IMO, Zoom has the worst user experience of all video conferencing tools by a long shot, at least on Linux, regardless of whether you are a paying user or not. And while Skype was doing a terrible job for years, these days it's light years ahead of Zoom. Google Meet is also doing an incredible job and lately I've been using it a lot. I seriously don't understand how a horrible product such as Zoom made it so big... So whatever comes after Zoom, I hope it will do a better job.
I’ve had the opposite experience. Zoom is far from ideal but Aside from a twice-daily freeze (that I suspect has something to do with my audio driver) Zoom works wonderfully.
Google meet, on the other hand, has been miserable. I’ve had cases where the group could hear me but I couldn’t hear them, even when the “test audio” button in the browser client produced sound. Even after calling in using a mobile phone I could then hear the group but then they couldn’t hear me. It feels like an alpha product as far as reliability goes.
Sure, I'll elaborate: video and audio quality is identical to that of Yahoo! messenger from the late 90's. As soon as I open zoom, it eats up about 80% of my CPU (without being in a call or anything). Controls work 60% of the time at best (turning off/on my webcam takes a dozen clicks), No matter what I do it won't let me remove the passwords from my rooms. It is a horrible experience.
Meet has been rock solid and my team switched over to it about two weeks ago - 0 issues so far.
You haven't tried Cisco WebEx,have you? For a good chunk of time Skype was dead while MS was busy figuring out how to assimilate it. Google was out because companies didn't want google to spy on you, so your options were WebEx or zoom (which we didn't know was a spying dumpster fire yet). We eventually also had to give up on WebEx because it simply did not work consistently on our Linux Dev's laptops. So our option was "or zoom"
The spying argument is not exactly applicable for most scenarios. I mean you know you are taking a risk when you're using proprietary software running on servers that aren't yours, whether the privacy issues are intentional or design flaws(both of which exist in every solution, whether that be zoom, google, microsoft or any other competitor in that context). So with that I personally pick reliability over anything else, hence my personal choice - meet. And realistically speaking, very few people are of any interest to Google or even state agencies. I most certainly am not: I've applied for positions at Google in the past so they have my near - complete resume(now lead developer as opposed to senior developer when I applied), I use some of their paid services so they know my bank account, full names, address and telephone number and I use a ton of their products in general. I'm way past the "on the internet no one knows I'm a dog" state. I'm with Torvalds on this one - I'll use proprietary solutions so long as they do the job and there are no viable alternatives.
Well in the case of Google I was working at a company that was interested in partnering with google competitors, so it didn't matter whether we thought we were targets or not.
Honestly, I find Zoom to be "WebEx, but not as good". There's just a dozen little things about Zoom that make it seem like it is a copy that someone didn't bother to put enough time into.
- At least half the time, one of the dialins doesn't work
- It's not uncommon for the meeting and caller id to be "below the fold", plus you can't resize the window with them, plus it scrolls to the top whenever someone joins. So you'll scroll down to see the meeting id, start typing, someone will join, it'll scroll back up, and you'll have to scroll back down.
There's just a bunch of minor issues like this that add up to make it seem like Zoom was done by one of those "oh, I can write that up in a weekend" people.
To add a note of positive, both of them are much better than some of the other systems I've used. There was one where the mute button was right next to the hang up button; I'd wind up accidentally disconnecting from calls accidentally on average once per call.
I've had much worse luck with Skype. Screen sharing will stop updating, audio drops out entirely and only restarting the call restores it. Eventually switched a long-standing Skype meeting to Zoom because of this. (With no great enthusiasm, since I'm not crazy about Zoom either. But Skype seems simply not to work half of the time.)
As I see it, the advantage Zoom had over Skype and similar tools was only the host needed an account.
Everyone else would get sent a link which would download the client if not already installed (it would have been perfect if that had gone straight to the browser client) and then they were up and running.
The friction to getting started was significantly lower than Skype and Hangouts and whatever else. And now that almost everyone has Zoom installed, it's going to stay low.
reply