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Comment by wardb | Hacker News Reader

As a remote worker who is on video conferencing calls most of the day, I have a lot of experience (aka strong feelings) with the tools mentioned in the article;

- Zoom is indeed great. Reliable and clean UI. Local recording to MP4 makes for easy sharing.

- Webex is a bit less intuitive, but still reliable. Proprietary video recording protocol makes it video's hard to share.

- Skype Business should die in a fire. Unreliable and terrible UI. The Mac version of it is pretty much broken. A lot of folks can't find out how to screen share.

- BlueJean. Trying too hard to be fancy with their UI. They are also very proud with their Dolby Voice, but I find it harder to properly understand people (My hearing is not that great).

- Google Hangouts / Meet doesn't work in Safari for no good reason IMHO. High CPU usage and could use some more features, like a personal room and default meetings settings (no vid/mute by default on join, default audio devices etc)

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> - Zoom is indeed great. Reliable and clean UI. Local recording to MP4 makes for easy sharing.

I disagree on the "clean UI". The actual "call in progress" window, yes - easy to find screen sharing, chat etc.

The Zoom application on Windows, the scheduling 'feature' (did I get the right meeting room ID? Have I joined my personal one or the call's one?) and the website, both are among the most confusing UIs I've used. Beaten only by some enterprise Java-GUI'd software.

I completely agree. How many times I've been invited and didn't press the right buttons in the right order, there is always that dance "oh I didn't enable the camera, oh i didn't see my mic was disabled, can you hear me". It's not quite right. I always wondered why they couldn't really streamline that. And there is a serious flaw in their chat mechanism: it doesn't offer to email you or say "do you want to save your chat" before you log off, and I've lost more times than I remember some important notes.

Having used Zoom for several remote projects, I really do love it. It’s reliable, great image quality for sharing screens (which was necessary for us), and had crystal clear audio. Zoom is great, giving customers access to an enterprise grade software solution for video conferencing at a low price.

There’s several of what appear to be anti-WebEx posts around here, and it makes me question who have actually used it in its intended setup. The university I’m at recently redid a lot of the rooms, and created several so-called presentation zones that are outfitted with WebEx equipment. Multi-monitor presentation (for the speaker and audience), multi-view camera’s that track and focus on the current speaker/audience member, and an audio system who’s microphone can pick up sound from pretty much anywhere in the room and doesn’t feedback loop on itself. To me that’s the difference when you go with a Cisco solution. Other vendors you get a utility or software, Cisco gets you into an ecosystem of well integrated tools, both software and hardware. Whether or not you actually need them is up to you.

This doesn't help when people mostly just want to join the standup from the tram or their desk at home.

I’ve joined across several devices (desktop, laptop, iPhone) with little to no issues. Maybe I’m just lucky and getting best case scenario?

I'd almost guess so, I tried to install broken deb packages on Linux and I think I tried some app for android (it's long ago, don't remember), in both cases I wasn't able to connect.

Until you have to connect to one of these so called solutions from your laptop. Using Webex puts my cpu at 100% with a mediocre quality, while I can use hangouts or Slack to call without these problems.

I connect to the stream with my laptop just fine, and it doesn’t stress my system. I’ve tried browser, temporary runtime, and real desktop app.

I did a test run on Friday with a guest speaker for today who was calling in from the west coast to us on the east coast. She was joining from a laptop. Connection was solid and worked great. Hopefully it stays that way today!

Google could clean up in this market. Hangouts is an abomination though, very unintuitive to use.

Google has lost all goodwill in this space in my opinion. They’ve built, sunsetted, and rebuilt multiple solutions for video conferencing and at this point who can trust them with putting out a long-term product?

What solutions are you referring to?

Can you explain which ones? The only product I know of is Hangouts and Google is right now rolling out updated Hangouts which is a compatible upgrade?

(Having said that, Hangouts is far from perfect.)

Hangout, Allo, Duo, Google Voice, Gtalk, Meet, Wave... (list to be completed, there's probably a dozen more which died I don't remember).

