Google appears to be mounting an aggressive effort to push its Meet video conferencing tool amid the growing demand for teleconferencing services. A new report shows the company is stealthily adding a Meet link to Zoom invites sent via Gmail.
MSPoweruser reports that some recipients of invitations to a Zoom virtual conference have seen an additional link in their email that allows them to join that meeting through Meet. In this particular case, the Meet link has been spotted in Zoom invites sent through Gmail using the Windows 10 Mail client. It also looks like only the recipients can see the Meet link, and senders may not have any idea that their invite email has been modified in this way.
Video conferencing platforms have seen a tremendous growth this year amid the coronavirus pandemic. A recent Gartner report projected end-user spending on cloud-based web conferencing services to grow 24.3% in 2020. It is no surprise, then, that tech companies like Google could be aggressively advancing their efforts to keep up with the competition.
Google"s presumed effort to hop on Zoom"s popularity may also make sense as the latter has dramatically increased its user base earlier this year as stay-at-home orders due to COVID-19 kicked in. The firm reported a dramatic spike in its users, from 10 million in December to 200 million daily users in March.