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It's crazy how little Google's marketcap benefits from things like this. Zoom's here sitting on 75B (~1/15th Googs) as we speak and Google Meet probably isn't e

It's crazy how little Google's marketcap benefits from things like this. Zoom's here sitting on 75B (~1/15th Googs) as we speak and Google Meet probably isn't even legitimately used in pricing Google. Wonder what Google's market cap would be if each individual service got the VC future growth pricing.

bhauer 6y ago
Not only that, but modern Google Meet is significantly more useful to my day-to-day remote conferencing needs than Zoom. Modern Google Meet's advantages: * It's nearly instantaneous to use. You can just bookmark any prior meeting ID you created and reuse it indefinitely. You just click the meeting on your bookmark toolbar and join the meeting. Creating a new meeting is also nearly effortless. * Works right in your web browser. It doesn't default to pushing you to use a native executable. * IMO, the video and audio both are slightly better than Zoom. Google Meet or Hangouts from years ago was quite bad, but it has improved nicely.
- MisterPea 6y ago
  Also the transcription. Fastest, most accurate transcription I've ever seen.
- hitekker 6y ago
  > IMO, the video and audio both are slightly better than Zoom. Firm disagree. Three days ago, I presented a video in a google meet stream for 50+ people. For three minutes the stream dropped frames , displayed visual artifacts and lagged behind my narration. I was on gigabit internet and so were my colleagues. I never had this problem with zoom, and I would never use google meets for a streaming setup again.
  - ariwilson 6y ago
    Did you use the newish "Present a Chrome tab" feature to do this? https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/04/high-quality-video-audio-meet.html https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/04/high-quality-vi... Normal Google Meet Present is optimized for slides/docs which is a very different problem than streaming video.
    - giovannibajo1 6y ago
      Well, it’s still a joke that Google Meet will stream desktop / windows at 4 FPS. I would be curious to know whether they really think the feature is good enough.
      - londons_explore 6y ago
        This is mostly a limitation of Chrome and other web browsers. When streaming the desktop, the browser doesn't get notified when some region on the screen changes. That means it has to retrieve a bitmap of the screen and 'diff' it with every frame, which is computationally heavy.
        giovannibajo1 6y ago
        FWIW, AirPlay can send a H264 video of my desktop at 60FPS with ~0% CPU impact (hardware accelerated), good enough to play many games on TV.
        londons_explore 6y ago
        I believe Airplay has special OS integration - a third party app wouldn't have access to the screen buffer with zero-copy.. A third party app would at a minimum have to copy the data to system memory and back to the GPU, using a lot of CPU time for that alone, before any encoding.
- oblio 6y ago
  Can it blur/cover backgrounds?
  - totallynotabot 6y ago
    Yes it now has a built in blur background feature. (Pretty aggressive level of blurring in my experience.)
- somewhereoutth 6y ago
  Yes - having it completely integrated into your Calendar (if you use Google Calendar) is the right way round, if I have a stack of remote meetings I should just need to know the when and the who - the how should take care of itself, as it does with Meet.
- prennert 6y ago
  And multiple people can share their screen at the same time. And nothing is interfering with note taking by making the window full screen whenever a presentation starts. I am using zoom rarely and every time I am baffled by it's horrible UX. Why do people use it?
Spooky23 6y ago
The stock market is hilariously bad at valuation of big businesses. The most egregious example was when value of all of EMC’s business was worth less than the value of their VMWare ownership stake. The Zoom story is really cool, and the business is simple. Are they actually worth $75B in a crowded, competitive market? We’ll see!
- ignoramous 6y ago
  With Zoom, I think, the money is riding on the brand. My parents, who aren't tech savvy at all, think they are on Zoom even when they are actually using Google Meets. Of course, the Zoom app is installed on their phones and they take "meetings" on it too.
JeremyNT 6y ago
Google organizationally though is probably incapable of capitalizing on Google Meet. They have a bewildering history of creating and discontinuing and morphing products in this space, and their historic lack of focus and vision means you'd have to really be a Google aficionado to keep up with what their current offering even is, much less whether it's any good. Whereas Zoom? They do one thing, and they do it well (enough). You don't download Zoom Hangouts one year and then switch to Zoom Duo then Zoom Allo and then migrate Zoom Meet. You just use Zoom and it works well enough. I feel like Zoom has basically eaten Google's lunch here, not by actually being a better offering, but by simply being a straightforward proposition. Perhaps Google can learn some lessons for the future...

