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Comment by simonswords82 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know a single person (personal or business) that uses Google Meet. I'm in the UK though - it it popular in the US or elsewhere?

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The last 2 companies I've worked at in the UK have used G Suite / Workspace and therefore Meet. It integrates well and runs well in the browser. No complaints here.

> ... and runs well in the browser.

On Chrome on Windows. Otherwise it turns on the jet engine mode on laptop cooling / energy consumption.

It used to be pretty bad on Firefox Linux but for the pass couple of months it runs well.

I use Google Meet on Firefox on Linux, and haven't noticed any excessive power use; and the laptop fan stays slow.

In fact, of the video conference systems I have used at work, Google Meet is the only one that works perfectly on Firefox, without having to use Chromium or even a dedicated flatpak package.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Meet claims (with citations)

> During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the use of Meet grew by a factor of 30 between January and April 2020, with 100 million users a day accessing Meet, compared to 200 million daily uses for Zoom as of the last week of April 2020.

That's nuts - 100 million users and I don't see a single one. Crazy how enormous ecosystems can grow and still be outside of one's radar.

What other product people in the UK use, then?

For business it's a pretty even split between Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Some still uses Skype for Business - which as you can imagine is a pretty awful experience. Note that we work with global financial services organisations with fairly strict infosec policies and antiquated architectures.

For personal video calls it's Zoom, WhatsApp video or Facetime.

Having worked until recently for a European bank, they were still using Skype for Business, and I agreed it was a horrific experience. Naturally they now migrate to Microsoft Teams.

I agree with others in this thread, however, that Meet is quite popular in US otherwise. I guess it's because pretty much everyone here has a GMail account, and it's super easy to get everyone join the meeting without any hassle.

We were a small tech company before being acquired and used Meet (and GSuite). It worked fine, but what I liked the most is that it's built around the browser with nothing to install. Click link, in a meeting. Now we use Zoom a bit more, but I have yet to ever use MS Teams.

Can this sudden growth be mostly attributed to opening up Google Classroom?

Over here I've seen schools going from zero online infrastructure to using Google Classroom in a week. Teachers and students started using Meet since there was nothing in place before.

I can't really imagine millions of businesses suddenly jumping onto G Suite. They just scaled up their existing collaborating tools, and Office 365 with Teams is absolutely killing it among SMBs.

We use it daily. Teams is still the most popular by far among our costumers here in Denmark, but I see Meet much more often than Zoom.

It is one of Googles better products, but for all we know Google Meet and Teams could be the same product with a different skin. They work very similar, have mostly the same features and work much the same.

My children's school district uses meet and google classroom. I think it's pretty common in schools in the US.

It is very common. My child's school district used Google Meet for remote learning during the last school year. They also give all students a Chromebook.

It is very popular with smaller companies that already pay for gsuite where I am in Colombia. It is well integrated out of the box with the tools you are already using.

In our case we use Meet for around 95% of day to day calls. Zoom for more conference style calls.

We have a diverse mix of operating systems, and it least in my experience Meet is the one that works best in browsers by far. Especially since you don't have to jump trough hoops actually using the browser version.

Google Workspace is the default option for most small tech companies in India.

The company I work for is in the UK and uses Meet. My last one did as well.

I used to use Meet for most calls. I found there were more technical and quality issues than Zoom or, for quick internal calls, Slack.

On almost every two person Meet call one of us would have some kind of technical issue. Not working with the correct mic, video not working until the browser was restarted, etc.

I know many public schools used it for classes as many schools already had G Suite. My friend taught his class on it (the latency and audio dropouts were terrible, FWIW, but much of that may have been the poor internet of the kids).

Meet has been the most popular tool in the companies I've worked for (in the Benelux and Portugal), followed by Webex. Never met anyone using Teams. That said, I've mostly worked for small-to-medium companies.

It replaced LifeSize for town halls at my old company (London, fintech) during lockdown. We used LifeSize in part because of the various integrations and dedicated hardware.

It tends to not get blocked in places where other video chat like Skype and WhatsApp Video are blocked by the government, such as the UAE.

I imagine a lot of businesses who use google workspace use it as it's bundled (why pay for zoom, teams etc. on top).

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