With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work
theverge.com
theverge.com
Who in their right mind would think that video could be a productivity tool!?
I mean videos can be great for educational content. But the putting out a video takes significantly longer than watching it. And theoretically you could make it just as searchable as anything else.
The problem is that people suck at communicating clearly and concisely already, add to that a narcissist guy who likes to see himself talk and you got a recipe for a major pain in the..
I am afraid the same people who really like to record voice messages will flock to this like moths to a lightbulb.
In that sense it may act as a filter to help remove low-effort content from other channels I actually use (ie. not video).
I love long form video essays. The longer the better.
Where for a off the cuff article I find I'm much less likely to read the whole thing unless it's really piqued my interest. Note that I'm not an especially fast reader.
These are very intelligent people, it's just that my generation is moving away from reading.
I've had discussions with friends who think academic papers should be replaced with videos. They find writing so time consuming and difficult that they think that an informative, animated video could be made with the same amount of effort as an academic paper. They also say that they're frequently distracted from the content due to the effort of reading itself.
I've been surprised by the extent to which people use "person talks to camera" style videos for revision and re-learning, rather than reading condensed notes. They are significantly slower, you can't scan through until you find something you're unfamiliar with, and they're just plain dull. Despite that, they're one of the most popular ways to revise. Perhaps it's because you can zone out of videos, convincing yourself that you're learning without actively engaging with the content. Again, I don't mean 3b1b style animated lectures, I mean someone essentially paraphrasing the textbook to the camera.
An similar phenomenon that also worries me is the lack of distinction between how people speak and how people write, and not in the "use straightforward language, not purple prose" way. People comma-splice entire paragraphs (if they use paragraphs at all) in a stream of consciousness rather than organising their thoughts.
It really depends on the video. A bad porn movie "captures your attention far better" than a corporate training video.
Searching within videos is a solved problem for Google.
Yeah, we'll just never get to use it.
A paragraph on the internet doesn't show you step by step visually how to do something.
Short form video, if you haven't noticed, is absolutely dominating social media and google has good reason to bundle and theme it for the workplace.
It does, images existed long before YouTube, and plenty of tutorials used them
Social media domination is usually associated with less productivity, so that's a negative factor
And since we are doing half-assed attacks, yours is a very naive take. Setting aside that most “short form video” on social media is not even used to actually convey information (as in the “productivity/office” sense of the original article), the reason video is dominating social media is because 1) advertisers pay way more to have ads shown before a video than among static content and 2) it is much more complicated to do Ad Blocking on video than on static content.
At any rate... We can have both written text and video media. And we will have both.
It's pointless trying to present one as better than the other. They will exist in parallel.
There are troves of information in short form. Information spreads among young people who own phones more rapidly than ever before.
Not sure what to tell you. Maybe scroll some tiktok videos about programming and find out.
There are few to no written words in their instructions so no translation is needed between languages. Only numeric quantities and part identifiers.
It basically already is a slide show. Add some chapters and it'd be fine as a video. Pause and unpause as you progress.
I’ve use video tutorials for everything from home renovations to cloud certifications, Minecraft builds, woodworking projects, software dev, and my graduate degree. This is kind of absolutism towards video is absolutely a get off my lawn take, regardless of your industry ties.
I think it’s especially ridiculous to pretend that the current state of most written media on the web is dramatically superior. I wish people ITT could just accept that they have a bias towards the medium they’re more comfortable with instead of pretending there’s some objective fault in things other people prefer.
Unless it's a fiendish plot to sell LLMs to prepare summaries of the videos. I'm at Google Next 24 and today's keynotes were pretty much AI from start to finish.
It's right there in the title, sir. /s
Ah, and Microsoft. Management _loves_ video trainings.
| Who in their right mind would think that video could be a productivity tool!?
They are also good for some classes of front end defects. Easier to see it in action some times.
Though to be fair, this could just be slides' codebase, with some extra UI changes on top of it. Just feels like an odd way to brand it though, especially with the market penetration + built up institutional knowledge of slides' UI.
