Comment by donalhunt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by donalhunt | Hacker News Reader

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I'm interesting in the claim regarding Zoom being head-and-shoulders above Google's product. Hangouts is certainly well past it's EOL but the Google Meet product (focused on the enterprise product) works very well and seamlessly integrates into the gsuite set of applications while also providing a great in-room experience.

I haven't personally used Zoom rooms (have connected to some via a laptop though). I have deployed and used Google Meet's in-room experience for a number of years... I suspect the combination of in-room and mobile workers is the key selling point around these products. Zoom have managed to tap that market very successfully while Google still struggle with selling their solution (despite it being very effective) - they seem to fail at making people aware it even exists.

Anyone deployed both? What has the experience been? Pain points of deploying / operating sizeable fleets of either product?

Hangouts suffers from the same thing that plagues every google product except for search: complicated interfaces made by warring teams of designers battling each other for a promotion. Nothing is ever fixed or improved, new UI flows are stapled in when someone needs to prove themselves to move up the corporate ladder. Vestiges of old flows remain to trip up unsuspecting users.

Always get anmoyed to see the crappy stock background image being so distracting, while using most of the screen real estate.

Same thing for the ambient mode on chromecast, doesnt even support suspend, so you either have to stare at a blindingly bright screen at night, or manually turn it off when your done with the tv.

I run on Linux currently and Macbooks previously. I've run into problems almost every time I tried a meeting in Google hangouts (which to be fair has not been often).

Zoom just works across Windows, Mac, and Linux. Problems with meetings are very rare. My previous employer VMware moved from Webex and GotoMeeting to Zoom. It added up to 5 minutes of productive times to calls for engineering teams due the fact that things actually worked and people weren't futzing around with audio, etc.

Try a Zoom call and a Meet for 5 minutes back-to-back. The difference in latency and quality is night and day.

I haven't used Zoom rooms but have used the Hangouts / Meet boxes a lot, and it's easy to see how the Zoom experience would translate.

Why invest in a product that might be “well past it’s EOL” in six months and which has a support model of: go read this FAQ?

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