[HN Gopher] With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big product...
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With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for
work
Author : marban
Score : 60 points
Date : 2024-04-09 14:55 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| belval wrote:
| 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.
| mbrumlow wrote:
| 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.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| 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.
| LordAtlas wrote:
| And with Google's track record, eventually end up on
| KilledByGoogle.com
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Cynicism is generally warranted, but they have a pretty good
| track record with Workplace/GSuite products geared towards
| _paying_ enterprises.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| Google Domains and Jamboard come to mind.
| Swizec wrote:
| > 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.
| falcor84 wrote:
| You can treat it as recording a YouTube video
| Swizec wrote:
| 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.
| nlawalker wrote:
| Do you call them "brown bags" and "tech talks"? For a lot
| of people those terms imply a one-way presentation.
| Swizec wrote:
| 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.
| jitl wrote:
| 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?
| happysadpanda2 wrote:
| 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
| nlawalker wrote:
| It's not always that there's no value in what's
| communicated; often it's just that there's not much value
| in attending live.
|
| Teams' auto-transcription, and now Copilot auto-
| summarization, is great for consuming these presentations
| after the fact in a fraction of the time.
| haliskerbas wrote:
| Most companies I've worked at have had some form of that,
| yes.
| vundercind wrote:
| See also: newsletters of all sorts.
|
| 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.
| hightrix wrote:
| 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.
| belval wrote:
| 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
| esafak wrote:
| You're saying they're more promotions to be had??
| echelon wrote:
| Loom is one of the best tools for remote work.
|
| 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.
| bl4kers wrote:
| 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.
| baby wrote:
| 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
| MaximumMadness wrote:
| FWIW - Loom was acquired by Atlassian earlier this year
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| There is an associated problem we've seen in screencasting
|
| 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
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| azinman2 wrote:
| 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.
| baby wrote:
| I hear you but I polish my loom videos so they can be as
| short and concise as possible. And by polish I mean I
| rerecord myself like 5 times
| baby wrote:
| 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.
| graypegg wrote:
| 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.
| Seb-C wrote:
| Someone probably wanted a promotion, or to use the latest shiny
| framework rather than an existing codebase.
| vkou wrote:
| You'd absolutely get a promotion for building a significant
| new feature into an existing application.
|
| It can also a _lot_ harder to do than greenfield development.
| surge wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| bigbossman wrote:
| This seems like the most obvious, Googley reason why this
| exists
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| 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.
| topicseed wrote:
| 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.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| My guess is that this is a product aiming to mimic the success
| and popularity of Loom more than anyone else, although it may
| also just be a response to Microsoft acquiring Clipchamp for in-
| browser video editing in 2021
| (https://clipchamp.com/en/blog/microsoft-acquires-
| clipchamp-t...). Loop was likewise acquired by Atlassian late
| last year (https://www.loom.com/blog/loom-atlassian ).
|
| 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?
| jdlyga wrote:
| Hacker News, April 2028: Google discontinues support for Vids, an
| experimental collaboration tool
| joezydeco wrote:
| When they add a chat feature, then the clock starts ticking.
| glenstein wrote:
| 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.
| padjo wrote:
| I'll happily take the under on that
| riffic wrote:
| 2028 is awfully optimistic. I give this less than a year of a
| lifespan.
| Seb-C wrote:
| 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).
| joezydeco wrote:
| See, then there's a future market in having your personal AI
| watch the video for you and send you a two-sentence summary.
|
| 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.
| jimbokun wrote:
| 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.
| peppertree wrote:
| My AI generated avatar will nod along your AI generated video.
| Win-win.
| cjk2 wrote:
| I'm wondering if this Dilbert was prophetic
| https://imgur.com/a/JB5g9Fx
| signal11 wrote:
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > 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
| hidelooktropic wrote:
| 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.
| badwolf wrote:
| 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.
| guestbest wrote:
| They are automating the parts you want to work on to replace
| you. The AI is there to be trained until the your part can be
| eliminated.
| baby wrote:
| 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.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| I'm personally skeptical because the only thing I want to do
| less than watch a presentation is be forced to watch a video.
| lxgr wrote:
| How about attending a "webinar"?
| unconsciousrais wrote:
| 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).
| JohnFen wrote:
| Honestly, that future sounds like a total nightmare to me. I
| think this comes down to that different people are better with
| different kinds of media.
|
| I don't do well with video at all. I do best with the written
| word.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I'm not clear from the article on whether Vids is already
| available, or even if there's a timeline for its release.
| constantcrying wrote:
| 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.
| peeters wrote:
| 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.
| gia_ferrari wrote:
| 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.
| tqi wrote:
| 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.
| tehruhn wrote:
| Good point! I think a useful addendum would be to only allow
| videos below a certain length - for instance, a 30 second/1
| minute demonstration.
| ipaddr wrote:
| If someone is doing a walkthrough give them the three minutes
| drcongo wrote:
| I would give this post _all_ my upvotes if I could.
| rurp wrote:
| 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.
