What’s next? Impactful additions and improvements to Hangouts Meet will be announced soon. This means you’ll have more diverse perspectives which makes for better quality output. Video meetings can help distributed teams feel more engaged and help employees collaborate whenever, and wherever, inspiration strikes. If you’re going to make the switch, go all in and make it accessible to everyone. Hangouts Meet brings you a consistent experience across web, mobile and conference rooms. We transformed our work culture to be video meeting-first because we made VC ubiquitous. If you’re going to move to VC, make it available everywhere.Be seen as an innovator by evangelizing video engagement in company meetings from the start. Encourage video engagement from the start.If you’re looking to transition your meetings to the cloud with VC, here are a few things to keep in mind: We learned a lot about what it takes to successfully collaborate as a scaling business. And, now, more than 3 million businesses are using Hangouts to transform how they work too. Face-to-face collaboration is ingrained in Google’s DNA now-more than 16,500 meetings rooms are VC-equipped at Google and our employees join Hangouts 240,000 times per day! That's equivalent to spending more than 10 years per day collaborating in video meetings. Nearly a decade has passed since we built the first prototype. By the end of the year, every Google conference room and company device had access to VC.Ģ014 - today: Transforming how businesses do business In the first two weeks, we sold more than 2,000 units. After a few years of testing-and widespread adoption by Googlers-we made the platform available externally to customers in 2014 (“Chromebox for Meetings”). With each of these elements, we had now built our earliest version of Hangouts. Hours after releasing the service to the public, it had hundreds of thousands of users. Our earliest “Hangouts” prototype was Gmail Video Chat, a way to connect with contacts directly in Gmail. We scaled with software and moved meetings to the cloud. In 2008, we built our own VC solution that could keep up with the rate at which we were growing. 2008 - 2013: Taking matters into our own hands I even remember one of the VC bridges catching on fire! We had to make a change. As more and more Googlers used video meetings, we reached maximum capacity on the technology’s infrastructure and experienced frequent dropped calls and poor audio/visual (AV) quality. The system was built to host meetings for team members in the office, but didn't cater to people on the go. By 2007, nearly 2,400 rooms were equipped with the technology. To complicate matters, the units were powered by complex, on-prem infrastructure and required several support technicians. Each unit could cost upwards of $50,000, and that did not include support, licensing and network maintenance fees. While revolutionary, this VC technology was extremely costly. If I need to sort out a problem or present an idea, I’d rather be face-to-face with my team, not waiting idly on a conference bridge line. We outsourced proprietary video conferencing (VC) technology and outfitted large meeting rooms with these devices. Google decided to go all in on video meetings. If I want to sort out a problem or present an idea, I’d rather be face-to-face with my team, not waiting idly on a conference bridge line. We realized that the technology we used didn’t mirror how our teams actually like to work together. Historically, we relied on traditional conference phone bridging and email to communicate across time zones, but phone calls don’t exactly inspire creativity and tone gets lost in translation with email threads. We grew from nearly 3,000 employees to more than 17,000 across 40 offices globally. In the mid-2000s, Google underwent explosive growth. Here’s a look at how we transitioned Google to be a cloud video meeting-first company. It’s sometimes easy to forget what life was like before face-to-face video conferencing (VC) at work, but we struggled with many of the same issues that other companies deal with-cobbled together communication technologies, dropped calls, expensive solutions. My coworkers and I build video conferencing technology to help global teams work better together. I’ve worked at Google for more than a decade and have seen the company expand across geographies-including to Stockholm where I have worked from day one. Editor’s note: this is the first article in a five-part series on Google Hangouts.
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