Google Meet becomes free for all users with a G Suite account: integration with Gmail will be coming soon. Here is the news
To respond to Zoom’s advance, which during the lockdown for the coronavirus pandemic has grown enormously both in a number of users and hours of use, both Microsoft and Google are pushing their respective video calling services to the maximum: Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. Google, in particular, is trying to push Meet by integrating it with Gmail.
With millions of Gmail users active worldwide, Google has chosen the column on the left of the email service to encourage the spread of a new service. And right there, in the all too crowded side column of Gmail, the option to start a meeting or participate in one already launched by one of our contacts is about to appear. This novelty will be released gradually in the coming weeks, still few users have seen it live.
Not just for business
Business users of G Suite already have the option to launch a Meet meeting from their Gmail account, but only if they access it from a web browser. But the same Meet, initially, was a service reserved for G Suite users. Already from the first days of the pandemic, however, Google understood that it was the right time to spread Meet among the general public and made it available for everyone until September. Last week Google went even further, making Meet free for everyone and allowing meetings for up to 100 participants and without time limits. Today Google says that Meet is used daily by over 100 million users worldwide.
Meet, Hangouts Meet, Google Hangouts
The meet is just Google’s latest attempt to enter the video call market. The first dates back to the beginning of the decade when the first Google Hangouts was launched together with the now-defunct social network Google+. Even then the service had more or less the same functionality as today, but it did not break through because the times were not ripe and, above all, because it was linked to the Google+ account and not the Gmail account. Then Google turned Hangouts into a premium product for businesses, renaming it Hangouts Meet. Not even that attempt was successful. Now there is Meet, which in practice is always the same service with a third name but, due to the unpredictable events of the last few weeks, has finally achieved the success that Google hoped for almost ten years ago.
