Google Meet, the tech giant’s video conferencing platform for businesses, was originally designed with presentations in mind — favoring slides and screen-sharing over a large grid view of everyone participating in the meeting. But like many things in the world these days, this approach is being revisited to adjust to new realities.
Starting today, Google is rolling out the option to show up to 16 people simultaneously in Meet. While more people have always been able to participate in a Google Meet video call, the prior grid view showed only four people at once. Google says this part of a broader wave of updates designed to accommodate larger meetings, improved presentation layouts, and support for more types of devices, amid the sudden spike in remote work due to COVID-19 mandates.
Microsoft is likewise updating its grid view to show up to nine people, while Zoom allows up to 49 in a grid simultaneously. Both Google and Microsoft say they’ll support larger grids in the future.
It might be tempting to boil this down to “grid wars,” a technological arms race among the major video-conferencing providers, but it’s more significant than that.
The last two months have dramatically accelerated the transformation in the way people work and connect, says Javier Soltero, the vice president and general manager in charge of Google’s G Suite productivity and collaboration platform. Companies and teams that were moving toward this new world gradually have been forced to fast-forward to the future. Technology platforms are evolving more quickly as a result.
The sudden absence of hallway conversations and meetings in physical conference rooms “changes things in a really, really dramatic way,” said Soltero, a former Microsoft executive, in a recent interview with GeekWire. “The goal isn’t to replicate that. The goal is to actually provide different paths for that same kind of collaboration to take place and feel natural.”
Like many of its competitors in the collaboration technology market, Google has seen a dramatic spike in usage in recent weeks. G Suite surpassed 6 million paying business customers, up from 5 million in February 2019. Google Meet is adding new users at a pace of more than 2 million per day, with daily usage more than 25 times higher than what it was seeing in January.
Soltero has a unique perspective on all of these changes, as a relative newcomer to Google’s leadership team. The former CEO of mobile email company Accompli, he joined Microsoft in 2014 when it acquired the startup for more than $200 million. He led products including Outlook and Cortana before leaving in November 2018.
Bringing G Suite products closer together, one step at a time. Much more to come… https://t.co/SaQ4LXYFcA
— Javier Soltero ?? (@jsoltero) April 21, 2020
He joined Google six months ago, in October 2019, overseeing products including Google Docs, Drive and Meet as the vice president and general manager in charge of G Suite. Soltero reports to Google Cloud leader Thomas Kurian, who in turn reports to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet.
One major difference between Microsoft and Google, in Soltero’s view, is that Google is able to more naturally move across the worlds of consumer and enterprise technology. For Microsoft, he said, this was “just a very difficult thing for them to reconcile,” in his experience.
He said he has been helping the G Suite team “appreciate the unique opportunity that we have to not be conflicted by our role as both a consumer and an enterprise company, in a way that I just constantly saw Microsoft really struggle with.” Google has the ability to “not even bother with those distinctions” and focus on making products that people want to use, he said.
On another front, Google has sought to emphasize its cloud security when it comes to G Suite and Meet, an area in which Zoom has struggled. Soltero called it a “surprising distinction” and “false choice” to say that scaling quickly is at odds with security.
Does Soltero consider Zoom and Slack competitors on the same level as Microsoft? “If the question is, ‘on the same level,’ the answer is no,” he said.
That’s because Zoom and Slack each focus largely on one product that has a counterpart in the larger collection of G Suite offerings, whereas Microsoft is a competitor across the board.
“I think there’s honestly something to be said for the responsibility and the experience that you have to go through to build out services that are used at the scale that we operate at, and at the breadth that we operate at in these kinds of companies,” he said. “Every small company aspires to be a big company, so I’m sure that they’re on their own journey to grow up.”
