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Comment by perryizgr8 | Hacker News Reader

Gchat, gdocs, gsheet, gmeet. These are the worst apps of their respective categories, ever to exist. But I am helpless, because I've to use what my company has bought.

The number one reason why they're bad is that they are not native apps. They need a tab in the browser, or a fake browser window.

The second reason they're bad is because Google does not care about the user experience. Each of these is probably assigned to a random intern every three months and she just does whatever she likes with it.

The third reason is that I know how good each of these category of apps can be. I've used slack, zoom, excel and word. Each one of those is lovingly crafted to satisfy the users every need, comparatively. Knowing that such apps exist makes it even more painful to use Google's half baked knock offs.

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Agree on Google Chat, which we use at work because it's free with our GSuite (workspaces now?), is HIPAA compliant, it keeps all chats forever without extra cost, and... That's it. Slack is better in basically every way, but we can't justify the expense of paying to reach feature parity, especially the HIPAA part.

Disagree heavily on docs, sheets, and meet. Meet is a bit wonky in Firefox but I wouldn't trade it for any of the other options we've tried. I consider docs, sheets, and drive to be best-in-class for what we use them for, which is pretty much always collaborative.

Gdocs doesn't go without it's issues. Switching from GSuite to Office365 made me want to rip out my eye balls. The online version of word is awful comparatively and depending on always having an installation of word doesn't work in all contexts.

Gsuite in general is accessible and works well for Collab.

And of course Teams is on a whole different dimension of pain.

> online version of word is awful

I agree. That's why I believe each of these apps should be a native app, built for your os. MS Word on windows 10 is an unbeatable word processor. Nothing else on the web comes even close. Same with Excel.

Just curious, why do you find Gmeet so bad? Among the three most common used (in my experience ar least zoom teams and meet) I find it the most usable.

Problems with gmeet:

1. No calling function. Most of the times I want to immediately call a person, like a phone. It should make the other person's computer ring, and they should be able to answer the call with one click. Gmeet doesn't do this.

2. Screen sharing options are extremely limited. Compare the ways zoom allows you to share your screen to what meet does. It's hilarious.

3. No screen annotations. No cursor control. No screen pointers. It's quite annoying to have to use such a limited product.

4. Screen sharing and video quality is atrocious. Again, look at zoom to find out what you're missing.

5. Screen recording is horribly low quality. It's almost impossible to read text on a shared screen recording, even though it was readable in the call itself.

6. Layout options. It seems Google has discovered the worst possible algorithms to lay out videos on the screen during a call. Many times it will even minimize presented content, and then everybody has to manually pin the thumbnail. There is no option to overlay the speakers video over presented content, which should be pretty high up in the list of features.

7. In call chat is lost after the call ends. It just goes straight to /dev/null. Who signed off on this?

I can go on, but I'm frustrated now just thinking about it. The problem is people don't even know how good the other stuff is. So it's hard to convey my helplessness.

1. It does have calling, but it's integrated with Gmail.

2. Elaborate? The screen sharing in Meet is what Chrome provides in general and I see the same options when using other web-based tools like jitsi. Zoom has a native app which presumably allows it do other things, but given that Chrome can "share entire desktop," "share a window," and "share a tab w/audio" I haven't actually found myself wanting any other behavior. Also, I consider not needing a native app an advantage and Zoom's web-based offering is trash.

3. Agreed, although to be fair I only find myself wanting this when presenting slides and Google Slides does have them.

4. Zoom supports 1080p while Meet does 720p, but if you're using any video features then Zoom apparently drops to 720p as well?

5. No argument there.

6. I've literally never experienced what you're describing. If more than one person is presenting content then the first presenter might be displaced by the second, which might look like "minimizing the presented content." If you have manually pinned anyone that always takes precedence. No option to overlay in Google Meet is a major annoyance.

7. Google Meet's chat is ephemeral unless you are recording the Meet. I think this goes into a bucket of design decisions that can all be lumped together as "No one is using Google Meet as their only communication tool." I've never needed things like Zoom's DMs that are inside a call. When I'm trying to have side conversations with coworkers I just use our normal chat tools. Google Chat is probably only better than Microsoft Teams among the "real chat apps," but it's definitely better than Zoom's built-in messaging.

Two things that have made it so that I cannot stand every over video calling product is that Google Meet does automatic video brightness adjustment, which helps a lot when you don't have a great set up at home, and the audio noise cancelling is insanely good. It is hard to overemphasize how good it is. You can whistle and clap and play music and type on your obnoxious self-indulgent clackity keyboard and other people will only hear your voice, plucked cleanly out of the mess as if everything had been mic'd separately. It's by far Meet's best feature and so far no one else has come anywhere close.

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