Finally! I don't know anyone who likes G+ over Skype, but we all use it for the group video features.
Are you telling me that you experience the opposite? If so, that's very odd.
I bought an iPad to my mom for Christmas and facetime with them now. It's the best I've found - even easier for them to use than Skype. They call me, I call them, there no confusion anymore.
No idea about the group chat, but I will agree on Skype working really badly (despite their 10+ years of experience) compared to newer solutions as hangout and facetime.
http://plus.google.com/hangouts/_
That will redirect you to a new hangout URL, and (in my experience) you can just copy/paste the new URL to other folks. To use it, they'll need to be logged into a G+ account, but it doesn't matter which one.
I find the screen sharing feature in Skype to be poor quality. We tend to use Skype for calls, and then join.me for screen sharing.
We sometimes have call quality problems on Skype too. We also switch to hangouts for this reason, and we are often surprised how good the call quality, video quality and screen share quality is on hangouts.
Only problem is that nobody can figure out how to login or start a hangout. The interface is damn awful. They need a simple app like Skype's that installs like Chrome does, and give me history for gods sake. How hard is that to deliver?
One of the reasons I shy away from hangouts, is that I use Skype to backfill my timesheet. I can see exactly what calls, video calls, chats I made going back to 2006 on Skype's history. Admittedly so can the NSA, but still, the feature is awesome from a work perspective.
Note Hangouts itself once was Gtalk, which I was a user of, prior to the first cattle herding on to Google+. Now Gundotra is out the door, there is no telling into which silo existing G+ users will be cattle-herded next. Hangouts might be technically superior (although I personally think Skype's rate-adaptive video is second to none), but the treatment of users by its parent company, and their endless thirst for personal data keeps me far away.
Skype just works, just like it has for the past decade, and just like I expect it will continue to in the coming years. I'd place a small wager on Hangouts being long dead, or at the very least rebranded before then
Most elegant video chat product in existence.
Then it got super complicated with circles and adding people via their g+ accounts and people who use 3rd party chat programs and permissions etc etc etc..
Sounds weird, but it definitely made a difference for me.
Imagine having a group call on Xbox One - TV, that would be a sweet conversation and I for one really appreciate this new feature.
TV is the only place Xbox wins today. Though google does have some TV toys right now (Google TV and Chromecast). They could probably look into adding a webcam to that with hangouts.
https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/business/solutions/for...
And same time I know hundreds who use skype on daily basic on literally every device they own. Including TV. Only device in my house lacking skype it's refrigerator.
Either that, or better bandwidth because less people use Facetime.
I don't have personal experience comparing the qualities of Skype vs FaceTime, but I guess Apple is willing to spend more per user. That makes sense: FaceTime sells hardware, and that brings in money, while Skype seems more like a land grab, especially with this 'group calls are free, too' change. It could also be defensive, with Microsoft thinking they have to offer this to prevent would-be Office 365 users from migrating to Google docs.
I've noticed this too. For a while I was on a really poor internet connection and on Skype calls video just didn't work. However FaceTime was practically flawless on the same connection.