Wow.... I got excited for finally a single place to go for hangouts (I was always confused at the best "launch point") and a better interface (chat on gmail hasn't changed in what feels like a decade) and lo and behold... It's a pretty launch interface but the SAME CRAPPY CHAT WINDOWS... I've always felt like hangouts was a horribly mismanaged product (starting and joining a hangout has always been a longer and more difficult process than it should) and this just confirms it.
There is SO MUCH potential and they've thrown it all away and not even for some gain. It'd be one thing if the interface sucked because of ads or something like that but no, it just sucks to suck. I continually have high hopes for hangouts and google does their best to dash them every time (Oh look they finally 'got it'... Nevermind, they fell flat on their faces again).
2) Upon need, click on that, wait for URL to change, and then send resulting URL over $IM_SYSTEM_OF_CHOICE
Best UI I've found so far to what I think is a pretty stellar video/voice communication product. Now if they would only fix hardware acceleration on Mac...
What would you want to use it for? It seems like HOA sessions for most of the use cases that spring to mind would be scheduled ahead of time, and therefore not suffer as much from the bad-contact-list issue.
There are all kinds of gaps even then. For example, you can't invite a google organization (company) to the event directly in any smooth fashion. The solution is to copy the link and e-mail it to your list. After that, there's no way to restrict viewing of the recording to an organization.
This is just one example of a poor integration between two Google products, but those few little gaps in permissions and utility made it a product that didn't work for my needs at least.
Definitely I want to schedule them ahead of time! But then when the time comes, Will it even work? Last week for the life of me I could not get the Record button to come up on the HOA I had scheduled a week prior and for which I saved the URL. I cycled through all my Google accounts hoping I had mistakenly created it in another account, but no luck. And no feedback whatsoever regarding what my privileges were in the Hangout, nor any indicator in the Google Plus homepage or Hangouts dashboard for my accounts. So I gave up. I know I created this darn HOA with one of my accounts, you HAVE to be logged into a Google account to create one! Like I said, HOA is a killer product, but it's sad that has only become less useful since it first came out, since now I can't even use it at at all!
Starting a hangout often works for me, but I rarely get notification messages. Sometimes it takes half an hour or more to get a notification that was sent by someone in the same room. I switched to SMS for IMs, because people don't get the Hangouts messages reliably.
Hangouts could be good, but it's awful at the moment. I wish they had at least kept the XMPP integration. I strongly suspect that Google would be more successful if they went back to a more open approach. If they had backed Diaspora rather than creating Google Plus, it would now be huge. Google Plus didn't even have a decent API. I have a lot of ideas on how to salvage it, but no one at Google has ever responded to my suggestions.
In the list of unreliable messaging, Skype Android app has been nicely random in how it notifies me too. I can never know if someone talked or not. They keep changing the UI though, how touching.
ps: I believe all your points on xmpp/diaspora are right, and that's how Google got popular, bringing good product (mail, maps) for free. Not trying to invent a whole G paradigm because Jobs said 'focus' in an Apple keynote.
The Skype app for Android and Linux were so bad that I stopped using Skype completely. I thought that Hangouts was going to be a perfect replacement, but the notifications became too unreliable. If anyone from Google is reading my comments, and would like ideas on how to fix it, send me a message. I do want Hangouts to work. :)
What exactly is wrong with the Hangouts UI? Admittedly I've only used it a few times, but it's always seemed leagues ahead of the unusable mess that Skype has become.
The complaint is not usually about the in-videoconference UI, but about the general product and overall confusing portfolio of applications that exist under the Hangouts moniker.
There's the Android app which replaced GTalk, which also does (or used to do?) SMS, this new thing, the Google+ builtin UI, and a few others (what's the successor to the GTalk Windows app?).
I have been in Hangouts-on-air sessions were I had to intervene to send a proper link to a guest because the hosts could not figure it out.
Your question right here appears to be evidence of that: I don't even know which UI I should criticize for you as I'm not sure we are even talking about the same product.
In-videoconference, I think they are on-par or slightly ahead of Skype after the latter's update (it used to be much worse). Some things are better (warns you that you are muted if it hears you speaking while muted) and some are worse (in-videoconference text messages exist in a weird limbo that only lasts the duration of the Hangout, and have no history tracking).
In my opinion, it's the general "contact list"/"IM product" UI that is a bigger mess. My Hangouts app on Android keeps getting "unread" Hangout sessions from videoconference sessions I did on my computer. I sometimes get Hangout invites on my phone, sometimes on G+ and sometimes over e-mail (?). I think this aspect is what the OP was talking about when speaking about the lost opportunity. The general experience for a Hangouts-the-IM-product user is still very confusing.
There is SO MUCH potential and they've thrown it all away and not even for some gain. It'd be one thing if the interface sucked because of ads or something like that but no, it just sucks to suck. I continually have high hopes for hangouts and google does their best to dash them every time (Oh look they finally 'got it'... Nevermind, they fell flat on their faces again).