Why Google is now a better a competitor to Slack, WhatsApp & Zoom?

Google has made "Meet" free for everyone & also has quietly turned down Hangouts recently. The suite of communication products by Google are now much better suited against the competition.

Google launched Hangouts back in 2013.
At that point too, it was an attempt to unify its different services (Gtalk, G+ messenger) into a single product and Hangouts positioned itself similar to WhatsApp. That strategy kind of made sense, though it never really took off (compared to WhatsApp). Biggest reason might be, not focusing enough towards a particular style of communication. Hangouts was chat & video both, plus it was also sold as part of its GSuite offering to enterprise.

Fast forward to 2017 & the communication space has picked up pace like never before.
You have Slack focused towards enterprise communication, Zoom for business video conferencing, Whatsapp Video & Facetime for personal video chat & WhatsApp (& to some extent FB messenger) for personal text based chat. All these products show that there is a need for different products for different communication needs. With this, Hangouts finds itself in a weird spot among all of these. That's when Google started paying attention closely & building products which resemble the actual needs of the time. Now we have "Meet", "Chat", "Duo" and "Messages" and they closely match the competition.

Meet & Duo are on a head to head comparison with Zoom & WhatsApp video/Facetime respectively. But it's "Messages" & "Chat", that seems most interesting.

"Messages" if you haven't noticed is the default messages (remember?) app on your Android phone.
It comes preinstalled with your Pixel phone & on other phones, you have to separately install it. The most amazing fact is that it surpassed 1 billion play store downloads! The app now supports Rich messages which means it works just like WhatsApp. Google has released a web version for it just like WhatsApp web. The best thing about it though is that Duo is directly integrated in the app which made it easier for Google to promote Duo to users.

The "Chat" app is very focused towards enterprise.
It has a very slack like functionality plus there is a direct integration with Meet. The other great thing about Chat is that, Google can integrate it's other GSuite products like Drive, Documents, Sheets all within the Chat. Having it separate from Meet also allows Google to sell Chat vs Meet differently. For e.g they can make Meet for everyone but still keep Chat paid. The idea is that if people like Meet they might like to use Chat too. (But I think it would have worked bettee the other way around). In future we might see Chat having a more close integration with other Google products like Docs, Sheets, Calendar, Gmail. This kind of makes sense because enterprise customers want to do everything from one place to increase productivity. And it also makes it a more direct competitor to Teams from Microsoft. All in all, Google's communication products seem to be more aligned now with the expectations of different users, the businesses and especially the competition. The key thing here will be to bring enough differentiation from a product standpoint or by providing value through integration of different apps. E.g "Make a Duo call & watch a youtube video together" OR "Make a meet call & automatically save meeting notes in Google Docs".