Google Duo, the upcoming video chat app, should scare our industry. This is the first video chat app that uses your existing phone number for calling. Not email addresses, not 35 digit call in numbers, but your existing phone number. This means ad hoc calls can actually happen, something that absolutely doesn't currently exist.
Interoperability, the running joke of our industry could be solved easily by Google by simply being a big player. Once they make a serious effort into video conferencing, any competing company making an island would be quickly swept away. Everyone would freak out and immediately make themselves compatible with Google. The freak out, in my opinion, would be much worse than the Skype/Lync freakout that's been going on for the last three years.
Phone to boardroom.
Expanding the capability of the Duo app to Chromebooks, Chrome browser and Chromebox would mean that calls could exist from phones, to computers to boardrooms. If they add (steal) some of Spark's functionality where you can take a video call with you to other rooms, it would greatly add to the product's overall functionality.
Chromecast
There's your perfect data sharing product that could be assimilated into their overall UC solution.
Pricing model
They could give away the app for phones and the browser component and build in premium features (like advanced scheduling with Google's Business apps) and of course charge for the Chromecast component. Chromebox for meetings would still run on a fee based model. They could either develop their own camera or just keep using Logitech.
The same really couldn't be said for Apple or Microsoft, but Google really has a shot, if they wanted it, to decimate our industry. It would send the larger vendors into scramble mode and probably kill off some of the smaller vendors. I'm going to hope this doesn't happen.
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