My guess is that this is a product aiming to mimic the success and popularity of Loom more than anyone else, although it may also just be a response to Microsoft acquiring Clipchamp for in-browser video editing in 2021 (
https://clipchamp.com/en/blog/microsoft-acquires-clipchamp-t...). Loop was likewise acquired by Atlassian late last year (
https://www.loom.com/blog/loom-atlassian ).
As far as Loom goes, video-based messaging and communication has the power to be a great low effort and high bandwidth for both the creator and recipient. It’s certainly easier to talk over a screen recording and send that over to someone, compared to typing out a long series of steps describing what you are doing and then also writing up the “why”. On the other hand, I do wonder if these types of apps are short-lived. What happens when the recipient is just using AI to get a summary of your video (instead of viewing it and benefiting from your nice graphics), or where they can use an AI to mimic what your screen recording shows (instead of needing to act on it themselves)? What about when an AI agent can just be a shadow trailing the creator’s actions and automatically put together a video to share with others?
Product features aside, I do have concerns when I see the big tech companies launch products like this. Don’t get me wrong - I think this is going to be an interesting and useful product for Google Workspace users. But I can’t help but feel that there’s something unfair or wrong about large companies creating new copycat products and entering segments that are established by smaller pre public companies first. Those smaller companies have had to struggle and survive - that means hiring early employees, finding your first customers, iterating rapidly, convincing investors, getting to product-market fit, all to most likely fail some day. Surviving is a difficult journey that requires talent, hard work, resilience, and some luck. But comparatively, it’s trivial for a trillion-Dollar tech company to just mimic features or entire products from others. It doesn’t really even matter if their efforts even succeed or not - a large company can afford to lose money on these things and shut down failed attempts in a few years without any risk to the company. Worse, they can act anti-competitively and bundle these new features/products alongside other things, like Microsoft did with Teams or Google is planning to do here, and deprive those deserving smaller companies of their markets. I feel like we need better language than “monopoly” to describe this dynamic. But what’s the fix? Updated competition laws? Higher taxes on companies above a certain size? Something else?