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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.
| MaximumMadness wrote:
| So it's Loom, but with Google Doc integrations?
| Animats wrote:
| Now we need something to read "Vids", extract the text, and
| summarize.
| cess11 wrote:
| Seems they just removed the presenters contact with the audience
| for the duration of a talk, putting a dead version of themselves
| in their place.
|
| 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.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| So does the verge just do ads for Google now?
| t_mann wrote:
| > You can ... prompt Google's Gemini AI to make a first draft of
| the video for you.
|
| Can I also ask Gemini to give me a text summary of a Vid?
| adolph wrote:
| Too wide instead of portrait and doesn't demonstrate a person
| talking with superimposed emphasis words and emojicons. TikTok
| for Enterprise is going to clean their clock.
| adverbly wrote:
| I love loom. I also wish it did a lot more. Excited to see more
| happening in this area.
|
| Video content creation tools are something Google has needed for
| a long time. Between YouTube, youtube shorts, generative AI, and
| everything loom does, there is a clear opportunity.
| fetzu wrote:
| One of my worst nightmares, using videos to convey information.
| It was bad enough with this wave of YouTube "guides" that take
| eight minutes to explain something which could have been done in
| a paragraph. Videos are also the worst searchable medium, really
| looking forward to having to scan through hours of content to
| find "that thing I saw six months ago".
|
| Who in their right mind would think that video could be a
| productivity tool!?
| atoav wrote:
| > One of my worst nightmares, using videos to convey
| information.
|
| I mean videos can be great for educational content. But the
| putting out a video takes significantly longer than watching
| it. And theoretically you could make it just as searchable as
| anything else.
|
| The problem is that people suck at communicating clearly and
| concisely already, add to that a narcissist guy who likes to
| see himself talk and you got a recipe for a major pain in the..
|
| I am afraid the same people who really like to record voice
| messages will flock to this like moths to a lightbulb.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| IMO it's because literacy rates are in the toilet.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Is it the cause or the effect?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Obviously not qualified to answer this but I think the drop
| in literacy is happened quite a while after youtube or even
| online video being a thing. I am a strong reader and get
| highly annoyed spending 5 minutes watching a video on a
| topic where I could get my answer in 10 seconds or less
| reading about it - I think most strong readers would feel
| the same. I see absolutely no benefit to getting
| information from a video (plus it's hard to refer back to)
| unless you are not great at reading.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I agree. I can only hope that this doesn't catch on. There's
| already too much information locked up in video form as it is.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| Ads and subscriptions seems easier on sites for video than
| text. Nobody ever made significant money with blogs or other
| online text form, while some people make a very decent living
| just producing YouTube videos.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Indeed. There are almost no rich poets, but more than a few
| rich songwriters.
| atoav wrote:
| The future of presentations is the web -- at least for me
| reveal.js is everything that I ever wanted for presentations. It
| can do video, it can do interactive stuff, it can do everything
| the web can do.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Hard not to see this as a way to sell mid-roll ads which have
| high engagement. Ad companies probably prefer video based
| tutorials to reference documentation.
| dan_hawkins wrote:
| "The main goal is to make everything as easy as possible, says
| Kristina Behr, Google's VP of product management for the
| Workspace collaboration apps."
|
| Looking up Kristina Behr on LI it looks like she jumped ships
| from MS to Google slightly over a year ago. At MS' last post
| she's been responsible for "Empowering frontline workers to
| achieve more with comms-first productivity and workflow
| solutions" listing following achievements:
|
| * Introducing Microsoft Teams Premium, the better way to meet |
| Microsoft 365 Blog
|
| * Microsoft Teams for frontline workers: What's Live and Coming
| Soon
|
| and so on...
|
| Yeah, I'll pass :)
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(page generated 2024-04-09 23:02 UTC)