It’s Been a Few Months So Google Is Trying to Figure Out Its Messaging Apps Again ⇥ theverge.com

Over the past couple of weeks, Zoom has been making some security improvements at impressive speed, culminating in the acquisition, announced today, of Keybase. It’s probably good news for Zoom users; it’s not great if you’re a Keybase user.

Rob Pegoraro tweeted about those improvements this morning:

I am legit impressed by how quickly Zoom has worked to address serious concerns about its service. Meanwhile, I’m sure somebody at Google is working on a pitch deck for the next rebranding of its messaging strategy.

And guess what? He wasn’t far off. Dieter Bohn, the Verge:

In October of last year, Google hired Javier Soltero to be the VP and GM of G Suite, its set of office apps and — importantly for today’s news — Google Meet and Google Chat. Now, the company is putting him in charge of yet another set of products: Messages, Duo, and the phone app on Android.

The move puts all of Google’s major communication products under one umbrella: Soltero’s team. Soltero tells me that there are no immediate plans to change or integrate any of Google’s apps, so don’t get your hopes up for that (yet). “We believe people make choices around the products that they use for specific purposes,” Soltero says.

Sure: Google has six different messaging apps because they like to provide choice, and definitely not because these apps were all developed independently by different teams who cannot get together to build a single app because the discussion about merging messaging clients is, itself, split across the company’s portfolio of messaging apps.