My prediction on this: people will create videos, people will stop attending meeting because "I'll just watch the video offline", people will get crunched and not watch the videos before finally re-scheduling meetings where the authors will step-by-step in the videos and present the content as we used to do with slides.
Before any of that happens it will be renamed and branded so somebody can get promoted, closely followed with canceled to make way for the next big thing.
Cynical but on point. My thought is I unfortunately don't trust Google for product launches because of exactly this. And I know anyone at startups might be thinking similar things.
> people will create videos, people will stop attending meeting because "I'll just watch the video offline"
This is why I have a strong “no recordings” rule for any meeting that benefits from back-and-forth conversation. Especially if it’s a knowledge sharing opportunity like an internal tech talk, brown bag discussion, or similar.
Nothing sucks more than presenting a talk to 3 blank squares, getting no questions, and having 30 people ask for a recording. No.
I prefer to treat it like a small club standup session. These meetings are how you figure out what to put in the youtube video or other documentation. Audience questions are vital.
Not all feedback is explicit. Being able to see when you're confusing the audience helps a lot.
Beyond that it depends on situation. Talk at a large conference is obviously one-way. Private talk to a "room" of 10 people who work with you on similar problems can be very interactive. The best ones are a low-fi 15min talk followed by a 45min discussion.
Those 45min discussions are pure gold for a future large conference talk.
This is not the point of meetings though. Meetings are for Aligning Stakeholders or Collaborating Across Teams at least in my world. Do you regularly attend meetings to be an audience member?
At various places of employment, /some/ meetings have absolutely been just so. Nothing of day-to-day value was ever communicated in those meetings, and nothing of value was lost when I stopped attending them.
Sprint Demos could also fall into this category if you squint, but at least there is a good chance you pick up something useful
I’m pretty sure everyone’s just using LLMs to write those now, and nothing of value was lost versus ten plus hours of actual human labor, since nobody reads them.
[edit] I mean internal corporate newsletters. “What department X is doing!” OMG nobody cares unless they’re just reading it out of sheer boredom as a plausibly-work-related distraction during avoidance of doing actual work.
I try not to be one of those people, but when I'm in a meeting with 20 people and only 3 are actively contributing it sure seems like some/many are doing just that. Any non-dev in a standup typically mentions how many meetings they went to yesterday, and will attend today, as if this is some badge of productivity - and I say this as a manager myself, someone who attends a lot of meetings!
This sounds awful. Video is the worst way to consume anything technical, for me. Video tutorials and video code walk throughs are completely worthless for most things.
I hope this is just another Google product that they shut down in a year and that it doesn't catch on.
There will be a fast follow for video transcription and search in videos so that people end up creating videos that nobody watch but get indexed by some internal system and provide a concise 1-pager for human consumption that should have been the original work output anyway. /s
This doesn't appear to be marketed or have features like Loom. Loom is primarily a point-and-click screen record capture tool. This is a lightweight video editor with some AI sprinkled on top to make content generation easier.
I thought the same thing. If I were loom this is a very scary news. Expect loom response to look like “we are not competing on the same product” and then loom to be acquired by salesforce
I feel the opposite though for lots of internal communication. I often see so much time that (to me) feels wasted when employees do tons of "polish" for slide decks for internal teams. Like you're just communicating to other employees, the goal is just to get the information across, not make it a work of art.
With a video I can quickly just say what needs to be communicated, but then with some highlighted bullets (which I'm assuming Vids will make it easy to timestamp) to make it easier to reference.
Again, I think it really depends on the audience and purpose, but if used efficiently I think lots of time wasted on slide deck prep could be regained.
All communications should be ideally polished. That’s you taking the time to refine your ideas and package it so those who listen to you can focus on the message and story you want to tell them, and not be distracted by irrelevant details, guesses, or just sloppy work.
That’s why I got excited here. If I could just record short videos and then easily create something that stitch all of that then it would simplify the flow greatly.
It's odd to me that they wanted to make a whole new "app" for this, rather than building in some sort of timeline into slides. Powerpoint supports automatically transitioning slides and auto playing video, so with some fancy magic in the export where they slice the video for each slide, you could even do everything in a "compatible" way. Slides would of course be able to keep the video on top of the slides + transitions, playing at all times.
Though to be fair, this could just be slides' codebase, with some extra UI changes on top of it. Just feels like an odd way to brand it though, especially with the market penetration + built up institutional knowledge of slides' UI.
