10 ms·

Enterprise conferencing software is so bad and so expensive I'm astonished it took this long for a decent competitor to come in. I'm really surprised Google did

Enterprise conferencing software is so bad and so expensive I'm astonished it took this long for a decent competitor to come in. I'm really surprised Google didn't go all in with making Hangouts a decent competitor. I have a feeling this will make a lot of money.

ajmurmann 10y ago
Hangouts is so strange to me (like many Google products I guess). They got a ton of traction; first release immediately was super solid and then nothing. Nothing has changed in ages. No obvious features get implemented. I would love so much to have s tile view of all participants. Ideally we would get a codec that's actually supported by hardware instead of this battery draining mess. I'd love to have an option for the video not to be cropped. I can't count the confusion that has caused over the years with people in meeting wondering why someone is only showing their forehead out why everybody but them can see multiple people on camera but they only see someone in the center. All the hard work seems to be done, but Google refuses to polish and properly maintain it. It's bizarre.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  At one time this was a function of how Google did promotions/pay raises. I'm not sure if Hangouts got caught in that catch 22 or not but it did kill a lot of decent projects. Had that team remained relevant they could have conceivably done a "Chromebox" Hub like the Surface Hub and given Microsoft some competition in that space. EDIT: Ok so as is pointed out there is a chromebox for meetings. Pretty nice. Seems to be out of the Enterprise group though, is that still part of Google or is it an 'Other Bet' now?
  - tschwimmer 10y ago
    We had it at my old company and it was garbage. Super frustrating to join meetings (type your automatically generated, super long meeting name on a tiny keyboard), random crashes freezes and relatively poor video quality. Another super annoying thing was screensharing had an extremely low bitrate. It was so bad that it was pretty pretty useless to demo any nice UI features or animations. The framerate was 2-5 fps.
    - dzhiurgis 10y ago
      Completely opposite experience. Where Skype and Gotomeeting would lag, Hangouts was 99% smooth. Perhaps you've got terrible firewall? The only problem I used to have is audio would die whenever I mess with browser plugins (disabling that WebRTC feature that leaks your internal IP for privacy, and some other Googlyeish feature).
      - parasubvert 10y ago
        We use Hangouts pretty extensively (2300 employees) but for anything involving more than 4 people we've switched to Zoom; all of the OP's problems creep up quickly and intermittently in Hangouts. Also we keep WebEx around for screen control, it seems still best bang/buck for that.
    - kbar13 10y ago
      we use it at work. it hooks into meeting rooms' calendars and you just have to use the chromebox remote to select the right hangout in the agenda. no typing involved (unless you were doing an ad-hoc meeting, then you'd just type one of our names as the hangout name). It works quite well.
      - seanalltogether 10y ago
        Yeah we have the same experience, I'm surprised hangouts works so badly for others. As long as you invite the chromeboxes to the same meetings as everyone else, it's super simple to operate and for everyone to join.
        Roritharr 10y ago
        Does it work with non-google Calendars?
        JoBrad 10y ago
        Yes. We use it with clients frequently.
  - jsolson 10y ago
    It's out of Google "other". Accounted along with Cloud all under Diane Greene. Also, modern GVC is fucking amazing.
- deong 10y ago
  Google desperately needs an "Executive Vice President of People Actually Using Shit". Someone who's entire job is to go to demos of products that are about to ship and cancel them until they at least work well enough to pass the laugh test. Nearly everything Google makes is just some version or another of Google Home telling your Android phone not to handle that voice prompt to add a calendar entry (which your phone can do) because Google Home is there, so that Google Home can tell you that Google Home can't add calendar entries yet. Hey, here's Allo. We think you're going to love it. I mean, it doesn't have SMS support, so no one is actually going to use it, but other than being pointless, ain't it great? My EVP there would have walked in, saw the first slide about a new messenger, and said, "Let me stop you here. Does it transparently bridge IP chat and SMS into one conversation like iMessage? No? OK, I'm going to lunch. I'm sure your stickers are cool and all, but pass."
  - joelx 10y ago
    Why all the hate for Hangouts? I have used it for five years to build and run my company. There is never an issue with Hangouts unless someone in the meeting has a hardware problem (meanwhile everyone else can handle the meeting). It's fast and easy for anyone to use screenshots or video. If you use YouTube Live Events, you can even have a company meeting with every person joining. We have done these once a week for years for fifteen minutes prior to lunch. Hangouts has been amazing for us.
    - deong 10y ago
