Don't Zoom off elsewhere: Google plugs video-chat service Meet into Gmail as user eyes start wandering Google is plugging its Meet service into Gmail as the Chocolate Factory rolls out the G Suite tanks in response to the threat posed by rival services. The new functionality, available to all G Suite customers, is coming out over the next two weeks in Rapid Release domains and from 30 April for Scheduled Release domains. It's …
Agree. Meet is really easy to use and get other users connected onto, but Zoom seems to have really good screen sharing quality, and also you can do remote control which google has been missing for far too long.
Both Meet and Zoom seem to lack Team's background "white noise feature" which can be very distracting.
Video-conferencing has struggled with professionals. Watching Zoom embraced by technophobes in lockdown is miraculous. This week we had a scratch choir of 60 folks from all over europe! No Gmail account required.
Security doesn't really matter for most informal meetings. Weird that wasn't Zoom's target market. How they monetise the masses is a question they must be perusing. I'm guessing a manadatory window will be rolling ads in some future 'free' edition.
Agree the requirement for a G-Suite account, as opposed to just a free Google/Gmail account does mean this isn't a competitor to Zoom. It does seem that Google is really aiming at the Teams market, in an attempt to prevent G-Suite customers moving to Microsoft 365, which given Teams is live now, means G-Suite Meet needs to be better not just to retain G-Suite customers but to attract people away from the others...
Does really everything has to be dominated to the same company? I not only like how easy Zoom works but also that it is not tied to any other big company. One does not need to have a gmail account to use it. It is likely that the company will be bought up by a big fish like Skype before (which had been great when it started, after it was bought by a big fish, it is become more difficult to use). I hope that Zoom stays independent but that is very unlikely. One of the sharks will eat it up and incorporate into their own infrastructure, making it harder to use as they would have to bend it to their other services.
Does really everything has to be dominated to the same company?
Well Zoom will interoperate with established standards (e.g. H.323 and SIP) for videoconferencing. But if we all just used the standards, Zoom wouldn't exist in the first place. The reason we don't do that is noone is going to host H.323 or SIP conferences free - they're only going to give services away if they hook people into proprietary technology from which there's no easy escape.
If you don't want to pay with money you're going to be at the mercy of large dominant companies and paying with your privacy. At that point it doesn't really matter if it's one dominant company or a handful.
>Does really everything has to be dominated to the same company? I not only like how easy Zoom works but also that it is not tied to any other big company.
Video calling and conferencing has been a thing since the early 1990's. What has been frustrating is the total lack of interest in it by big telcos and ITU/CCITT - similar can be said about chat and rich messaging apps. So with a total lack of interest by the Standards community, we are going to get single company solutions and standards coming to the fore.
I expect many are currently happy with Zoom, but when it has 1+ billion users and has to start turning that into revenue..
BlackBerry? Communications? BB Me? ah but thats for real professional organizations (voice,chat,video-SECURE!!!). Though the lightweight consumerish individual use version is available on iphone, android desktop too for chats and messaging and sharing diagrams (for the cost of a few postage stamps per month for a single user). Though I don't really need to zoom in to see the nosehairs of the presenter, they can send me their wedding photo or something instead to put on my contacts image.It's not like I'm using it to watch the reporter (presenter) with the Desert Storm rocket fireworks backdrop, am I? Unless your boss is dropping fireworks every video conference. Oh and when I do use zoom, I put my BlackBerry Playbook mounted on a stand in front of my laptop computer and start Need for Speed or some such old game that the other viewers can be mesmerized by, while the boss is facilitating the work. That or I run a presentation of my vacation pics from last when I took one.
Most people pay for their home broadband and mobile phone connections. Why is videoconferencing different? I bought a low end Zoom account so that I could host meetings lasting > 40 mins. I like Zoom better than Skype or WebEx, which I have tried. I am forced to use Teams for some things, which is OK.
I like opensource software, but there is clearly an expensive server and a service to run here. I'm not made of the stuff, but happy to pay for a job well done, and "If its free , your'e the product" for this sort of thing.
Biggest problem is everyone having different services of course.
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