Bringing Google Meet features to Duo for a single, integrated video solution
workspaceupdates.googleblog.com
workspaceupdates.googleblog.com
Every time this comes up I can't help but shake my head and wonder how they dropped the ball so bad, so many times. I understand the whole "release a new product to climb the ladder"-problem but are the top-level execs really so blind that they continue to make the same mistakes (or allow it happen) over and over again?
Google Wallet/Pay/"whatever it's called this week" has the same issues. It's just astounding to me.
I wanted to quickly find the story of how inside Microsoft the teams were also at war with each other, IIRC it was the Windows team vs the Office team, results of putting the query "microsoft insider competition windows team vs office team" in Google or DuckDuckGo:
- Links/articles about Microsoft Teams
- Links/articles about Windows/Office Insider (ie. their beta program?).
It doesn't look like they're going to tell anyone about it.
I asked this question on twitter in the thread of the announcement:
> Will all calls still be end-to-end encrypted after this transition from Google Duo to Google Meet?
and got this reply:
> Hi there, we over at @AskWorkspace are happy to confirm that all data in Meet is encrypted in transit by default between the client and Google for video meetings. You can check more Google Meet security info here https://goo.gle/3NR7ZMj Hope it helps! -WV
Sounds like a purposefully confusing version of "no".
There are other clues as well: While e2ee was part of the messaging of Google Duo, this current announcement of the product merge does not mention encryption at all. ... despite mentioning a lot of random vanity features. Clearly they intended to create the impression that all features will be preserved. Since the e2ee feature was such a prominent and reoccuring part of the Duo pitch, it's very unlikely that they just forgot to mention it in this announcement.
[0]: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/announcing-...
Does anyone even know what the current name for google's video call or chat product is called?
This has been my first-hand experience.
- Having chat and calls in one app
- Being able to make other people's devices ring if required (and not having to send a meeting invite code in a completely different app and coordinate with the other party to join)
- Being able to log in using their Google account rather than doing some weird dance involving their phone number
- Using more than one device simply by logging in using their account, rather than "linking an additional device to their phone" (which of course has to be the center of it all)
Seems like the same thing is happening to Pay/Wallet too. It was always completely beyond me how they would rip out "Login with Google" from their own products and replace it with a phone-number-based single-device model.
If they could just stop these ridiculous exercises in bundling, unbundling, redesigning and fiddling with the UX in totally unnecessary ways, I believe they could have (had) a winner.