Not at Google, they skew towards new projects for performance reviews. Not improving or maintaining existing projects. Which is why they have 3 different versions of hangouts/Meet, play music being replaced by YT Music which does the same thing and is slowly building back in the same functionality, and a lot of abandonware and stagnated core products like search/gmail/slides, etc.
There was a great blog on here where an (ex maybe) Google engineer first pointed out this problem and a good reason why he left since he realized this too late and all his time making huge performance improvements in existing products meant nothing come review time and all his colleagues got promoted.
"Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome"
Maintaining and improving existing projects is a footgun at Google because of the way their promotion structure works. Unless they've changed something fundamental about their review process, of which I've not heard, it's still the same. This launch of a new product rather than naturally being integrated into an existing one that already fills this space and has adoption seems to prove its still the case.
I think there are a few benefits to doing creating a whole new app. First, a video editing application can become very sophisticated, especially if you want to both offer easy fast creation/editing features but also provide a spectrum where users can opt into more customization or sophistication. Cramming that user interface alongside other UI for slides or whatever will quickly become too crowded and unmanageable, for users but also the teams trying to add more functionality. The second benefit is that a new product lets you have independent flexibility on pricing or usage models. Third, you have the opportunity to perform impactful marketing around something new, as we’re seeing here. Finally, you get to define how users should use the product and incorporate it into their world. If these same features were just in Slides, people may automatically view video creation as a tool to generate content for live slide-driven presentations. But as a separate app, you have a chance to train users to view this as a daily tool that they use for all sorts of communication - both casual everyday chat-like messages and highly-polished presentations.
I have no idea which of these benefits Google is intentional about, by the way - I am just speculating.
Probably like what happened with Google Inbox... It's a greenfield canvas to try a lot of innovations, see which ones people use, then shut down the product and add these popular features to Gmail, or in this instance, Slides.
As far as Loom goes, video-based messaging and communication has the power to be a great low effort and high bandwidth for both the creator and recipient. It’s certainly easier to talk over a screen recording and send that over to someone, compared to typing out a long series of steps describing what you are doing and then also writing up the “why”. On the other hand, I do wonder if these types of apps are short-lived. What happens when the recipient is just using AI to get a summary of your video (instead of viewing it and benefiting from your nice graphics), or where they can use an AI to mimic what your screen recording shows (instead of needing to act on it themselves)? What about when an AI agent can just be a shadow trailing the creator’s actions and automatically put together a video to share with others?
Product features aside, I do have concerns when I see the big tech companies launch products like this. Don’t get me wrong - I think this is going to be an interesting and useful product for Google Workspace users. But I can’t help but feel that there’s something unfair or wrong about large companies creating new copycat products and entering segments that are established by smaller pre public companies first. Those smaller companies have had to struggle and survive - that means hiring early employees, finding your first customers, iterating rapidly, convincing investors, getting to product-market fit, all to most likely fail some day. Surviving is a difficult journey that requires talent, hard work, resilience, and some luck. But comparatively, it’s trivial for a trillion-Dollar tech company to just mimic features or entire products from others. It doesn’t really even matter if their efforts even succeed or not - a large company can afford to lose money on these things and shut down failed attempts in a few years without any risk to the company. Worse, they can act anti-competitively and bundle these new features/products alongside other things, like Microsoft did with Teams or Google is planning to do here, and deprive those deserving smaller companies of their markets. I feel like we need better language than “monopoly” to describe this dynamic. But what’s the fix? Updated competition laws? Higher taxes on companies above a certain size? Something else?
I actually wonder if they can't just openly commit to something like a five-year plan for support, along the lines of commitments to security updates to android. Just a resolve that they will not terminate their product in its first five years.
I think a good way to address the crisis of credibility Google has with their commitment to their own products is to just make articulated timelines of support something considered as fundamental as the code base itself.
It could admittedly be perceived of as a negative, because a "cliff" could approach. But the flip side is that we are where we are in the absence of credible commitments, and I think the present status quo is worse.
Not bad, so instead of having people spend time making powerpoints and then give presentations while everyone else pretends to listen, now the presenter can auto generate it while everyone else pretends to have clicked the link.
This is a more efficient way to waste time, it might actually succeed in many companies (until Google kills it anyway).
