Google announced that is making its Zoom competitor, Google Meet, available for free to anyone. According to the announcement, starting in May, anyone with a Gmail address can get access to the Google Meet virtual meeting platform.
Meet is another virtual meeting solution akin to Microsoft Teams or Zoom. Until now, Meet was only available for folks who’d purchased products inside of the GSuite which is Google’s productivity software. GSuite directly competes with Microsoft Office and includes cloud based offerings for email, document, spreadsheets and more.
With the sudden shift of huge swaths of the workforce to a mostly virtual work from home model, the use of virtual meeting technology has skyrocketed. Products like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and yes, Google Meet, are used by millions of folks every single day. While Zoom may be getting all the attention (it’s background features are pretty wicked; plus they’ve had some security issues), Google Meet has been quietly experiencing massive growth.
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The announcement notes that “Meet is hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings and adding roughly 3 million new users every day.” Astonishing figures.
Given the aforementioned security issues Zoom has experienced it was not surprising that Google touted the security features of the Meet platform. In their announcement it’s clear they are leaning heavily into the notion they are more secure than the recently maligned Zoom by highlighting a significant list of default security features. Chief among these is the fact anonymous users cannot join.
It’s clear that Google is a major player in the productivity space and the tight integration between their Meet platform and other productivity apps like GMail, Calendar, Chat, etc, gives it incredible leverage as it competes with Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
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You can read the full announcement here as well as steps on how to sign up for your free Google Meet account.
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