Google announced today that it will merge its two video calling applications duo and meet into one platform. Next, only Google's meet will exist. Google hopes that it can become a calling application that meets almost all the needs of users in their lives. By combining the two, Google hopes it can solve some of the problems of modern communication tools Javier Soltero, head of Google workspace, said:
"What really matters is knowing how people choose the tools they want to use, for what purposes, and under what circumstances. Our digital life is full of countless different chat applications, each with its own rules, specifications, and contact lists, some for work, some for individuals. Google hopes it can use Gmail addresses and phone numbers to put all these things together. It can contact in this way It's really important and powerful for you to decide whether you want to be connected, rather than having to manage all these different identities and deal with them separately. "
Soltrow has been promoting this concept of "accessibility" throughout most of his tenure at Google, which has prompted Google to integrate meeting and chat into many of its other services. This is naturally a good goal, but it comes at a price: add everything to all services, making some Google services disorderly and complex. Especially in the past few years, meet has become a powerful platform for meetings and various group chats, while Duo is more focused on an information transmission application. Google promises that it will bring all the features of duo to meet, and seems to believe that it can provide the best features in both worlds.
However, it is not entirely correct to say that duo was killed. The app originally launched by Google in 2016 is a simple way to make one-to-one video calls. It has many useful functions that meet does not have. First, you can call someone directly -- including their phone number -- instead of sending a link or clicking the attend button in the Google calendar invitation. In this sense, duo has always been more like FaceTime than zoom. (Google also launched allo, a competitor of IMessage, at the same time as duo. The market response of allo is not ideal).
With the integration of these two services, duo applications will be updated soon, bringing a large number of meet functions into the platform; Later this year, the duo app will be renamed Google meet. The current meet application will be called "meet original" and will eventually be abandoned.
This sounds confusing, but Google says it is the best way to develop. Dave citron, director of Google video products, said: "Duo mobile applications have a lot of complexity, especially in emerging markets, where network connections are scarce or change a lot. On the network, the situation is different; meet is a more developed network platform, so it forms the basis of a new composite system. But in these two cases, our idea is to combine 100% of the functions and not let users fall behind."
This is another effort of Google to unify some previously irrelevant parts and make Google's complete set of services more coherent and cohesive. With the development of meet during the pandemic, it has become a common place for Google to focus on voice and video work in the future. He hoped that over time, the meet brand could not only mean "meeting".
"To make it work, Google has to solve a lot of small problems about information and calls.".
Meet has been integrated into many Google services. It can become a meaningful competitor of WhatsApp and FaceTime almost overnight, but only if it can be integrated without annoying or complexity.