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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I fail to understand why Zoom seems to have so many fans. I find the UI confusing, on my Linux machine having a call with video will lead to the CPU cooler going into overdrive, I often have to leave and re-enter calls because audio output isn't working, etc. etc.

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I think people like(d) Zoom because its core features were pretty simple to use. Yes, they do really weird stuff like having app settings that you can change in the app but account settings that you have to log in to your web account to change, but most of those features are more marginal.

Google Meet, and this may have changed recently, lacked basic features like being able to quickly identify what window you are sharing. I've also seen far more call issues with Google and Teams than I have Zoom.

As for Teams, I don't have a ton of quarrels with the video meeting system itself but it's desire to jam 20 other critical workflow pieces into the software made it a huge mess, at least from my experience with it on Mac:

1) The calendar sort of works, but not really, and most features you'd expect to accomplish with a calendar actually need to be done in Outlook and not teams.

2) The chat UI is really cumbersome compared to Slack and it quickly becomes difficult to find anything if you interact with a lot of people

3) The document file system is a total cluster. Let's say someone chats me a file to look at. I click the link and the file opens in my Teams window. I review it partially and have a question for the person who sent it. I go back to chat, send a message, and then try and go back to my document. Guess what? It's gone and I have to load it again. What fun! You just have to get into the habit of forcing the files to open in their native app or load them in a browser. I'm sure there is a way to prevent this from happening but what I've found with Microsoft applications (at least on Mac) is that basic functionality like this is completely unintuitive compared to any other productivity software I've seen.

Zoom has a free version and the UI isn't that bad - and it scales to quite large groups. It's not nearly as confusing as Webex. And the video and audio quality are better than Teams. And no one knows what Google is offering this week (I think it's Meet, but maybe Hangouts or Duo or are they all the same now?)

Audio quality on Zoom is downright worse with a hallow, distant sound -- Zoom is/was using the same codec as Skype (Silk) which Teams replaced earlier this year (Satin) which is much more robust and capable.

I don't know about the algorithms, and I don't care about broadcast quality. When I am on zoom I understand people. When I am on Teams I have to close my eyes and concentrate to figure out what the robot is trying to say.

Of all the bad solutions, Zoom is the best one. It is the only one with a native (= not a glorified web browser) client, which you can definitely feel. Both Slack's and Teams' calls bring my top-end (Intel) MBP to its knees, while Zoom is the smoothest (though absolutely not without faults).

I thought it was the best I've used. It was very intuitive and I could easily test my mic and sound. It handled my 5mb hotspot connection without stuttering. Contrast that to Teams: Desktop or web version? One allows anonymous use, the other doesn't. You have to Google to find out how to test mic and sound, which brings up the desktop version. I was using the web version and ran out of time for searching. The video would freeze every 30 seconds or so.

Zoom did it right and that's why it's popular.

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