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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

Great, but any company big enough to be in the market for this should probably not be using Hangouts to hold meetings in.

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why not? what is the advantage of traditional vc systems over hangouts? nothing i think.

because ... ?

Can't you only have like 8 people in the meeting or something?

> Join meetings with up to 15 participants

https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/business/solutions/for...

that's 15 streams, e.g, 15 meeting rooms

It says 15.

We've only hit this limit with very large all-hands meetings or presentations that lots of people also want to dial into. We often have a separate view-only stream for those cases.

Webex and GoToMeeting handle all-hands type meetings by making it only a 1-way presentation (view-only as you said). Participants can only ask questions via a chat dialog. The nice thing is, it prevent stupid feedback loops you always get when someone forgets to mute themselves.

Though, I believe both Webex and GoToMeeting charge extra to have this ability.

The contents of the hangout exist unencrypted in Google's data centres, which are of unclear jurisdiction, so the meetings are not suitable for any sort of confidential information.

Then I think that would be better explained as saying "meetings with particularly sensitive information." The size of the company would not dictate that policy.

Not to mention that if you are afraid of Google exploiting your data, you'd probably have the same problem with the NSA so cisco, juniper and almost all other US-based vendors (and why not Chinese/Russian?) are out of question.

You're left off with XAMPP and OpenSource tech?

Most corporations are more concerned with whether or not the data goes "off-network" or offsite at all, not whether or not the intermediary hardware they own is compromised by three-letter agencies.

At a previous job the building next door was a remote office for a non-IT part of a large non-tech company. They spent the money to get some kind of carrier line (maybe EPL/EVPL?) solely for teleconferencing.

While the system is almost certainly not difficult to compromise for TLAs and others, they get assurance that the data hasn't left "their" network,

I personally don't think there's much rhyme or reason to that particular permutation of those policies, but there is certainly a large group of buyers who are fine with potentially backdoored commercial products as long as "the data doesn't leave our network" and hence would not be OK with Google's solution.

I think you meant XMPP (XAMPP is a totally unsecured for-developers distribution of Apache+PHP+MySQL).

[citation needed]

"Google encrypts data amid backlash against NSA spying" http://wapo.st/1adFyAe

Nope - to reformat the video for different devices Hangouts have to be decrypted on the intermediary servers.

Is that much different to how Google's competitors in this space store data?

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