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Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

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Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#231

Post by perennate »

cdolan wrote: post #213
meristem wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack is ripe for the picking--same capabilities with a better UI, giving better value? I am amazed no one has eaten them alive yet.

Discord did a complete R&D (rob and duplicate) of Slack and focused on video game communities. It’s doing very well from what I can tell!

I haven't heard this term before, but I'm not sure it is a "rob and duplicate" if they are targeting a market segment that Slack never advertised towards nor was really designed for. Seems more like refreshing Slack for a niche, but it turns out to be a really big niche.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#232

Post by koheripbal »

fraencko wrote: post #41

I use meet professionally on a daily basis as my company is a GApps for business customer and most people I talked to are pretty satisfied. Sound, connection and video quality is very good, far better than Slack in my opinion. We had meetings with more than 100 paticipants. Integration in Google Calendar is also a big plus. One pretty minor thing that bothers me is that the webcam and mic mute toggles and the hang up…

The only feature I wish I could have is org-wide call recording.

We are financial startup and since we need to record all calls by law - which means we need to keep our legacy PBX system that is constantly a headache.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#233

Post by perennate »

llarsson wrote: post #130
disillusioned wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your confusion is fair, considering that, up until two weeks ago, Google Meet was actually called Google Hangouts Meet. And yes, it is a completely and entirely different service. Hangouts is still the legacy chat program that featured some video and voice call capabilities. Meet is their Zoom competitor, built for GSuite users, and is under active development and is a very solid product with very strong video/voice…

Thank you for listing an ecosystem of services that, from my point of view, seem to be overlapping quite a bit. I hope they can prune or merge some of it, because it sounds exhausting: do I as a GSuite user talk with an external person (say, for a job interview) over a Meet or a Duo or a Hangout Classic... and what are the privacy policy implications of such a choice? Too exhausting!

I hope they don't prune Hangouts, but if they do then at least I can delete my Google account since it won't be of much use anymore.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#234

Post by koheripbal »

olyjohn wrote: post #226
CydeWeys wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you aren't taking advantage of browser profiles properly. I have two Google accounts, one personal and one for work, and they live in two separate Chrome profiles, both of which are always open. On MacOS the shortcut for switching between the two windows (when both are open) is command-`

That's totally missing the point. You shouldn't have to have browser profiles to call somebody on a video app. Most people don't even know how to use them.

You don't have to - there's an account switcher in the top right on all Google products. Is it somehow missing on Meet?

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#235

Post by jmole »

koheripbal wrote: post #232
fraencko wrote: post #41

I use meet professionally on a daily basis as my company is a GApps for business customer and most people I talked to are pretty satisfied. Sound, connection and video quality is very good, far better than Slack in my opinion. We had meetings with more than 100 paticipants. Integration in Google Calendar is also a big plus. One pretty minor thing that bothers me is that the webcam and mic mute toggles and the hang up…

The only feature I wish I could have is org-wide call recording. We are financial startup and since we need to record all calls by law - which means we need to keep our legacy PBX system that is constantly a headache.

you could automate a bot that calls in to every meeting for recording

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#236

Post by koheripbal »

jedberg wrote: post #94
kartayyar wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google products ( and other tech company products ) are discontinued when they don't take off. Meet has a 100 million daily call participants. And really with video conferencing product, I don't get the whole trope of "but they might discontinue it." - the utility is immediate in terms of the calls that you make with it, and time boxed till by when a call ends.

> And really with video conferencing product, I don't get the whole trope of "but they might discontinue it." - the utility is immediate in terms of the calls that you make with it, and time boxed till by when a call ends. Not true at all. I have a bunch of recurring meetings in my calendar, and each one has a Zoom link in it. If I wanted to switch to Meet, I'd have to redo each of those invites with a new link, and…

Updating a recurring meeting invite with a new link, is what... 4 clicks?

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#237

Post by cwhiz »

crazygringo wrote: post #156
gregdoesit wrote: post #115

Can someone tell me the difference between Google Meet, Google Hangouts, Google Duo and Google Chat? Multiple of these support video and chat. I’ve used Hangouts and Chat and Duo before. Why the new brand “Meet”? And why have competing - even more importantly - confusing products at Google who seem to offer the same features? I would like to, but cannot be bullish on Google as a video communications platform for this…

It has extremely valid market reasons. Google Hangouts = the original chat+video product which was semi-popular, but never got huge traction and mindshare the way WhatsApp, Slack, the original Skype, or the newer FaceTime did. And now Zoom and Teams. So Google realized it had to compete better against all of those, all of those being very separate communications channels with different priorities. Hangouts could neve…

>And Google Hangouts is this zombie product that used to do everything, but never as well as any of the competitors

So Google has Hangouts that is able to compete broadly in the consumer and business market but it's not quite good enough so the best answer is to let Hangouts slowly die and invent 4 new apps?

