Browsers Have a Ceiling

Google Meet is objectively Google’s worst product.

A few weeks ago, I considered switching from Zoom. On paper, it made sense. I’m a Google shop. The calendar integration, the meeting summary, the seamlessness.

So I lived in it for a week. And my goodness. It is bad.

But what’s interesting is why it’s bad. It’s not the UI. It’s not the features. It’s the architecture.

As long as Meet remains browser-native, the ceiling is baked in.

You can’t brute-force performance through a browser tab. Latency, video quality, screen-sharing fluidity, CPU load — the browser environment simply wasn’t designed to handle that level of real-time throughput like a native app can.

Zoom wins because it lives on the OS. Meet loses because it lives in Chrome. Simple as that.

It got me thinking about what product management would look like at a behemoth like Google. The “no install” frictionlessness is their main selling point. But at what cost? For teams that live on calls for 4+ hours a day, friction isn’t the download. That’s a one-and-done. Friction is the lag.

Eventually, this product team will have to make a choice. Go all in and build a native client to actually compete on quality. Or keep trying to duct tape a video conferencing platform into a browser tab.

Right now, the duct tape is showing. And Zoom is winning.