Then we can compare the two sentence summary used to prompt the first AI to generate the video, to the two sentence summary produced by the second AI watching the video, to see if there was any loss of information.
Probably in response to Microsoft Stream and Zoom Recordings.
Incidentally for the hackers out there: it’s surprisingly easy to build an in-house video sharing platform if you have engineers who like hackathons. I was surprised how little it costs to run in the larger scheme of things, no cloud fees required.
> For decades, work has revolved around documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Pages, Numbers, Keynote; Docs, Sheets, Slides. Now Google is proposing to add another to that triumvirate: an app called Vids that aims to help companies and consumers make collaborative, shareable video more easily than ever.
When you have a hammer, in this case GenAI, every problem looks like a nail
I've always been skeptical of generative AI being used to make slides. I like the idea of it, and maybe someday we will get there. But right now, they all feel like they are trying to fully automate the process where what I really want them to do is automate the tedious parts, co-piloting with me.
Because what ends up happening is I need a high degree of precision and I have a very concrete idea of what I need to present on a slide and exactly how to do it. But because it's fully automated, I have to instead convince the AI to generate my concrete idea on its own. Then I just don't use it entirely. Meanwhile, I go back to tediously making little shapes and moving them into precise locations, aligning things, and so on.
I feel you. I wish PowerPoint's "Design suggestions" could at least be editable. It will often suggest a similar layout that looks nicer, but with some dumb crayon looking lines. Just let me (re)move that stupid line at the very least.
I tried Copilot on PowerPoint once and I swear I'll never use it again. (Or at least not until it is 10x better.) I asked it to generate slides on a technical topic. I wasn't expecting it to fill in a lot of details, but what I got was 10 slides of stock photos next to some very high-level ideas that almost mean nothing. Think of those presentations that take half an hour but really only has 5 minutes of content. I ended up throwing away the entire thing and start over, creating slides myself.
I am sooo interested in this because I think loom is one of the best and most useful products for communicating knowledge. Especially in remote companies.
But it’s not interactive!
I want to be able for people to add and insert videos, and for me to insert responses or keep building a video based on what people asked.
I’m surprised by the skepticism here. Slides suck ass to communicate ideas, and text is just not enough IMO. The future is: everybody has tablet they can draw with (like the ipad pro) and can easily communicate back and forth by cobuilding an interactive timeline of videos. I see the vision.
The skepticism is also driven by Google's track record of killing products and generally lacking a long-term or stable roadmap of product lines (with very few giant exceptions).
Videos are not as information dense as text - both because people talk slower than they read and because authors are forced to spend more time planning and editing. The difference between Loom and Tiktok is Looms don't have to compete for an audience (they are required to watch in order to do their job) which means they are orders of magnitude less carefully made.
Slides are not, and should not, be the primary medium for communicating information. They're a skeleton to hang together a presentation, set tone and context, and anchor your ideas. If they are information dense you need to be very, very careful; typically it's a sign of failure when they're too dense.
I love a good presentation, a well designed deck that compliments a presenter who knows their stuff and has (gasp!) practiced... I can't stand bad slide decks and have no tolerance for the lazy garbage that is the majority.
Horrifying. If you want to transfer information, then text + illustration is the best way to accomplish that.
Now we get a 10 Minute Video of an AI narrating a 5 Bullet point list the user gave it with AI generated visuals. Productivity just has to go through the roof.
As an alternative to slides it might work well, but both are terrible formats for reference material (anything where you need to extract a quick piece of information). The shift to having to mine YouTube videos for much of the world's specialized knowledge is a shame, and Google makes it worse every day with how they prioritize search results.
I run a local Tube Archivist mirror and having live, predictable full-text search of descriptions, transcripts, and user comments has been a breath of fresh air (it's backed by ElasticSearch, so you can go full-contact if needed). I appreciate YouTube's official search for its accessibility, speed, and spooky "it knew what I meant" ability, but it's a tragedy that this is the only supported way to search their library. I consider YouTube's archive a wonder of the world, and it's a shame that it is locked behind an engagement-polluted interface.
> I appreciate YouTube's official search for its accessibility, speed, and spooky "it knew what I meant" ability
That's interesting to hear, because my experience with YouTube search is poor. It will find text that appears in the title of a video, but that's about it. It certainly has no idea of "what I meant".