It can also a lot harder to do than greenfield development.
There was a great blog on here where an (ex maybe) Google engineer first pointed out this problem and a good reason why he left since he realized this too late and all his time making huge performance improvements in existing products meant nothing come review time and all his colleagues got promoted.
Since then it's been documented several times:
https://www.warp.dev/blog/problems-with-promotion-oriented-c...
https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1576985038511448064
"Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome"
Maintaining and improving existing projects is a footgun at Google because of the way their promotion structure works. Unless they've changed something fundamental about their review process, of which I've not heard, it's still the same. This launch of a new product rather than naturally being integrated into an existing one that already fills this space and has adoption seems to prove its still the case.
I have no idea which of these benefits Google is intentional about, by the way - I am just speculating.
Because what ends up happening is I need a high degree of precision and I have a very concrete idea of what I need to present on a slide and exactly how to do it. But because it's fully automated, I have to instead convince the AI to generate my concrete idea on its own. Then I just don't use it entirely. Meanwhile, I go back to tediously making little shapes and moving them into precise locations, aligning things, and so on.
That's interesting to hear, because my experience with YouTube search is poor. It will find text that appears in the title of a video, but that's about it. It certainly has no idea of "what I meant".
Video content creation tools are something Google has needed for a long time. Between YouTube, youtube shorts, generative AI, and everything loom does, there is a clear opportunity.
If this is free and in Google Docs, I won't need Loom anymore. Loom should be terrified.
This will probably also be added to YouTube, so CapCut and the like are about to be checkmated too.
The biggest worry for this product is that it's from Google and we know how they are about products.
Does the company just not care about it's reputation in regards to this?
For every minute of screentime, there is time requirement for writing, practicing, filming, editing, fixing bad takes, etc.
While I can whip up a presentation quickly, videos take quite a bit more.
The pros make it look easy, but it isn't
With a video I can quickly just say what needs to be communicated, but then with some highlighted bullets (which I'm assuming Vids will make it easy to timestamp) to make it easier to reference.
Again, I think it really depends on the audience and purpose, but if used efficiently I think lots of time wasted on slide deck prep could be regained.
Now we get a 10 Minute Video of an AI narrating a 5 Bullet point list the user gave it with AI generated visuals. Productivity just has to go through the roof.
This is why I have a strong “no recordings” rule for any meeting that benefits from back-and-forth conversation. Especially if it’s a knowledge sharing opportunity like an internal tech talk, brown bag discussion, or similar.
Nothing sucks more than presenting a talk to 3 blank squares, getting no questions, and having 30 people ask for a recording. No.
Beyond that it depends on situation. Talk at a large conference is obviously one-way. Private talk to a "room" of 10 people who work with you on similar problems can be very interactive. The best ones are a low-fi 15min talk followed by a 45min discussion.
Those 45min discussions are pure gold for a future large conference talk.
Sprint Demos could also fall into this category if you squint, but at least there is a good chance you pick up something useful
Teams’ auto-transcription, and now Copilot auto-summarization, is great for consuming these presentations after the fact in a fraction of the time.
I’m pretty sure everyone’s just using LLMs to write those now, and nothing of value was lost versus ten plus hours of actual human labor, since nobody reads them.
[edit] I mean internal corporate newsletters. “What department X is doing!” OMG nobody cares unless they’re just reading it out of sheer boredom as a plausibly-work-related distraction during avoidance of doing actual work.
I hope this is just another Google product that they shut down in a year and that it doesn't catch on.
Can I also ask Gemini to give me a text summary of a Vid?
Incidentally for the hackers out there: it’s surprisingly easy to build an in-house video sharing platform if you have engineers who like hackathons. I was surprised how little it costs to run in the larger scheme of things, no cloud fees required.
But it’s not interactive!
I want to be able for people to add and insert videos, and for me to insert responses or keep building a video based on what people asked.
I’m surprised by the skepticism here. Slides suck ass to communicate ideas, and text is just not enough IMO. The future is: everybody has tablet they can draw with (like the ipad pro) and can easily communicate back and forth by cobuilding an interactive timeline of videos. I see the vision.