You should switch to Allo for IM. Oh, but if you want to send an SMS find something else, Hangouts might work. But if it is for work stuff you should use Chat. Well unless it's also for video then you should use Meet. But if it's for personal video then try Duo. Ah, well, nvm we killed Allo. Well now Meet is free for everyone so use that for personal use also, I guess.

Totally makes sense. What a cohesive strategy they have enacted to respond to market trends.

Why would anyone in their right mind trust a Google chat, video, or conferencing app? They reinvent the wheel every 3 years and set fire to their user base every time.

Hangouts was absolutely fine. They just needed to add more features and business tiers. Instead of updating Hangouts they invented a convoluted mess that is destined to fail.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#238

Post by corobo »

mav3rick wrote: post #229
corobo wrote: post #139

Google's just realised it's been asleep at the wheel eh? Used to be they'd fart out an internet changing mail service on a whim, now they pivot about as fast as an aircraft carrier in treacle. Better luck next once in a lifetime pandemic, big G

Maybe if Zoom farted correctly it wouldn't be mired in bad PR about security.

Unfortunately the masses aren’t really phased by internet security issues

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#239

Post by CydeWeys »

olyjohn wrote: post #226
CydeWeys wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you aren't taking advantage of browser profiles properly. I have two Google accounts, one personal and one for work, and they live in two separate Chrome profiles, both of which are always open. On MacOS the shortcut for switching between the two windows (when both are open) is command-`

That's totally missing the point. You shouldn't have to have browser profiles to call somebody on a video app. Most people don't even know how to use them.

The browser profiles are quite necessary for dealing with every other Google product too. Every day I'm using Gmail, Meet, Docs, Sheets, Drive, Keep, YouTube, Search, and more. If I was trying to do this all in one profile I'd be logging out and logging in dozens of times per day.

This isn't unique to Google; it applies to any kind of single sign on with lots of different products. You're always better off maintaining separate browser profiles so you can seamlessly switch between them than forcing everything into a single profile and endlessly logging out and logging in on all these different sites. I used to do this with Facebook too back when I was using a different account for work development.

And there's also the "poor man's" version of this which even many non-technical users know about, which is to use Chrome for one account and Firefox for another.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#240

Post by PaulHoule »

numbsafari wrote: post #195
crazygringo wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has extremely valid market reasons. Google Hangouts = the original chat+video product which was semi-popular, but never got huge traction and mindshare the way WhatsApp, Slack, the original Skype, or the newer FaceTime did. And now Zoom and Teams. So Google realized it had to compete better against all of those, all of those being very separate communications channels with different priorities. Hangouts could neve…

Funny ... none of those other "competitors" seem to feel the need to have 4 different products in order to operate in this space. Each of them is expanding its reach and capabilities, coming from a place of strength. Google is just practicing "me-too"-ism and not really trying to solve a problem except some engineer is bored and some product person thinks these tools could become a threat to ad dollars if allowed to…

Microsoft keeps shooting own goals such as buying Skype, renaming the popular Lync product (not be confused with several other Microsoft products also named after corrupted versions of the work "link") to "Skype for Business" just to make everybody confused.

Then later "Microsoft Teams" comes out of nowhere. Maybe I live behind a rock but I see people using all kinds of chat programs, and all kinds of Microsoft software, but I've never known anybody who uses "Microsoft Teams" and I wonder if it is as popular as "Hipchat" but backed by a company which gives in more benign neglect than Atlassian can afford to.

One constant is that chat programs are constantly churning, another is that every chat program seems to get worse over time, the third is the level of functionality that chat programs have had since early 2000s. (I helped reskin Paltalk for Brazil and it seemed to do everything that Skype and Facebook Messenger did today) The fourth is that consumers and vendors seem to learn nothing from past successes and failures.

(e.g. AIM was great, but AOL failed. Chat clients are usually an attempt to lock you into using services from a particular company, so whether they "succeed" or "fail" has nothing to do with how they succeed or fail, but just a function of what state in the vendor lock-in cycle they are in.)

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