Of this list, only Hangouts is a video conferencing application, is it not? Allo's primary goal was chat, Duo's is 1-1 interaction, GTalk is simply the older version of hangouts, and so on.

What do you think Meets is for?

Hangouts Meet, as it's full name suggests, is a compatible upgrade.

And it's a bit of a wierd criticism since Hangouts actually predates Zoom and most of solutions suggested in this thread.

Or they could have built a single application which does both chat/audio/video.

Which was/is Hangouts?

I dont know, its so confusing with so many options from Google.

The fact that this is so confusing is part of the problem - consistency of product vision is not their forte and there are market economic consequences as a result.

> only Hangouts is a video conferencing application

btw, there are three different versions of Hangouts: Classic, Meet, and Chat. Hangouts Classic will be EOL'd later this year. Hangouts Meet is the video conferencing for business. Hangouts Chat is a Slack clone for business that includes video calling.

Google will transition Hangouts Classic users to Hangouts Chat, not Meet:

https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/01/upcoming-hangou...

Google Talk and Google Voice are two other Google products that (used to?) support video calling.

As with every other business market, google has the design, technical and market reach resources to clean up. However, as with every other business market, they never will due to their mysterious aversion to providing

a) actual support

b) product lifespans that businesses can rely on

Their penchant for "surprise! sunset"ing major products that users rely on, and showing no reluctance to do this for business customers as well means only scrappy small players who feel like the cost differential or some specific feature is worth the threat of having to migrate one fine weekend.

Specifically in the chat/videochat domain, Google has released and sunsetted

gchat (to...) google talk (to hangouts) duo allo voice

Their sales and support approach to Meet hardware is also abysmal. If they sold hardware direct, supported it through an official channel, and had reasonable documentation around it, they would slay, especially for customers who already have G Suite. Instead, it’s a confusing web of resellers bundling off-the-shelf hardware.

I say fuck google meet.

The mic doesnt work on mobile, their ability to get people to join easily sucks.

But i do like HighFive

I have a slack integration to create a highfive video conf i just /highfive (name of meeting) and then share that link.

Within our company we use Google for one person meetings, and BlueJeans for team meetings. Hangouts doesn't work well on anything other than Chrome. In Firefox it doesn't work with video on. It doesn't work well when other party is in China. We tend to use Skype for China calls.

> we use Google for one person meetings

Ah, Hangouts works splendid for one person meetings! Anything with two or more people I'd rather use something else ;)

Inadvertent mistake from my side but I upvoted you :)

> Skype Business should die in a fire

It has some great hidden features - seamless network switch (my wifi was giving problem. I switched to LAN. Skype displayed a message something like - 'detecting and switching network'. Call quality improved without disconnecting), make\promote an attendee a presenter. Their core tech is strong.

Agree on Skype Business. Even the audio call quality is terrible. Based on the nag messages I get every day, though, it appears they’re migrating it Teams, which I still haven’t used. Does anyone know if it’s better?

No. My company just migrated from Skype to Teams and it's worse. Half the time, scheduled meetings don't connect. Mute button will randomly not work. Entire UI/UX is poorly thought out. Beyond that, I think Teams is trying to do everything at once, chat, fileshare, boards, etc. Without doing one thing well and expanding from there.

Teams video and audio is the best part of Teams. Teams was launched as a Slack killer, but in reality I think it's closer as a replacement to Zoom than Slack.

Skype for Business has essentially been depreciated at Microsoft. The modern conference call app is Teams.

How deprecated? Because $giant_university I used to work for is currently rolling it out for everyone.

I agree with most of this, except I've had good luck with BlueJeans (relatively few people) and had some audio quality issues with Zoom. To be fair, it could be the wireless connectivity of the people I was connecting to...Screen sharing seemed to work fine for both...

Amen about Skype business. Worst torture I've ever been submitted to.

Zoom is interesting to me, because we've been using GoToMeeting pretty exclusively for 8-10 years, and in that time the stability & software quality has kind of cratered.

We use HighFive at work and it works great. Never had issues on web or on mobile.

really liked appear.in until they added "sign up to create room" basically

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