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With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

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Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#101
post #88

One 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…

IMO it's because literacy rates are in the toilet.

Is it the cause or the effect?

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#102
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google Domains and Jamboard come to mind.

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#103
"The main goal is to make everything as easy as possible, says Kristina Behr, Google’s VP of product management for the Workspace collaboration apps."

Looking up Kristina Behr on LI it looks like she jumped ships from MS to Google slightly over a year ago. At MS' last post she's been responsible for "Empowering frontline workers to achieve more with comms-first productivity and workflow solutions" listing following achievements:

* Introducing Microsoft Teams Premium, the better way to meet | Microsoft 365 Blog

* Microsoft Teams for frontline workers: What's Live and Coming Soon

and so on...

Yeah, I'll pass :)

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it's because literacy rates are in the toilet.

Is it the cause or the effect?

Obviously not qualified to answer this but I think the drop in literacy is happened quite a while after youtube or even online video being a thing. I am a strong reader and get highly annoyed spending 5 minutes watching a video on a topic where I could get my answer in 10 seconds or less reading about it - I think most strong readers would feel the same. I see absolutely no benefit to getting information from a video (plus it’s hard to refer back to) unless you are not great at reading.

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#105
post #88

One 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…

I agree. I can only hope that this doesn't catch on. There's already too much information locked up in video form as it is.

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#106
post #39

I am sooo interested in this because I think loom is one of the best and most useful products for communicating knowledge. Especially in remote companies. But it’s not interactive! I want to be able for people to add and insert videos, and for me to insert responses or keep building a video based on what people asked. I’m surprised by the skepticism here. Slides suck ass to communicate ideas, and text is just not eno…

[deleted]

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#107
post #21

It'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.

This seems like the most obvious, Googley reason why this exists

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#108
post #88

One 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…

Ads and subscriptions seems easier on sites for video than text. Nobody ever made significant money with blogs or other online text form, while some people make a very decent living just producing YouTube videos.

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At various places of employment, /some/ meetings have absolutely been just so. Nothing of day-to-day value was ever communicated in those meetings, and nothing of value was lost when I stopped attending them. Sprint Demos could also fall into this category if you squint, but at least there is a good chance you pick up something useful

It’s not always that there’s no value in what’s communicated; often it’s just that there’s not much value in attending live. Teams’ auto-transcription, and now Copilot auto-summarization, is great for consuming these presentations after the fact in a fraction of the time.

[deleted]

Re: With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

#110
post #39

I am sooo interested in this because I think loom is one of the best and most useful products for communicating knowledge. Especially in remote companies. But it’s not interactive! I want to be able for people to add and insert videos, and for me to insert responses or keep building a video based on what people asked. I’m surprised by the skepticism here. Slides suck ass to communicate ideas, and text is just not eno…

Honestly, that future sounds like a total nightmare to me. I think this comes down to that different people are better with different kinds of media.

I don't do well with video at all. I do best with the written word.

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