for absentees.
Amazon Chime too, is defined in a similar fashion per Amazon itself — “(it is) a secure, real-time, unified communications service that transforms meetings by making them more efficient and easier to conduct.”
So, making meetings hassle free and more efficient is what Do will do for Amazon Chime.
Moving on, while Amazon doesn’t want to talk about it, Google on the other hand, is out there conjuring up major updates to Google Hangouts.
Google is trying to make Hangouts a more business-friendly product and considering that Hangouts already does a lot of what apps like Slack use to dominate the scene, there is clearly a need for Google to up the ante and tom-tom it’s wares and make Hangouts’ presence felt.
Accordingly, Google announced some changes to Hangouts at the Next Conference in San Francisco.
Google has bifurcated its workplace tools, dubbed as G Suite into two separate apps: Hangouts Meet, a videoconferencing app, and Hangouts Chat, a Slack-like messaging app designed for teams to interact professionally.
Hangout Chats’ new prime feature is all about group messaging — and to be yet more specific, team messaging. Chat has also incorporated threaded conversations without which any messenger app looks barren and which Slack hasn’t been able to perfect as yet.
Additionally, to make things easier and more efficient, Hangouts Chat will now be able to perform advanced search and be able to filter conversations by file types.
What’s more, the update also enables users to create virtual chat rooms which would be a one-stop place to hold group conversations. No points for guessing this one, just like Slack!
And obviously you can’t take out Google from Hangout Chats as the former’s services are deeply entrenched within Chat as when you share a file with a room, all of the members automatically get access to it.
All the G Suite customers who apply for access will be able to enjoy this new feature. But, for starters, Hangouts Chat will only be available to companies in Google’s Early Adopter Program, and as of now there are no clear indications as to which features will cost money and which ones will be free of cost.
Hangouts Meet, the other sibling is all about making your meetings hassle free.
With just a click, you’ll be transported into a meeting — be it an audio or video one.
Meet is combined with what Google likes to call a digital whiteboard, dubbed as the Jamboard, that enables users to easily collaborate and view Jamboard displays remotely.
Google claims that this rewritten version of Hangouts meeting experience will be lighter on the processor and would not gobble onto your laptop’s battery life either.
What I love the most about all this, is that the whole thing would work without any plug-ins and due to the cut down in size will load “instantly”. It use to irk me to have to download plugins on every new computer and click pop-ups to confirm Trust alerts. Hopefully, they’re gone now!
The reason why Hangouts has been bifurcated is because Google wants to take better care of its enterprise customers. Google does claim though, that these major changes to Hangouts are not aimed at overtaking Slack.
As per Prabhakar Raghavan, the Head of Apps Engineering at Google, Slack already integrates with Google Drive. “We don’t intend to take away from that” he said during a panel discussion at the conference.
However, that doesn’t negate the fact that a lot of what the new Hangouts does, is to showcase it’s wares better, and enables users with a lot of the frill and benefits that Slack users have enjoyed for a while.
Look out Slack, sleeping tigers are rousing!
Originally published at Chip-Monks.
