It's crazy how little Google's marketcap benefits from things like this. Zoom's here sitting on 75B (~1/15th Googs) as we speak and Google Meet probably isn't even legitimately used in pricing Google. Wonder what Google's market cap would be if each individual service got the VC future growth pricing.
Not only that, but modern Google Meet is significantly more useful to my day-to-day remote conferencing needs than Zoom. Modern Google Meet's advantages:
* It's nearly instantaneous to use. You can just bookmark any prior meeting ID you created and reuse it indefinitely. You just click the meeting on your bookmark toolbar and join the meeting. Creating a new meeting is also nearly effortless.
* Works right in your web browser. It doesn't default to pushing you to use a native executable.
* IMO, the video and audio both are slightly better than Zoom.
Google Meet or Hangouts from years ago was quite bad, but it has improved nicely.
Google organizationally though is probably incapable of capitalizing on Google Meet. They have a bewildering history of creating and discontinuing and morphing products in this space, and their historic lack of focus and vision means you'd have to really be a Google aficionado to keep up with what their current offering even is, much less whether it's any good.
Whereas Zoom? They do one thing, and they do it well (enough). You don't download Zoom Hangouts one year and then switch to Zoom Duo then Zoom Allo and then migrate Zoom Meet. You just use Zoom and it works well enough.
I feel like Zoom has basically eaten Google's lunch here, not by actually being a better offering, but by simply being a straightforward proposition. Perhaps Google can learn some lessons for the future...
To Googlers working on this: thank you! My work life shifted from 5% Meet to 80% Meet and it only got better during the crisis. Never noticed deteriorated performance.
There's a setting you can turn on called "Automatically add Google Meet video conferences to events I create"[1].
I tested on a new account and the default was on, which you might argue is bad, but when I tried to create my first calendar event there was a popup that told me that it was on and gave me the option to turn it off.
Plus when you create a event the option to include a Google Meet is right there and it's one click to remove.
PEBKAC. Google Calendar integrates with multiple meeting systems. The organizer should have used Zoom's integration to put the Zoom link in the meeting field instead of putting the Zoom link in the location field and adding a Meet link in the meeting field. https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360020187492-Googl...
> Literally adding Google Meet URLs to Zoom meeting invites in Google Calendar, so half of a meeting's members went to the wrong room is kinda a bad way to scale your product
You could argue that, yes. And I won't blame you. But if you ignore Google and Meet for a moment and consider Microsoft (or in an alternate universe - Apple); product wise, this is a good decision. Reduces friction from creating meetings and provides a better experience.
You can disable automated Meet meeting generation though.
I'd love to hear the war stories about the network capacity plan violations that were involved here. There's no way they had 30x headroom in their 90-day capacity forecast. The organizational ability to reach in and shuffle up the network capacity allocations may be even more interesting than the technical items discussed here.
Nah, this is considerably minor scaling problem for Google.
Youtube bandwidth is there. Google meet is just a rounding error.
Of course (most likely) there will be dedicated planning going forward, but these type of traffic ramping up is daily operation at Google.
At Google, application developers rarely pay much attention to scalability, that's how the TI org tries to achieve, and they are probably the best AFAIK.
Every web-based video chat I’ve used (including Google Meet and Slack) makes the fans on my decently-specced 2018 MacBook Pro spin up like it’s about to take off. I’ve tried Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Zoom (via the native Mac app) doesn’t do this. Does anyone know why browser-based video is so resource intensive?
Use Safari. Turn on the developer settings, and find the setting to disable VP9 in WebRTC. That will force Meet to stop using VP9 and switch to H264 for which MacBooks (and Intel CPUs in general) have a hardware accelerated decoder and encoder.
When did Google meet get better? I used it actively in April had a some really bad customer meetings on it (it seemed to be bandwidth heavy though that is anecdotal). I decided on Zoom and haven’t really looked back. I also was irritated at the Google Meets browser compatibility issues as I mostly use Firefox.