      Hangouts was (is?) pretty good. But it hasn't been immune to Google's inability to figure out how to make a thing people want. Initially it was IP only. Then it added SMS support. Then it added merged conversations between SMS and IP. Then it unmerged those conversations. All the while only really working well on the desktop inside a weird Chrome extension that burned through battery like kindling because there was no hardware support for encoding and decoding the video. I still use it on my phone, but again, the only actual feature anyone really wants from a text/chat/IM program is the one that enables "I just want to send a message to Alice. You figure out how to get it to her appropriately" -- a.k.a. iMessage. If you put stickers and crap in there, sure, people will use them I guess, but the one absolute core feature anyone should expect for at least five years now is still the one Google can't figure out how to do. And they were actually close with Hangouts at one point. Close enough, in my opinion. It lacked the automatic routing of iMessage, but just showing any message I've received from my wife in one conversation and giving me the ability to toggle how I send a reply right there in the conversation view was fine.
- droopyEyelids 10y ago
  Most everything you're describing is a part of the new beta hangouts. If you're a part of a large Google Cloud account, have your IT person contact your gCloud account manager and get on the beta. Actually, if you're a part of a large account and your IT team is risk tolerant.
jpatokal 10y ago
Chromebox for Meetings (basically, Hangouts video conferencing in a box) is actually pretty awesome: https://enterprise.google.com/chrome/video-conferencing/ https://enterprise.google.com/chrome/video-conferencing/ Disclaimer: I work for Google, albeit not on Chrome, and use this every day.
- ec109685 10y ago
  Yes, agreed. It is great — use it where I work (10k employees) and it was such a relief over all the conferencing solutions we tried (my team was a guinea pig for several). The coolest thing is that the company rolled out hangouts in a weekend to 100% of the conference rooms, replacing all projectors in the process. It completely democratized remote work and remote offices since people are using Hangout by default.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
actuator 10y ago
Have you looked at Zoom(zoom.us)? We have been using it for a while now and it seems to work very well for us.
ryanSrich 10y ago
You're right in that 99% of them are complete garbage. However I was pleasantly surprised when my company switched to Zoom[1]. A company I had never heard of before. In terms of call quality I've never experienced anything better. Beyond that their mobile experience is almost better in terms of raw features than their desktop app (which is still very good in its own right). 1.) https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zoom-video-communications#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zoom-video-communica...
- jwilliams 10y ago
  +1 to this. We're across 24 hours of time zones and conduct a majority of internal and external meetings over video conference. We've pretty much tried them all and Zoom has been the best. That said, there are still things to improve, so will be interesting to compare.
- projectileboy 10y ago
  I'll also +1 - Zoom has consistently excellent video and audio, and is a breeze to use.
- psybin 10y ago
  Zoom is consistently garbage for us. The latency is high, the audio quality is low, and the apps have a really terrible user experience.
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    I wonder where the closest Zoom PoP is to you? I've had the opposite experience, Zoom worked on connections where Hangouts was terrible.
    - psybin 10y ago
      If two participants are in EU, the latency is awful. I don't get the impression they have multiple POPs.
FireBeyond 10y ago
Zoom seems to be a lot better for pricing. At a company of 12 people, our GoToMeeting bill was $15,000/yr. But uhh, call-in rates of 1c/min/participant? That's going to add up. We would regularly have meetings of two hour duration (programming, planning) with up to six-eight attending is a $10 meeting in itself. Chicken feed compared to salaries but I could easily see pricing of up to $1k/mo with this. Shame.
- xyzzy123 10y ago
  Compare the 1c per minute to the staff cost of meetings and it's not even pocket change. It's like a 1% tax on meetings. To get a $1k meeting bill with $100k fully loaded avg participant cost or about $50/hr (way too low in metros, but let's be conservative), that's 1600+ meeting hours or about $80k/mo in staff costs. (I see you do mention this but I wanted to call it out). I think an interesting way to look at it is, if it can make your meetings one minute shorter than what you do now, you'll actually save.
- gedy 10y ago
  > At a company of 12 people, our GoToMeeting bill was $15,000/yr. Am curious how? I think it's like max $50 a person/month, and that's only for huge meetings.
  - FireBeyond 10y ago
    Actually, I appreciate the heads up... I wonder if we're still on "older" plans that are more expensive (I don't run the billing but I do get to listen to the complaints about the cost). Because yeah, at the current plans we should be seeing a max of $7k/yr.
Twirrim 10y ago
I've seen almost every solution used internally at Amazon to one degree or another. It's really telling that you get a bunch of highly competent technical people in the room and they still end up fighting with the conferencing software and waste a bunch of time in the meeting trying to get everyone connected. I'm really not surprised they built their own in the end. It's a clear pain point for companies. That said, my current employers (not Amazon) have been using Zoom (zoom.us) and it seems to be really quite good. I've had almost no problems with it at all.
ryandrake 10y ago
Most place I've worked, we'd waste anywhere from 5-10 minutes at the beginning of every meeting just trying to get A/V systems and voice conferencing to work. "Anyone there? Hello? Crap, someone needs to dial in as the host. OK Is everyone dialed in? Good. Oh, wait, Roger can't hear us. Roger, dial back in. OK. Hey, whoever is at the cocktail party, can you go on mute?? Thank you. All right. Who's projecting? The projector is VGA, does anyone have a laptop with VGA? How about a dongle? Great, we can see it now. Can everyone who's remote see the screen sharing? No? OK let's restart the screen sharing program. How about now? Shit, we lost Roger again! Why is the screen 640x480? Damnit, can we just use a different laptop? E-mail the presentation to Diane, we can use her laptop. Did Roger dial back in yet??" It's almost universally an awful UX.
