Being first doesn’t always equal being the best.
This can easily be seen in Google’s products.
We all know Google is very good at a lot of things they do; Search, Gmail, Android, Adwords, Adsense.
But one thing people may come to realize is that Google is almost always playing catch-up. Like in the early 90s when there were search engines like Altavista, Yahoo, AskJeeves; Google as a company started with search as a first product, in an already existing field with players ahead of them.
They’ve won a few of these markets in the past; although, they’ve been humbled in recent times with failed products like Google Hangouts, Plus, Inbox, Glass, Wave.
Zoom
Zoom became the go-to video conferencing app in the middle of the global pandemic for the single reason that it was easy to setup and use. But critics, and even national governments have come up with many reasons to turn people away from it’s use citing security concerns.
The current Covid-19 pandemic has led to the restriction of movement physically in most parts of the world, which makes this period the best time to launch products that help to ease long distance communication between remote groups.
In the midst of all the hype about Zoom, people flocked to the stock markets to buy shares of Zoom, but mistakenly bought in on the wrong Zoom from Beijing.
Google Meet
Not too long ago after the noise of Zoom seemed to be hitting all the news channels, Google made public it’s recently improved video conferencing product, Google Meet.
As the widely cited aphorism by Pablo Picasso goes, Good artists copy; great artists steal.
This will be another time to see if Google will out-innovate in this product by focusing on the customer, or follow the same path along the likes of Google+.
I’m rooting for them in this one due to the ease of integration with existing email logins — just hope they know what’s important now and in the future.
