Zoom vs Meet : A look at two unrelenting opponents

The Covid-19 outbreak has forced employees to work from home amid the lock-down enforced in various countries across the globe to prevent the virus from spreading. Amid the present circumstances, video conferencing apps such as Zoom and Google Meet, have become a staple way for people to connect with their colleagues and carry out their day to day work.

A week ago Google made its premium video calling platform free for everyone in these social distancing times.The free availability of the Meet app will roll out globally including in India in the coming weeks.The demand for video conferencing app during the Covid-19 led lock-down compelled Google to make the app free. Google Meet was launched as a premium app, which was part of G-Suite subscription.

“With Google Meet becoming free for everyone, individual users will be able to host meetings with up to 100 participants and the maximum meeting length is set to 60 minutes, but we are not enforcing it until September 30,” Smita Hashim, Director, Product Management, Google Cloud, told IANS.

Since January, Google has seen Meet’s peak daily usage grow by 30 times. Meet is currently hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings and adding roughly 3 million new users every day. During the earnings call, CEO, Sundar Pichai said that they are adding 3 million new users every day to Meet. This is a quick jump from 2 million users each day reported earlier this month.

And with the other major player in the market, Zoom, facing some serious security issues and concerns, Google just might be looking at capitalizing on the opportunity to get a majority share of the market. You see Zoom, before the whole security lapse, was growing like nothing. Daily meeting participants on the platform surged from 10 million in December to 200 million in March, and 300 million in April. And to be honest it was really good so much so that even Google introduced some of its features like the tiled display. But unlike Zoom, the chances of such issues happening with Meet are lets say very slim if not impossible.Google said it does not allow anonymous users (without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts.

That’s not all, while Zoom is currently busy fixing its issues, Google is making sure that Meet becomes the absolute best video conferencing app. The company is using AI to automatically adjust the lighting in your video to make it more visible to other participants in the conference call. It also is rolling out updates to filter out background noises. Google has rolled out advanced Google Meet features to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers globally until September 30, 2020. This includes the ability to add up to 250 participants in a call, live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain and ability to record meetings and save them to Google Drive.

In case you are wondering, these features are not available in Zoom. This gives organisations a particularly interesting incentive to pick Meet over Zoom.

On a more personal front, although both work pretty flawlessly, Meet does seem to have a cleaner and less cluttered UI experience and its integration with the Google Calendar does make scheduling meetings absolutely easy. These are also some things others could look at to improve the overall experience.

Adding all this up it seems like there is no stopping Google from now on.I mean your biggest rival committed the one biggest mistake you can’t afford to make in this space and while Google might have been a bit late to the party there is no question that it hasn’t put a wrong foot which is to be expected with a company of its stature. It’s basically a question damage control for Zoom now and getting this thing sorted ASAP! Make no mistake it’s only a small battle that’s gone in the favour of the heavyweight and it’s a long war. A couple of big updates and Zoom might just back be up there but it’s an uphill battle from now on. One more slip up and it just might prove to be a deathblow for Zoom because as we have seen in other domains once Google decides to enter a market they do tend to disrupt it massively.

Sure it might seem like a David vs Goliath kind of fist fight but when David himself is susceptible to mistakes I’d say the odds of him winning just got even smaller.