- bthornbury 10y ago
  I'm convinced this exact scenario, bad A/V at the start of a meeting, has cost billions in lost dev time.
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    I completely agree. Out of all the places I've worked at and all of the developers I've talked to, not being able to work AV with TVs for presenting or conference calls is the common, almost 100% of the time an issue. One place I worked at spent about $25,000 to get an AV system setup complete with conference calling that was supposed to make it "easy". Every single meeting without fail we'd waste 10 minutes trying to figure it out then have to bring someone from IT support who would then spend 10 minutes themselves fiddling with it.
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      Perhaps if expectations were set before rolling out a new system, that IT Support would attend every meeting ten minutes early to get things working, conference system decision-makers would have priorities better aligned with the rest of the organization. Of course you could plan for a "Phase 2" in which mandatory attendance would cease, but that would be based on performance rather than timing.
tlianza 10y ago
I'm not sure where the optimism comes from. I too have been surprised at how mediocre most conferencing software is, and concluded that it's probably harder than it seems. What would great videoconferencing software look like, and what are the odds that this is it?
- disiplus 10y ago
  realtime protocols depend a lot on where are you and where are the participants, and even if you cover everything else you have random things that you have no influence on. like what route does your traffic go, how is the buffer set up on this route and so on. i had to debug voip and outside of some simple things like not enough resources/bandwidth it can be really frustrating.
greyman 10y ago
We used Outlook communicator and it wasn't that bad. There were some glitches sometimes but overall it was workable.
craigds 10y ago
We've tried loads of them. Skype, hangouts, appear.in, zoom, ... They all sucked with voice and video all cutting out and getting regularly garbled etc. And finally Slack added video, and is amazing. No problems since then, Slack has solved the problem for us.
amelius 10y ago
> I'm really surprised Google didn't go all in with making Hangouts a decent competitor. I have a feeling this will make a lot of money. I guess video conferencing is about to get really easy to implement over WebRTC. So I'm guessing there will be an explosion of competitors soon.
arjie 10y ago
Everyone has tried. If you're in SF and a BART user you will have seen at least three different ones being advertised. I believe the BlueJeans ones are still up. BlueJeans is pretty good.
yalogin 10y ago
I don't know Google even today comes across as a company that does technology very well but not solutions. It's a shame that no startup took this on till now.
karmajunkie 10y ago
We use hangouts at a client of mine and it works great—what else would you like to see out of it, out of curiousity?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
akerro 10y ago
>Enterprise conferencing software is so bad and so expensive I'm astonished it took this long for a decent competitor to come in Have you tried http://www.justchimein.com/chime-in.html http://www.justchimein.com/chime-in.html ?
emdowling 10y ago
Google did and I think they do make a lot of money from it. They've just chosen to target the business sector. We have the Asus Chromebox for Large Meeting Rooms[0] in every meeting room here and it works flawlessly 99% of the time. I'm amazed how well it works. Automatically integrated with Google Calendar, so walking into a meeting room has the upcoming meetings for that room displayed on the screen. Single tap and away you go. If you need to join another meeting, simply type in the name using the remote. So easy.
emdowling 10y ago
Google did and I think they do make a lot of money from it. They've just chosen to target the business sector. We have the Asus Chromebox for Large Meeting Rooms[0] in every meeting room here and it works flawlessly 99% of the time. I'm amazed how well it works. Automatically integrated with Google Calendar, so walking into a meeting room has the upcoming meetings for that room displayed on the screen. Single tap and away you go. If you need to join another meeting, simply type in the name using the remote. So easy.
23443463453 10y ago
They are and were in the space with their Chromebox product and service. Unfortunately, kid of like how Google does, it seems they just kid of plateaued once they created it. Their whole Google Apps for enterprise suite is stale as can be. It kind of frustrates me to no end that, e.g., you can't set "smart filters" in gmail that can clean out noise emails (newsletters, notifications, etc.) based on age or quantity. All gmail filters can only be applied to incoming emails.
technofiend 10y ago
>Enterprise conferencing software Have you tried Cisco's offerings? Maybe I just have a really excellent IT department, but whether joining audio only, from a tablet, desk, desk phone or telepresence room it just works. It's impressive as hell.
Diederich 10y ago
I've used Google Hangouts at my last two companies. Overall, it worked pretty well.
gomox 10y ago
Best thing about Hangouts: it was rock solid and bulletproof at first, despite the clunky UI (and weird plugin system). Somewhere along the road, they removed all the crap UI, and in the process: - it became more unreliable (F5 to get sound working) - it introduced crazy bugs (says your muted, but not really!) - it remained software accelerated on mac so it kills the batt

