Human interaction that actually works right now is so important. And I simply have a hard time trusting another product to actually do the call reliably
Disclaimer: I work for Alphabet, but already held this opinion before I did.
Every second time I’m using it, I either don’t hear the other people, or people do not hear me. YMMV.
Edit: Maybe if I could receive some support from Google to find out what my problem is, I’d be able to fix it. But that ain’t going to happen.
Jitsi and Google Meet worked by following a link and clicking one popup. Much easier UX
I wish Google would just provide the internal tool and sell that. It’s the opposite of dogfooding their product. They eat the good stuff and product a lesser product to their customers.
I tried looking up the features on the Wikipedia page [0] and didn’t see a really comprehensive list. I reviewed Wikipedia because when I searched for google meet, Google’s top result (that seems like their product page) [1] just had an “open” button that linked out to the App Store to install “Hangouts Meet by Google.”
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hangouts [1] https://meet.google.com/
It seems to work only in Chrome and Safari.
My pet peeve with Meet by the way is the absence of a native grid view in big rooms.
Perhaps I'm just used to them as a remote worker, but they were never all that janky to begin with. Or, rather, more janky than the other tools available at the time.
I hadn't used Jitsi until this current situation meant friends wanted to "meet up" drunkenly on Friday evenings but it's the same.
The main obstacles are hardware. The cheapest correct working solution for a single individual participant is a headset and a webcam. Can you use lapel microphones, or (as two of my Youtube creator friends do for Friday evenings) sit in front of a huge professional microphone with filters? Yes, yes you can but that's not for most users. Can you plug a high-end SLR that's focused dead on you into a converter and stream that instead of a webcam? Yup, but again most people either don't own an SLR or don't want to set it up just so they can be a bit clearer and brighter when drunk.
And the thing about hardware is that we abstracted this away entirely. Zoom doesn't have different hardware support from Hangouts or Skype or any other tool.
"Which VC tool should we use for this meeting?" is a bike shed discussion at the best of times. Chances are good either you didn't need a video conference at all, or any of the tools would have been fine.
Teams is awful. Skype is worse. WebEx is just fine. So is Zoom.
My experience with Google Meet matches yours with Zoom.
Nothing else comes close on Linux for me.
We use it internally at Xero, more than ever currently with working from home, and it's been solid from what I've experienced.
Given we also use Google Calendar, joining a meeting is pretty straight forward, as a Meet link is populated in each event, and shows up on the home screen for meet.google.com
Usually the only mic issues that occur are people using their own headsets with audio gain set too high or flaky bluetooth connections
Running in Firefox, it works great for the most part although sadly it breaks every few months. It'll tend to drop me from the lobby a few seconds in with "Network Error" or something along those lines. I would get frustrated but given it's a work tool, a few days to a week using Chrome (just for calls) and Firefox is back in action again.
We also conduct our postmortems via Google Meet and it generally seems to support 50+ person calls fairly well. That said, we use Hangouts Streaming for All Hands type of stuff so I couldn't speak on performance with hundreds of users at once
Purely anecdotal but my coworker has an older HP laptop (specs are still a respectable 8GB ram, presumably quad core CPU) and finds that he can't be on a Google Meet call while also doing development as his fans will flare up too much.
I would actually quite appreciate a Google Meet desktop app (that's not electron) but I guess the premium userbase tend to have enough specs to throw at web-based products
Oh yeah, I do appreciate that Zoom presumably doesn't require any fancy logins because running Google Meet on a phone requires a device policy in order to connect to a call.
I can either install it on my device plainly (requiring a pin to login going forward vs say, a fingerprint) or I could install it in a work profile. The latter is cleaner but then I have an entire second set of apps just to join a call on my phone once in a blue moon :(
At least you can dial into meetings but I find the audio is kinda wonky at times.
Having said all this, I can respect the product but I'm always happy for a non-Google entity to win in any given space ;)
These two remove from one-another other.
Zoom just showcased this back to back to back to back in a few weeks time). They played tricks with the words. "we wrote ABC but what we really meant is XYZ" is a shitty response to any type of audit/scrutiny.
This is a public company. They have an Internal Audit. What the hell were these guys been auditing in security audits??? The color of the background????