I don't do well with video at all. I do best with the written word.
Slides are not, and should not, be the primary medium for communicating information. They're a skeleton to hang together a presentation, set tone and context, and anchor your ideas. If they are information dense you need to be very, very careful; typically it's a sign of failure when they're too dense.
I love a good presentation, a well designed deck that compliments a presenter who knows their stuff and has (gasp!) practiced... I can't stand bad slide decks and have no tolerance for the lazy garbage that is the majority.
"One thing missing, though? Any sign of YouTube. You know, that other video service Google owns. Behr laughs when I mention it and says that there’s some tech shared between the products but that “the audience and use cases are pretty fundamentally different” between the two products. This is a work product, for workers, to use at work. “We’re trying to make sure we’re really supporting that use case, you know?”"
a lot of content for "work" ends up on youtube too.
Looking up Kristina Behr on LI it looks like she jumped ships from MS to Google slightly over a year ago. At MS' last post she's been responsible for "Empowering frontline workers to achieve more with comms-first productivity and workflow solutions" listing following achievements:
* Introducing Microsoft Teams Premium, the better way to meet | Microsoft 365 Blog
* Microsoft Teams for frontline workers: What's Live and Coming Soon
and so on...
Yeah, I'll pass :)
As far as Loom goes, video-based messaging and communication has the power to be a great low effort and high bandwidth for both the creator and recipient. It’s certainly easier to talk over a screen recording and send that over to someone, compared to typing out a long series of steps describing what you are doing and then also writing up the “why”. On the other hand, I do wonder if these types of apps are short-lived. What happens when the recipient is just using AI to get a summary of your video (instead of viewing it and benefiting from your nice graphics), or where they can use an AI to mimic what your screen recording shows (instead of needing to act on it themselves)? What about when an AI agent can just be a shadow trailing the creator’s actions and automatically put together a video to share with others?
Product features aside, I do have concerns when I see the big tech companies launch products like this. Don’t get me wrong - I think this is going to be an interesting and useful product for Google Workspace users. But I can’t help but feel that there’s something unfair or wrong about large companies creating new copycat products and entering segments that are established by smaller pre public companies first. Those smaller companies have had to struggle and survive - that means hiring early employees, finding your first customers, iterating rapidly, convincing investors, getting to product-market fit, all to most likely fail some day. Surviving is a difficult journey that requires talent, hard work, resilience, and some luck. But comparatively, it’s trivial for a trillion-Dollar tech company to just mimic features or entire products from others. It doesn’t really even matter if their efforts even succeed or not - a large company can afford to lose money on these things and shut down failed attempts in a few years without any risk to the company. Worse, they can act anti-competitively and bundle these new features/products alongside other things, like Microsoft did with Teams or Google is planning to do here, and deprive those deserving smaller companies of their markets. I feel like we need better language than “monopoly” to describe this dynamic. But what’s the fix? Updated competition laws? Higher taxes on companies above a certain size? Something else?
How is that "productivity"? Is this a reference to Google making more money compared to live talks?
I have a hard time perceiving it as anything but a solution looking for a problem.
On the creator side it takes an awful lot of time to create a clear and concise video, especially for people who are much more used to writing docs than creating videos of themselves.
Videos are a terrible medium for the audience, at least for any technical and referenceable material. They aren't searchable and are much slower to consume than text. Old videos almost never get watched, whereas some older documents get read often.
This is a more efficient way to waste time, it might actually succeed in many companies (until Google kills it anyway).
It's like the opposite of compression. Expand a piece of data 10-fold for transmission, then recompress it back down at the other side.
I think a good way to address the crisis of credibility Google has with their commitment to their own products is to just make articulated timelines of support something considered as fundamental as the code base itself.
It could admittedly be perceived of as a negative, because a "cliff" could approach. But the flip side is that we are where we are in the absence of credible commitments, and I think the present status quo is worse.
When you have a hammer, in this case GenAI, every problem looks like a nail