Full single device for everyone would mean either everyone loudly shouting at their desks from within their noise canceling headphones or the company giving everyone an office with a door. As even Google doesn't do this for their employees, this is the next best thing we can do to save the sanity of our coworkers and respect remote colleagues dialing in by including them in a shared room meeting.
It's a great idea, IMO. You can fit 10-12 of these in the same space as a regular conference room. This solves exactly the problem you're describing.
So it's kinda like sitting in a conference room, except you're talking to other people via a shitty audio quality with latency, random noise, talking over each other due to not seeing each other. You don't even have the benefit of a more ergonomic personal setup like more monitors. When people are in the office, let them do their meetings in person ...
I worked for a company that was headquartered in London and had satellite offices in Spain and Germany. After we all went remote during the pandemic the EU offices said they felt so much more engaged with the rest of the company because they were no longer disadvantaged by default for not being in HQ and in person bad habits were penalizing them
Its definitely doomed to fail if CEOs want you to think it's doomed.
Your comment is handwavy with words like "feel" and "bad habits". There are real issues with remote work, but there are also ways to mitigate the downsides of it. It's easier for some people to just dismiss the idea entirely and pretend that in-office work is the better alternative without any problems. I have definitely seen that happen in my company and here.
I have worked there fully remote jobs and the ones that did it best fully leaned into being remote.
There is no hard or fast rule, I've been in a team social where I was the only person remote and it still felt relatively natural. I've done a fully remote follow a recipe and cook at home session which was also pretty fun.
I've also been in places that do the bare minimum of what constitutes remote "oh we use Zoom and screenshare" and dictate to people where everyone is cam off. And the difference is night and day.
I think that a little bit of cargo culting wrt remote etiquette is probably a net good thing because I posit many people still don't know what good looks like.
The meeting room (should) have a much higher quality mic than an attendee's laptop. You want that mic.
Worse, when attendees use their mic, someone in the room asks a question, which remote viewers cannot/do not hear, because it is not picked up by the mic on the laptop. Or they join and don't mute, resulting in feedback loops.
I do feel the need for Google's feature though: the pandemic has meant a reduction in offices, so now we're ending up in "co-working" spaces, which — despite this being the bread and butter of the business — have in my experience alarmingly poor quality meeting rooms. To the extent that those present have given up on them. Literally, we were in one with no cabling. We asked the company for a cable, and they gave us a DP cable, but the room was HDMI. In these situations, yeah, nobody is going to want to waste the time trying to deal with getting the coworking space provider to deliver a quality product, and features like the one here help make up the difference.