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Comment by chazeon | Hacker News Reader

Speaking from inside Academia, Zoom remains an important part of communication. We never used Zoom or any form of video chat before COVID, but even after COVID, Zoom is here to stay now. We meet in Zoom because it has unmatched quality and stability for video-conferencing / screen sharing compared to Skype etc. Office hour have Zoom sessions, etc.

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I think google meet is way cleaner feeling and I would pick it over zoom or teams. We do continue to use Zoom for very large 200+ meetings with the idea being that Zoom handles those better than Meet. Not sure if that information is outdated at this point.

I love meet but I have to reluctantly admit that zoom behaves better when you have a very low and/or irregular bandwidth. It reacts very well to temporary packet losses, by replaying the audio a little faster until it catches up with realtime, and video syncs up with audio quite well.

No idea about Zoom scaling but I can say with confidence that Meet works perfectly fine with >200 these days. (I work at Google, use Meet 8+h per day in meetings small and large.)

We use Meet for most purposes because it's "free" given that we use Google Workplace for other things. Just use Bluejeans these days for the largest meetings.

Which is why it's good when there's a big outage and you need a ton of engineers in a call to debug it - Zoom is the only one I've seen that doesn't fall over.

Speaking from inside tech, we were using Zoom before the pandemic, its usage exploded during the pandemic, and our usage of it has never come back down.

But it's not going to go up either.

Perhaps with population growth?

Teams & Meet are improving rapidly; I can't help but ask why when it comes to Zoom these days.

Never really used Meet, but for Teams I'll say "which one?" Microsoft provided a free Teams business license during the pandemic, but that ends in April - at which point you need either a $4/month license managed through the M365 admin portal or you switch to a Personal account through live.com and use that for Teams. Haven't tried in a while, but that always seemed troublesome when I tried it early on.

Zoom may not be perfect, but it's a lot more accessible for a lot of non technical people. They're also pushing things like phone service as well, competing with VoIP providers including Microsoft, cable companies, phone carriers and third party companies.

> Zoom may not be perfect, but it's a lot more accessible for a lot of non technical people

It uses dark patterns to get people to install Zoom when the web client works fine. I recall the software itself also doing a lot of shady stuff, but that was some time ago.

I like Meet best. It never tries to force me to download an app, it just works in the browser.

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