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Comment by sl1ck731 | Hacker News Reader

I'm on a remote team as well that primarily uses Webex. It has kinda been the gold standard for me. Lately the audio has been declining and we started to use the Slack calls more often, which have been fantastic especially with the drawing tool. Other than drawing, voice, or screenshare is there something Zoom does that has made remote work easier? Or are you referring to better in terms of reliability and usability?

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90% of Webex calls I've been on for some reason didn't allow using computer audio. I couldn't even tell if it's disabled or somehow broken. That makes it hard to use good headphones. I usually ended up calling the webex phone number via hangouts, so that I can use a real headset. However, in a way it doesn't really matter because it's hard for other participants to use good audio equipment as well and so everyone else is using some echoey conference room speakerphone or worse put their phones on speakerphone. Zoom treats computer audio like a first class citizen and I've typically found that 80-100% of participants call in via that and end up using a good Sennheiser headset or similar. That makes for a so much better experience.

Everytime I am on some damn webex with people yelling into their conference room speakerphones, I just want to hang up.

By "works better" I mean that it largely implements all the same features of other competing video conferencing products but does them better / more reliably / with better usability. "It just works."

Compared to Slack we have fewer problems with people dropping out of calls or losing audio or video and audio and video quality are generally better. Screen sharing is better quality and less buggy and let's you share individual windows. For calls with people outside the team we have fewer problems connecting than with Skype or Google Hangouts. It handles people calling in by phone or from mobile devices with poor connections more robustly. Overall no real revolutionary features, just consistently good execution.

In addition to everything already mentioned, Zoom has great screen sharing quality and very, very importantly, is the only solution that supports Linux with a native client, which means proper screen sharing and much more.

Linux desktop adoption may not be great, but many good software engineers use it for work. In our team it's hard to find a windows laptop. Zoom is the only software that works for us.

My company pays for Slack and despite have 1Gbps fiber I constantly have issues hearing via Slack. It was so bad the entire company switched to Zoom just so the remote people could participate properly.

Webex.... I’d rather use Skype. We replaced webex at work with Google Meet. No longer have the issues we had with webex like people not being able to join or not hear audio.

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