bhauer 6y ago

Not only that, but modern Google Meet is significantly more useful to my day-to-day remote conferencing needs than Zoom. Modern Google Meet's advantages: * It's nearly instantaneous to use. You can just bookmark any prior meeting ID you created and reuse it indefinitely. You just click the meeting on your bookmark toolbar and join the meeting. Creating a new meeting is also nearly effortless. * Works right in your web browser. It doesn't default to pushing you to use a native executable. * IMO, the video and audio both are slightly better than Zoom. Google Meet or Hangouts from years ago was quite bad, but it has improved nicely.

MisterPea 6y ago
Also the transcription. Fastest, most accurate transcription I've ever seen.
hitekker 6y ago
> IMO, the video and audio both are slightly better than Zoom. Firm disagree. Three days ago, I presented a video in a google meet stream for 50+ people. For three minutes the stream dropped frames , displayed visual artifacts and lagged behind my narration. I was on gigabit internet and so were my colleagues. I never had this problem with zoom, and I would never use google meets for a streaming setup again.
- ariwilson 6y ago
  Did you use the newish "Present a Chrome tab" feature to do this? https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/04/high-quality-video-audio-meet.html https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/04/high-quality-vi... Normal Google Meet Present is optimized for slides/docs which is a very different problem than streaming video.
  - giovannibajo1 6y ago
    Well, it’s still a joke that Google Meet will stream desktop / windows at 4 FPS. I would be curious to know whether they really think the feature is good enough.
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      This is mostly a limitation of Chrome and other web browsers. When streaming the desktop, the browser doesn't get notified when some region on the screen changes. That means it has to retrieve a bitmap of the screen and 'diff' it with every frame, which is computationally heavy.
      - giovannibajo1 6y ago
        FWIW, AirPlay can send a H264 video of my desktop at 60FPS with ~0% CPU impact (hardware accelerated), good enough to play many games on TV.
        londons_explore 6y ago
        I believe Airplay has special OS integration - a third party app wouldn't have access to the screen buffer with zero-copy.. A third party app would at a minimum have to copy the data to system memory and back to the GPU, using a lot of CPU time for that alone, before any encoding.
oblio 6y ago
Can it blur/cover backgrounds?
- totallynotabot 6y ago
  Yes it now has a built in blur background feature. (Pretty aggressive level of blurring in my experience.)
somewhereoutth 6y ago
Yes - having it completely integrated into your Calendar (if you use Google Calendar) is the right way round, if I have a stack of remote meetings I should just need to know the when and the who - the how should take care of itself, as it does with Meet.
prennert 6y ago
And multiple people can share their screen at the same time. And nothing is interfering with note taking by making the window full screen whenever a presentation starts. I am using zoom rarely and every time I am baffled by it's horrible UX. Why do people use it?

Spooky23 6y ago

The stock market is hilariously bad at valuation of big businesses. The most egregious example was when value of all of EMC’s business was worth less than the value of their VMWare ownership stake. The Zoom story is really cool, and the business is simple. Are they actually worth $75B in a crowded, competitive market? We’ll see!

ignoramous 6y ago
With Zoom, I think, the money is riding on the brand. My parents, who aren't tech savvy at all, think they are on Zoom even when they are actually using Google Meets. Of course, the Zoom app is installed on their phones and they take "meetings" on it too.

JeremyNT 6y ago

Google organizationally though is probably incapable of capitalizing on Google Meet. They have a bewildering history of creating and discontinuing and morphing products in this space, and their historic lack of focus and vision means you'd have to really be a Google aficionado to keep up with what their current offering even is, much less whether it's any good. Whereas Zoom? They do one thing, and they do it well (enough). You don't download Zoom Hangouts one year and then switch to Zoom Duo then Zoom Allo and then migrate Zoom Meet. You just use Zoom and it works well enough. I feel like Zoom has basically eaten Google's lunch here, not by actually being a better offering, but by simply being a straightforward proposition. Perhaps Google can learn some lessons for the future...