Google and Microsoft went wrong one step at a time, and the next step was all wrong …
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Editor’s note: Affected by the new coronavirus epidemic, the number of users of the video conferencing application Zoom has soared, and its stock price has doubled in two or three months. But in fact, in addition to Zoom, technology giants such as Google and Microsoft also have video communication services. How does Zoom beat tech giants such as Google and Microsoft? This article, the original title is How Zoom Beat the Tech Giants, author Eric Ravenscraft further analyzes the cause of this problem in the article, I hope to have something for you Inspired.
Image source: Glenn Harvey
At the end of April, Google announced that its video conferencing application Google Meet will be free to all users. In early April, Microsoft ’s instant messaging software Skype also added a feature that allows users to join Skype meetings via a link.
Although Google and Microsoft are both large companies that dominate the technology sector, they are both “taking the lead” and seem to want to catch up with the recent sudden popularity The video conferencing application Zoom.
At the beginning of the second decade of this century, Microsoft ’s Skype and Google ’s Hangouts (later renamed Meet) had already laid the basic standards and operations for video conferencing applications mode. So, how exactly does Zoom surpass Microsoft and Google to be far ahead?
From the beginning, Microsoft and GoogleSong takes a very different approach from Zoom in video conferencing. Zoom was founded in 2011. Since its inception, it has focused on the single function of video conferencing. However, technology giants such as Microsoft and Google see video conferencing as a function of their Skype voice calling system or social product Google+.
If you want to chat with others on Google Hangouts, users must first log in to Google+. If you want to join a group of 10 Skype chat video conferencing groups, users must log in to Skype’s desktop application. At the time, this was not really a particularly troublesome operation, but the move planted a destructive “seed” for the long-term strategic development of Google and Microsoft.
Although there is no problem with the functional experience of video conferencing for these products, the services they rely on are not optimistic. With the popularity of chat apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and iMessage on more and more smartphones, Skype simply cannot stand on the messaging platform. These newly launched applications have introduced more eye-catching features on the basis of text messaging, which has attracted millions of users to use its platform.
In 2013, Facebook announced that it would provide free voice calling for all iOS users in the United States. This move had a devastating effect on Skype directly. Although Skype was regarded as the “leader” of cross-platform voice and video calling applications at that time, Facebook directly integrated Skype’s core products into a messaging platform with hundreds of millions of active users. On this platform, neither Must always need to communicate through voice.
If it only provides a communication function, it can no longer attract the attention of users. At that time, the so-called success message platform, just like the products launched by Google and Microsoft at that time, was to provide users with various functions.
For this, Google seems to be indifferent, but it seems a little late. Not long after Facebook launched the free voice call feature, Google announced that it planned to split the Hangouts app into a separate service and merge text messages, voice calls, and video calls.
Image source: Jordanna Chord
Unfortunately, Google ’s strategy of developing different versions of the same product led to the failure of this plan. In 2016, Google launched the new instant messaging application Allo, but it was not until 2017 that Google ’s Google Talk instant messaging application ceased service. And Allo finally officially closed in 2018.
By 2015, compared with other consumer-centric information services competitors, Google Hangouts and Microsoft Skype are not particularly outstanding. At the same time, a new threat is quietly approaching again- Slack has joined this “group chat” again.
Slack, a team collaboration tool based on chat groups, was designed to seize the business communications market. At the time, the most popular products on the market were only electronic devices that kept changing and changing. Mail system and clumsy instant messaging.
In the enterprise market, Microsoft and Google occupy a strong market position with the Office suite and G Suite respectively, but because they failed to allow consumers to accept and choose their communications Application, they had to turn their communication platform to the enterprise side.
Group video communication will follow. At that time, most mainstream communication applications provided some form of one-to-one video calling, and letting many users join the same group of video calls was still a niche case. Generally speaking, users did not particularly like it. .
However, in the corporate context, group video calls seem to be more meaningful, because this feature allows teams to communicate quickly and effectively through remote meetings. It is a very inefficient way to communicate business plans through text information systems.
In 2017, after a year of discussion and decision-making, Google finally launchedHangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet two applications. However, their names are very bad.
The former is similar to Slack, you can create a virtual chat room, let team members can communicate with each other, support online browsing and sharing of files, and can also set the schedule including time and place arrangement.
The latter is specifically used for video conference communication applications. It has the functions of Hangouts that Google first launched in 2011, and also has Zoom ’s existing communication functions.
While technically, Google is still providing video chat through consumer-centric Hangouts, but since 2018, Google has been hinting that it will eventually Eliminate Hangouts services for G Suite paying users.
Combined with Google ’s free Google Meet service for all users with Gmail mail accounts, this will only make people more Burned in anger. Now, Google provides two competing video chat services, and at least as of the date of publication, both applications are still named after Hangouts.
Google has not stated the total number of users currently using Hangouts Chat (although it previously stated that G Suite has 6 million paying corporate users, and the G Suite suite currently includes the expansion service), But Slack’s competitor, Microsoft’s free chat, video call and collaboration tool Microsoft Teams, has a relatively large number of users.
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Since the public launch in 2017, the number of Microsoft Teams users has been on the rise. As of the end of 2019, the number of daily active usersWhen was this single easy-to-use feature launched?
Translator: Junyi