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With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work
81–90 of 152 posts
Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work
#82My prediction on this: people will create videos, people will stop attending meeting because "I'll just watch the video offline", people will get crunched and not watch the videos before finally re-scheduling meetings where the authors will step-by-step in the videos and present the content as we used to do with slides.
Before any of that happens it will be renamed and branded so somebody can get promoted, closely followed with canceled to make way for the next big thing.
Cynicism is generally warranted, but they have a pretty good track record with Workplace/GSuite products geared towards paying enterprises.
Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work
#83Hacker News, April 2028: Google discontinues support for Vids, an experimental collaboration tool
2028 is awfully optimistic. I give this less than a year of a lifespan.
Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work
#84> You can ... prompt Google’s Gemini AI to make a first draft of the video for you.
Can I also ask Gemini to give me a text summary of a Vid?
Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work
#85Too wide instead of portrait and doesn't demonstrate a person talking with superimposed emphasis words and emojicons. TikTok for Enterprise is going to clean their clock.
Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work
#86It's odd to me that they wanted to make a whole new "app" for this, rather than building in some sort of timeline into slides. Powerpoint supports automatically transitioning slides and auto playing video, so with some fancy magic in the export where they slice the video for each slide, you could even do everything in a "compatible" way. Slides would of course be able to keep the video on top of the slides + transiti…
Someone probably wanted a promotion, or to use the latest shiny framework rather than an existing codebase.
You'd absolutely get a promotion for building a significant new feature into an existing application.
It can also a lot harder to do than greenfield development.
Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work
#87I love loom. I also wish it did a lot more. Excited to see more happening in this area.
Video content creation tools are something Google has needed for a long time. Between YouTube, youtube shorts, generative AI, and everything loom does, there is a clear opportunity.
Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work
#88One of my worst nightmares, using videos to convey information. It was bad enough with this wave of YouTube “guides” that take eight minutes to explain something which could have been done in a paragraph. Videos are also the worst searchable medium, really looking forward to having to scan through hours of content to find “that thing I saw six months ago”.
Who in their right mind would think that video could be a productivity tool!?
Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone probably wanted a promotion, or to use the latest shiny framework rather than an existing codebase.
You'd absolutely get a promotion for building a significant new feature into an existing application. It can also a lot harder to do than greenfield development.
Not at Google, they skew towards new projects for performance reviews. Not improving or maintaining existing projects. Which is why they have 3 different versions of hangouts/Meet, play music being replaced by YT Music which does the same thing and is slowly building back in the same functionality, and a lot of abandonware and stagnated core products like search/gmail/slides, etc.
There was a great blog on here where an (ex maybe) Google engineer first pointed out this problem and a good reason why he left since he realized this too late and all his time making huge performance improvements in existing products meant nothing come review time and all his colleagues got promoted.
Since then it's been documented several times:
https://www.warp.dev/blog/problems-with-promotion-oriented-c...
https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1576985038511448064
"Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome"
Maintaining and improving existing projects is a footgun at Google because of the way their promotion structure works. Unless they've changed something fundamental about their review process, of which I've not heard, it's still the same. This launch of a new product rather than naturally being integrated into an existing one that already fills this space and has adoption seems to prove its still the case.
Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work
#90One of my worst nightmares, using videos to convey information. It was bad enough with this wave of YouTube “guides” that take eight minutes to explain something which could have been done in a paragraph. Videos are also the worst searchable medium, really looking forward to having to scan through hours of content to find “that thing I saw six months ago”. Who in their right mind would think that video could be a pro…
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