On the other hand with zoom I did had the experience of it just arbitrary not working at all for me.
But why are you on a (presumably) work call when you're driving over a hill with two bars? Put the work down for crying out loud. I'd love it if people like you were forced to just turn the god damn thing off when you can't actually attend a meeting instead of setting unrealistic expectations for the rest of us... It is just not that fucking important.
"feels great, jim!"
Edit: Ok actually some Meet complaints: Weird useless white space in the UI. Doesn't put people's faces at the top of the window closer to the camera (will push them to the bottom and put screen share above). Very annoying settings UI. Generally doesn't work well when the window is small. No floating window option. No option to rearrange participant tiles. Probably 100 more like that, but it's still tolerable.
Zoom just works on both of my devices.
It has steadily gotten worse ever since they started aggressively pushing users to log in, and also have phone browsers force redirect to the app (which is worse than the mobile web version was…)
Like...all these products do video calls fine. They all seem to work. What's the killer feature that one has that the others don't?
No, they don't. Teams does not work at all on MacOS with Intel silicon, just for starters.
That's not helpful when you're trying to chat with someone who for whatever reason is stuck with a MacBook. This is why Zoom is so great: you can actually count on it working with everyone's computer. With everything else, there always seems to be some combination of hardware+OS+browser that just doesn't work. That's completely unacceptable for a video chat platform that needs to be usable by everyone. If you're just chatting with one or two friends, one of the others might be fine since number of different platforms isn't very high and you can pick something that works for the 2 of you, but for something that needs to be usable by anyone at any time, it won't work.
Does the browser version work well on macos? I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work on chrome.
Not if you're interviewing candidates using video-chat. What's the company supposed to do, FedEx overnight a company laptop to the candidate just for doing a video interview?
>Does the browser version work well on macos?
In my experience, no. It consumes all the CPU.
What problems are you running into?
Not sure what you're on about. I'm all for shitting on Teams, as the chat and specifically group chat functionality is horrible, especially compared to slack (that has its own issues).
But claiming it doesn't work at all is a big one.
>(It's a massive battery drain and CPU hog, but other than that it works)
That doesn't fit with my definition of "works".
There are some awesome features with teams that other apps lack, meeting chat being integrated into the rest of teams, and getting notifications for when recordings are available. the key features leave a lot to be desired though.
IME, Teams is better than Zoom for meetings.
Its worse than alternatives at everything else (at a text-centric asynchronous multimedia group communication tool, its far worse than Slack, for instance).
Zoom is a really great product, they’ve really worked hard on the basic ”join a meeting” user experience. At least a few years back they provided every meeting with a custom installer(!) that deployed Zoom, then automatically whisked you into the right meeting.
The competition has improved by leaps and bounds, but most products used to be either super enterprise-y, requiring seven MSI files and two reboots to get you to a meeting - or super open source, bleeding you to death via a thousand paper cuts
(And before you say “zOoM wOrKs iN tHe BrOwSeR tOo”, yes, but Zoom still asks _my_ partners to install the heavy client and uploads files to the Internet. That there’s a dark pattern that allows you to run in the browser is irrelevant).
This is a horrible user experience -- and impossible to do in most enterprise IT environments today. Take a look at other platforms: get a link, click the link, join meeting in already installed browser. Done.
Zoom on the other hand annoys you with user hostile shit to get you to install their client. I wonder why! Their only saving grace is that they are an equal opportunity annoyer, even Linux users are not safe. /s
Anytime someone tried to host a meeting with Teams, they were never able to get/keep everyone connected. After having tried to exhaustion, I just got a GoToMeeting subscription and used that.
Skype used to work fine before Microsoft merged it into their Link abomination. Later there was Zoom that just worked.
Yes, there was lots of MS sales collatoral and infomercials in the press around Zoom insecurity. That was until MS themselves were found lacking in that same department. Later they both cleaned up their act.
I thought windows still had mostly mandatory telemetry, and as far as I know, they haven’t walked back the thing where engineers can pull arbitrary files off your machine “for diagnostic purposes only”, which means they’re legally obligated to service all sorts of sketchy warrants against machines they don’t own.
I realized this when I first noted a process started by Chrome called "software reporter" that wasn't started by me, I had no knowledge it started and if I knew, I wouldn't let it start. The web was full of tips on how to permanently disable the thing from running. So yes, from the point of view of these companies, they can do whatever they feel is reasonable, and we as users have no say in this.
- latency+quality, even with > 10ppl
- works in challenging network conditions
- tons of tunables to make it fit one's use case
- no-account meeting join
- ability to dial in via phone
- n:p webconf/webcast mode (with p vastly > n)
- subroom breakouts
- live closed captioning
- recording (incl. chat replay + transcript)
- non-GSM-quality audio (stereo, no echo cancellation, no passband filter, high bitrate encoding)
- conference room mode with automatic presence (via ultrasound or something) and individual face extraction
- many platforms and OSes support - Noise cancelling that will mute the sound of a German Shepherd who's just spotted the mailman (though, granted, nobody will hear *you,* either, if it's your German Shepherd :)
- Sensible defaults to the extent that if you get invited to a Zoom meeting and just download Zoom to open the meeting link, generally what you want to happen will happen (this being the other half of your "tons of tunables" point)
- A pretty decent web client you can use if you don't *want* to download Zoom