I'm not a fan of the decision and some decisions Google makes about how to organize certain features of their products baffle me...why isn't the "Settings" icon consistent, for instance - in gmail and hangouts it's a gear in the upper righthand corner, for some reason in Chrome you can only get there by hitting the 3 vertical dots -- but I can live with it. It's familiar. It's not totally unknown to me.

Google is not a company, not really; it's a loose confederation of warring business groups pretending to be a company. Don't think "country" think "Hanseatic league" or "the Pirate Coast." As such Hangouts looks like Hangouts, Chrome looks like Chrome, Gmail looks like Gmail, and the only thing uniting them are the Crayola Colors of the Company.

I mean, Apple has iMessage. It works on desktop, it works on iOS. Google has so far tried

- gChat

- Wave

- Hangouts

- Allo

- Duo

...and I'm still left in the position of texting from my laptop with a 3rd-party Haxie that works through a Chrome backdoor.

At least Microsoft is all about Skype. They have no interest in making it work, but they have it.