#GOOGLE HANGOUTS ORIGINAL VERSION SOFTWARE#
#GOOGLE HANGOUTS ORIGINAL VERSION SERIES#

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.

#GOOGLE HANGOUTS ORIGINAL VERSION SOFTWARE#

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. 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.

#GOOGLE HANGOUTS ORIGINAL VERSION SERIES#

Editor’s note: this is the first article in a five-part series on Google Hangouts.

Google hangouts original version