I found it to be perfectly adequate. Just like Zoom. Neither stood out and I'm perfectly fine with that.
Some of my fellow employees asked for a company wide Zoom license at the beginning of WFH so out of curiosity I looked to see how much Zoom costs. Turns out it costs about the same as all of G Suite which honestly surprised me (in how expensive Zoom is).
The fact that one of those requires only a modern browser, and doesn't hide the browser access behind a dark pattern in favour of a software download which is a security dumpster fire, causes me to not worry quite so much about ultra-crisp video.
30x growth only? My wild gutted is that at least 1 billion Gmail App installations must have been updated to integrated Google Meet versions. So I expected much higher jump.
Just yesterday, we were asking people in our school WhatsApp Group to install Teams app. As for Google Meet, just update!!!
[+] [-] parhamn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhauer|5 years ago|reply
* It's nearly instantaneous to use. You can just bookmark any prior meeting ID you created and reuse it indefinitely. You just click the meeting on your bookmark toolbar and join the meeting. Creating a new meeting is also nearly effortless.
* Works right in your web browser. It doesn't default to pushing you to use a native executable.
* IMO, the video and audio both are slightly better than Zoom.
Google Meet or Hangouts from years ago was quite bad, but it has improved nicely.
[+] [-] Spooky23|5 years ago|reply
The most egregious example was when value of all of EMC’s business was worth less than the value of their VMWare ownership stake.
The Zoom story is really cool, and the business is simple. Are they actually worth $75B in a crowded, competitive market? We’ll see!
[+] [-] JeremyNT|5 years ago|reply
Whereas Zoom? They do one thing, and they do it well (enough). You don't download Zoom Hangouts one year and then switch to Zoom Duo then Zoom Allo and then migrate Zoom Meet. You just use Zoom and it works well enough.
I feel like Zoom has basically eaten Google's lunch here, not by actually being a better offering, but by simply being a straightforward proposition. Perhaps Google can learn some lessons for the future...
[+] [-] jtwaleson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gav|5 years ago|reply
I tested on a new account and the default was on, which you might argue is bad, but when I tried to create my first calendar event there was a popup that told me that it was on and gave me the option to turn it off.
Plus when you create a event the option to include a Google Meet is right there and it's one click to remove.
[1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/9898950?hl=en
[+] [-] lern_too_spel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amf12|5 years ago|reply
You could argue that, yes. And I won't blame you. But if you ignore Google and Meet for a moment and consider Microsoft (or in an alternate universe - Apple); product wise, this is a good decision. Reduces friction from creating meetings and provides a better experience.
You can disable automated Meet meeting generation though.
[+] [-] izacus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justicezyx|5 years ago|reply
Youtube bandwidth is there. Google meet is just a rounding error. Of course (most likely) there will be dedicated planning going forward, but these type of traffic ramping up is daily operation at Google.
At Google, application developers rarely pay much attention to scalability, that's how the TI org tries to achieve, and they are probably the best AFAIK.
[+] [-] j4mie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giovannibajo1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kenhwang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guillemsola|5 years ago|reply
I bookmarked the article that can be seen as an engineering approach to solve a problem like this.
[+] [-] tasssko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CubsFan1060|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevindong|5 years ago|reply
Some of my fellow employees asked for a company wide Zoom license at the beginning of WFH so out of curiosity I looked to see how much Zoom costs. Turns out it costs about the same as all of G Suite which honestly surprised me (in how expensive Zoom is).
https://zoom.us/pricing
https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html
[+] [-] isatty|5 years ago|reply
That and I’m not installing a proprietary, possibly spyware ridden (excluding spying at the server) that installs weird daemons on my computer.
For family use, I’ve found FaceTime to have the best AV if everyone has a decent connection.
[+] [-] ThePowerOfFuet|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exclusiv|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ramshanker|5 years ago|reply
Just yesterday, we were asking people in our school WhatsApp Group to install Teams app. As for Google Meet, just update!!!
[+] [-] tpmx|5 years ago|reply
srsly?