ajmurmann 10y ago

Hangouts is so strange to me (like many Google products I guess). They got a ton of traction; first release immediately was super solid and then nothing. Nothing has changed in ages. No obvious features get implemented. I would love so much to have s tile view of all participants. Ideally we would get a codec that's actually supported by hardware instead of this battery draining mess. I'd love to have an option for the video not to be cropped. I can't count the confusion that has caused over the years with people in meeting wondering why someone is only showing their forehead out why everybody but them can see multiple people on camera but they only see someone in the center. All the hard work seems to be done, but Google refuses to polish and properly maintain it. It's bizarre.

ChuckMcM 10y ago
At one time this was a function of how Google did promotions/pay raises. I'm not sure if Hangouts got caught in that catch 22 or not but it did kill a lot of decent projects. Had that team remained relevant they could have conceivably done a "Chromebox" Hub like the Surface Hub and given Microsoft some competition in that space. EDIT: Ok so as is pointed out there is a chromebox for meetings. Pretty nice. Seems to be out of the Enterprise group though, is that still part of Google or is it an 'Other Bet' now?
- tschwimmer 10y ago
  We had it at my old company and it was garbage. Super frustrating to join meetings (type your automatically generated, super long meeting name on a tiny keyboard), random crashes freezes and relatively poor video quality. Another super annoying thing was screensharing had an extremely low bitrate. It was so bad that it was pretty pretty useless to demo any nice UI features or animations. The framerate was 2-5 fps.
  - dzhiurgis 10y ago
    Completely opposite experience. Where Skype and Gotomeeting would lag, Hangouts was 99% smooth. Perhaps you've got terrible firewall? The only problem I used to have is audio would die whenever I mess with browser plugins (disabling that WebRTC feature that leaks your internal IP for privacy, and some other Googlyeish feature).
    - parasubvert 10y ago
      We use Hangouts pretty extensively (2300 employees) but for anything involving more than 4 people we've switched to Zoom; all of the OP's problems creep up quickly and intermittently in Hangouts. Also we keep WebEx around for screen control, it seems still best bang/buck for that.
  - kbar13 10y ago
    we use it at work. it hooks into meeting rooms' calendars and you just have to use the chromebox remote to select the right hangout in the agenda. no typing involved (unless you were doing an ad-hoc meeting, then you'd just type one of our names as the hangout name). It works quite well.
    - seanalltogether 10y ago
      Yeah we have the same experience, I'm surprised hangouts works so badly for others. As long as you invite the chromeboxes to the same meetings as everyone else, it's super simple to operate and for everyone to join.
      - Roritharr 10y ago
        Does it work with non-google Calendars?
        JoBrad 10y ago
        Yes. We use it with clients frequently.
- jsolson 10y ago
  It's out of Google "other". Accounted along with Cloud all under Diane Greene. Also, modern GVC is fucking amazing.
deong 10y ago
Google desperately needs an "Executive Vice President of People Actually Using Shit". Someone who's entire job is to go to demos of products that are about to ship and cancel them until they at least work well enough to pass the laugh test. Nearly everything Google makes is just some version or another of Google Home telling your Android phone not to handle that voice prompt to add a calendar entry (which your phone can do) because Google Home is there, so that Google Home can tell you that Google Home can't add calendar entries yet. Hey, here's Allo. We think you're going to love it. I mean, it doesn't have SMS support, so no one is actually going to use it, but other than being pointless, ain't it great? My EVP there would have walked in, saw the first slide about a new messenger, and said, "Let me stop you here. Does it transparently bridge IP chat and SMS into one conversation like iMessage? No? OK, I'm going to lunch. I'm sure your stickers are cool and all, but pass."
- joelx 10y ago
  Why all the hate for Hangouts? I have used it for five years to build and run my company. There is never an issue with Hangouts unless someone in the meeting has a hardware problem (meanwhile everyone else can handle the meeting). It's fast and easy for anyone to use screenshots or video. If you use YouTube Live Events, you can even have a company meeting with every person joining. We have done these once a week for years for fifteen minutes prior to lunch. Hangouts has been amazing for us.
  - deong 10y ago
    Hangouts was (is?) pretty good. But it hasn't been immune to Google's inability to figure out how to make a thing people want. Initially it was IP only. Then it added SMS support. Then it added merged conversations between SMS and IP. Then it unmerged those conversations. All the while only really working well on the desktop inside a weird Chrome extension that burned through battery like kindling because there was no hardware support for encoding and decoding the video. I still use it on my phone, but again, the only actual feature anyone really wants from a text/chat/IM program is the one that enables "I just want to send a message to Alice. You figure out how to get it to her appropriately" -- a.k.a. iMessage. If you put stickers and crap in there, sure, people will use them I guess, but the one absolute core feature anyone should expect for at least five years now is still the one Google can't figure out how to do. And they were actually close with Hangouts at one point. Close enough, in my opinion. It lacked the automatic routing of iMessage, but just showing any message I've received from my wife in one conversation and giving me the ability to toggle how I send a reply right there in the conversation view was fine.
droopyEyelids 10y ago
Most everything you're describing is a part of the new beta hangouts. If you're a part of a large Google Cloud account, have your IT person contact your gCloud account manager and get on the beta. Actually, if you're a part of a large account and your IT team is risk tolerant.

