Chat, but now there's also Spaces (well currently Rooms but soon Spaces) which is a Slack competitor. Gif here: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/origin...

Announcement here: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/helping-bus...

Should the first one be Google _Talk_, or was there another pre-Hangouts feature called Chat too?

You're right!

Are we talking dozens of meetings about the name? Probably more like hundreds.

Welcome to Google Synonym[1] - a new Google service that helps you navigate the Marketing Graph of product names and their relationship with each other over time. Think of it like Google Maps if the map was a mind map produced by our product teams!

[1] Will be renamed to "Google Metaphor" in 2022.