- Post Publish: 2021-11-03
- Categories: Industry news
- Conference
- Updated:
Will Google Meet be the king of cloud video conferencing?
Will Google Meet be the king of cloud video conferencing? - Table of contents:
Due to the spread of COVID-19, people have spent a long time at home in the past, thus the usage of cloud video conferencing has greatly increased, and Zoom, names such as Houseparty, and Skype have become synonymous with certain social interactions.
Google has also joined these companies, providing unique Google Meet services to everyone, which can be used as long as you have a Google account.
What is Google Meet?
It is a cloud video conferencing of Google, and some people call it Google Hangouts Meet, although it was separated from Hangouts some time ago.
Previously, Meet as part of G Suite software package and a commercial solution provided by Google for companies, organizations and schools to share and produce applications. However, after Google issued a new statement, anyone can get the application online for free to Meet.
Google said: “Starting from early May 2020, anyone with an e-mail can join the application to Meet and enjoy the same functions used by many commercial and educational users.”
For the first time, Google Meet users can create and host meetings for up to 100 people free of charge, provided that they have Google accounts, and the call duration of basic products is usually limited to 60 minutes.
Google says Meet hosts 3 billion minutes of video conferencing, adding nearly 3 million new users per day, and the Meet app has recently surpassed 100 million daily meeting participants.
How to use Google Meet?
All functions of Google Meet video conferencing can be accessed in your current web browser, which means that it can be run without other software or applications.
Google says that in addition to the backend benefits, video conferencing is more secure using Google Chrome. If you already have a Google account, for example, if you are a Gmail user, you can log in to meet.google.com to get started.
If you don’t have a free Google account, it only takes a minute to create an account using your company or personal email address of your choice. Google requires this step for security purposes and you only need to perform it once.
If you want to make calls on your phone or tablet, you can also download the dedicated Google Meet app from the Apple and Google stores.
It is also reported that Google Meet video conferencing service, is further open, has allowed users to directly through the Gmail email account login to use free, and is not even limited to their own Gmail email.
People with Gmail accounts can now quickly start or join a video conference directly from their Gmail page.
Independent video provider Zoom sees big growth amidst the epidemic. Tech giants have also shifted their strategies and entered the competition.
Google announced on March 3, 2020 that it is moving its existing premium video service Meet to free, and will officially implement it on April 9.
The free strategy is paying off. Google CEO Sandar Pichai said on the Q1 2020 earnings call that Google Meet is adding about 3 million new users per day. Since January, Google Meet usage has grown 30-fold, with the number of daily active users surpassing 100 million.
Smita Hashim, Google’s director of cloud product management, has said in an interview that Google Meet’s free offer will continue in perpetuity. “It’s like Gmail (Google’s free webmail service). Video conferencing has become a basic service.”
Other competitors:
Zoom
COVID-19 pandemic has made Zoom, the video conferencing software, a household name and one of the biggest technology beneficiaries. At present, the market share of Zoom has reached 41.48%, and the share price has risen all the way.
The following figure shows the function comparison between Google Meet and Zoom:
Microsoft: Teams
In the same way, Microsoft changed the “Skype for business” section of Skype that he purchased earlier and began to intervene in the big cake of cloud conferences.
Microsoft put their own Office conference software Teams into the Office framework, allowing real-time collaboration and file sharing. The free edition also provides 10 GB of team file storage space and 2 GB of personal file storage space for each person.
In addition, Microsoft’s product also hits the “soft spot” of video conferencing, as it released a statement announcing the security of its Teams chat and conferencing application when the privacy and security controversy erupted over Zoom.
Facebook: Messenger Rooms
Facebook’s own video chat project Messenger Rooms will provide a maximum capacity of 50 people, unlimited video calls.
Invitees can enter the conference without registering a Facebook account.
And, Rooms will connect and optimize other products under Facebook, such as WhatsApp Group Calls will be expanded to 8 people; seamless video forwarding and sharing will be provided on Facebook, Instagram and Portal platforms.
In terms of functions, Facebook cloud videos focus more on the activity of content and time, focusing on social contact and family. It is slightly different from the one-sided corporate meetings and the orientation of school courses.
In addition, other competitors of video conferencing include Cisco’s WebEx, the originator of cloud video conferencing, Adobe’s Connect and so on.
Competitive Key: Information Security + User Experience
With technology giants out to compete, product information security and user experience are two key factors if we want to successfully lead the market.
Recently, the use of Zoom has been increasing, but there have been frequent problems in the security field, such as strangers joining Zoom meetings to “eavesdrop” and people hacking into company meetings to broadcast inappropriate content. …. Even recently there are new words like “Zoombombing” and “Zoom raiding” to describe this phenomenon, and the problem is so serious that it has even attracted the attention of the FBI, which leaves competitors open to exploit.
The second key to competition is user experience.
Zoom CEO Yuan Zheng said in an interview that in this “once-in-a-century crisis”, Zoom is not thinking about competition, but focusing on user experience, and that Zoom’s rapid success is due to its ease of use and simplicity in design.
The picture below shows the initial interface of Google Meet and Zoom in Chinese. It can be seen that although Google’s interface is more vivid and lively, some users reported that the function area is too deep and inconvenient to operate.
In the battle for the high ground of cloud video conferencing, who will finally win and become the king? We’ll see.
