According to reports, in 2018, Google Cloud teams explored to acquire video meet app Zoom which has seen a definite surge in its popularity in social distancing times across the globe including in India.
The reports state that the internal discussions didn't get very far but a group of Google Cloud engineers "evaluated what would be a reasonable price to pay and calculated the unit economics for the service if it ran on Google's servers".
Zoom was one of several companies the Google engineers evaluated. A Google spokesperson was quoted as saying that the tech giant never "seriously evaluated" acquiring Zoom and has never had a large-scale agreement for employees to use Zoom.
Citing privacy and security concerns, Google has banned Zoom for its employees across offices, and promotes its own app unified enterprise communication app Meets.
Google is adding roughly 3 million new users on Meets daily and have seen a 30-fold increase in usage since January. According to Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, there are now over 100 million daily Meet meeting participants.
