Google is wasting no time capitalising on the growth in the video conferencing market by integrating its Meet software, formally a part of their bigger enterprise-only G-Suite, package to all G-Mail users and are now offering a host of free features that their competitors are going to be unlikely to match by allowing meetings of up to 100 people with no time limits.
And now to complete this remarkable challenge to the likes of Zoom and Microsoft teams, Google has also now added functionality which will launch Meet directly form the Gmail application to ensure people have got no issues finding it and accessing it. The best part is that, most users won’t even need to worry about creating yet another account, as Google can use their existing Gmail credentials for the Meet account, while this also provides added security, though does meet that if you need to contact someone without a Gmail account (the same constraints Teams has), you will still need to use another to like Zoom to do so.
Honestly though given that it offers better security, unlimited meetings lengths and large meeting sizes, it’s now the clear leader in terms of features available to users and it makes people justifying the use of Zoom incredibly difficult. Teams still has more business users over Google’s G-Suite, but with this approach, Google may win over a lot of people if it can deliver the quality across in their free meetings. Though you my also argue that with Google been too generous with its free offering would people really be wanting to subscribe to the rest of the G-Suite, even if Google rolls back some of this functionality over the next few months.
It will indeed be interesting to see how these features work out for Google over the next few weeks and if the can indeed lure people away from their competitors during this time or if the likes of Zoom start to up the ante and offer even more features for free.
Last Updated: May 6, 2020