I absolutely LOATH it when people post a video instead of a document or deck (except in cases when they need to demo something) because they essentially offload the work onto the audience. Obviously there are exceptions, but in general writing an update requires the author plan what they want to communicate. In my experience, off-the-cuff Loom videos are often rambling and verbose, and leave it to the viewer to synthesize. On top of that, videos are harder to scan, harder to search, and require headphones or a quiet space to be consumed.
I agree with this. My company started pushing these types of short videos more and they have not been popular, at least with my peers.
On the creator side it takes an awful lot of time to create a clear and concise video, especially for people who are much more used to writing docs than creating videos of themselves.
Videos are a terrible medium for the audience, at least for any technical and referenceable material. They aren't searchable and are much slower to consume than text. Old videos almost never get watched, whereas some older documents get read often.
article mentions no plans to integrate to youtube but i bet it's added on the first update.
"One thing missing, though? Any sign of YouTube. You know, that other video service Google owns. Behr laughs when I mention it and says that there’s some tech shared between the products but that “the audience and use cases are pretty fundamentally different” between the two products. This is a work product, for workers, to use at work. “We’re trying to make sure we’re really supporting that use case, you know?”"
a lot of content for "work" ends up on youtube too.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadThis is why I have a strong “no recordings” rule for any meeting that benefits from back-and-forth conversation. Especially if it’s a knowledge sharing opportunity like an internal tech talk, brown bag discussion, or similar.
Nothing sucks more than presenting a talk to 3 blank squares, getting no questions, and having 30 people ask for a recording. No.
Beyond that it depends on situation. Talk at a large conference is obviously one-way. Private talk to a "room" of 10 people who work with you on similar problems can be very interactive. The best ones are a low-fi 15min talk followed by a 45min discussion.
Those 45min discussions are pure gold for a future large conference talk.
Sprint Demos could also fall into this category if you squint, but at least there is a good chance you pick up something useful
Teams’ auto-transcription, and now Copilot auto-summarization, is great for consuming these presentations after the fact in a fraction of the time.
I’m pretty sure everyone’s just using LLMs to write those now, and nothing of value was lost versus ten plus hours of actual human labor, since nobody reads them.
[edit] I mean internal corporate newsletters. “What department X is doing!” OMG nobody cares unless they’re just reading it out of sheer boredom as a plausibly-work-related distraction during avoidance of doing actual work.
I hope this is just another Google product that they shut down in a year and that it doesn't catch on.
If this is free and in Google Docs, I won't need Loom anymore. Loom should be terrified.
This will probably also be added to YouTube, so CapCut and the like are about to be checkmated too.
The biggest worry for this product is that it's from Google and we know how they are about products.
Does the company just not care about it's reputation in regards to this?
For every minute of screentime, there is time requirement for writing, practicing, filming, editing, fixing bad takes, etc.
While I can whip up a presentation quickly, videos take quite a bit more.
The pros make it look easy, but it isn't
With a video I can quickly just say what needs to be communicated, but then with some highlighted bullets (which I'm assuming Vids will make it easy to timestamp) to make it easier to reference.
Again, I think it really depends on the audience and purpose, but if used efficiently I think lots of time wasted on slide deck prep could be regained.
Though to be fair, this could just be slides' codebase, with some extra UI changes on top of it. Just feels like an odd way to brand it though, especially with the market penetration + built up institutional knowledge of slides' UI.
It can also a lot harder to do than greenfield development.
There was a great blog on here where an (ex maybe) Google engineer first pointed out this problem and a good reason why he left since he realized this too late and all his time making huge performance improvements in existing products meant nothing come review time and all his colleagues got promoted.
Since then it's been documented several times:
https://www.warp.dev/blog/problems-with-promotion-oriented-c...
https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1576985038511448064
"Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome"
Maintaining and improving existing projects is a footgun at Google because of the way their promotion structure works. Unless they've changed something fundamental about their review process, of which I've not heard, it's still the same. This launch of a new product rather than naturally being integrated into an existing one that already fills this space and has adoption seems to prove its still the case.
I have no idea which of these benefits Google is intentional about, by the way - I am just speculating.
As far as Loom goes, video-based messaging and communication has the power to be a great low effort and high bandwidth for both the creator and recipient. It’s certainly easier to talk over a screen recording and send that over to someone, compared to typing out a long series of steps describing what you are doing and then also writing up the “why”. On the other hand, I do wonder if these types of apps are short-lived. What happens when the recipient is just using AI to get a summary of your video (instead of viewing it and benefiting from your nice graphics), or where they can use an AI to mimic what your screen recording shows (instead of needing to act on it themselves)? What about when an AI agent can just be a shadow trailing the creator’s actions and automatically put together a video to share with others?
Product features aside, I do have concerns when I see the big tech companies launch products like this. Don’t get me wrong - I think this is going to be an interesting and useful product for Google Workspace users. But I can’t help but feel that there’s something unfair or wrong about large companies creating new copycat products and entering segments that are established by smaller pre public companies first. Those smaller companies have had to struggle and survive - that means hiring early employees, finding your first customers, iterating rapidly, convincing investors, getting to product-market fit, all to most likely fail some day. Surviving is a difficult journey that requires talent, hard work, resilience, and some luck. But comparatively, it’s trivial for a trillion-Dollar tech company to just mimic features or entire products from others. It doesn’t really even matter if their efforts even succeed or not - a large company can afford to lose money on these things and shut down failed attempts in a few years without any risk to the company. Worse, they can act anti-competitively and bundle these new features/products alongside other things, like Microsoft did with Teams or Google is planning to do here, and deprive those deserving smaller companies of their markets. I feel like we need better language than “monopoly” to describe this dynamic. But what’s the fix? Updated competition laws? Higher taxes on companies above a certain size? Something else?
I think a good way to address the crisis of credibility Google has with their commitment to their own products is to just make articulated timelines of support something considered as fundamental as the code base itself.
It could admittedly be perceived of as a negative, because a "cliff" could approach. But the flip side is that we are where we are in the absence of credible commitments, and I think the present status quo is worse.
This is a more efficient way to waste time, it might actually succeed in many companies (until Google kills it anyway).
It's like the opposite of compression. Expand a piece of data 10-fold for transmission, then recompress it back down at the other side.
Incidentally for the hackers out there: it’s surprisingly easy to build an in-house video sharing platform if you have engineers who like hackathons. I was surprised how little it costs to run in the larger scheme of things, no cloud fees required.
When you have a hammer, in this case GenAI, every problem looks like a nail
Because what ends up happening is I need a high degree of precision and I have a very concrete idea of what I need to present on a slide and exactly how to do it. But because it's fully automated, I have to instead convince the AI to generate my concrete idea on its own. Then I just don't use it entirely. Meanwhile, I go back to tediously making little shapes and moving them into precise locations, aligning things, and so on.
But it’s not interactive!
I want to be able for people to add and insert videos, and for me to insert responses or keep building a video based on what people asked.
I’m surprised by the skepticism here. Slides suck ass to communicate ideas, and text is just not enough IMO. The future is: everybody has tablet they can draw with (like the ipad pro) and can easily communicate back and forth by cobuilding an interactive timeline of videos. I see the vision.
I don't do well with video at all. I do best with the written word.
Slides are not, and should not, be the primary medium for communicating information. They're a skeleton to hang together a presentation, set tone and context, and anchor your ideas. If they are information dense you need to be very, very careful; typically it's a sign of failure when they're too dense.
I love a good presentation, a well designed deck that compliments a presenter who knows their stuff and has (gasp!) practiced... I can't stand bad slide decks and have no tolerance for the lazy garbage that is the majority.
Now we get a 10 Minute Video of an AI narrating a 5 Bullet point list the user gave it with AI generated visuals. Productivity just has to go through the roof.
That's interesting to hear, because my experience with YouTube search is poor. It will find text that appears in the title of a video, but that's about it. It certainly has no idea of "what I meant".
On the creator side it takes an awful lot of time to create a clear and concise video, especially for people who are much more used to writing docs than creating videos of themselves.
Videos are a terrible medium for the audience, at least for any technical and referenceable material. They aren't searchable and are much slower to consume than text. Old videos almost never get watched, whereas some older documents get read often.
"One thing missing, though? Any sign of YouTube. You know, that other video service Google owns. Behr laughs when I mention it and says that there’s some tech shared between the products but that “the audience and use cases are pretty fundamentally different” between the two products. This is a work product, for workers, to use at work. “We’re trying to make sure we’re really supporting that use case, you know?”"
a lot of content for "work" ends up on youtube too.
How is that "productivity"? Is this a reference to Google making more money compared to live talks?
I have a hard time perceiving it as anything but a solution looking for a problem.