jpatokal 10y ago

Chromebox for Meetings (basically, Hangouts video conferencing in a box) is actually pretty awesome: https://enterprise.google.com/chrome/video-conferencing/ https://enterprise.google.com/chrome/video-conferencing/ Disclaimer: I work for Google, albeit not on Chrome, and use this every day.

ec109685 10y ago
Yes, agreed. It is great — use it where I work (10k employees) and it was such a relief over all the conferencing solutions we tried (my team was a guinea pig for several). The coolest thing is that the company rolled out hangouts in a weekend to 100% of the conference rooms, replacing all projectors in the process. It completely democratized remote work and remote offices since people are using Hangout by default.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

actuator 10y ago

Have you looked at Zoom(zoom.us)? We have been using it for a while now and it seems to work very well for us.

ryanSrich 10y ago

You're right in that 99% of them are complete garbage. However I was pleasantly surprised when my company switched to Zoom[1]. A company I had never heard of before. In terms of call quality I've never experienced anything better. Beyond that their mobile experience is almost better in terms of raw features than their desktop app (which is still very good in its own right). 1.) https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zoom-video-communications#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zoom-video-communica...

jwilliams 10y ago
+1 to this. We're across 24 hours of time zones and conduct a majority of internal and external meetings over video conference. We've pretty much tried them all and Zoom has been the best. That said, there are still things to improve, so will be interesting to compare.
projectileboy 10y ago
I'll also +1 - Zoom has consistently excellent video and audio, and is a breeze to use.
psybin 10y ago
Zoom is consistently garbage for us. The latency is high, the audio quality is low, and the apps have a really terrible user experience.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  I wonder where the closest Zoom PoP is to you? I've had the opposite experience, Zoom worked on connections where Hangouts was terrible.
  - psybin 10y ago
    If two participants are in EU, the latency is awful. I don't get the impression they have multiple POPs.

FireBeyond 10y ago

Zoom seems to be a lot better for pricing. At a company of 12 people, our GoToMeeting bill was $15,000/yr. But uhh, call-in rates of 1c/min/participant? That's going to add up. We would regularly have meetings of two hour duration (programming, planning) with up to six-eight attending is a $10 meeting in itself. Chicken feed compared to salaries but I could easily see pricing of up to $1k/mo with this. Shame.

xyzzy123 10y ago
Compare the 1c per minute to the staff cost of meetings and it's not even pocket change. It's like a 1% tax on meetings. To get a $1k meeting bill with $100k fully loaded avg participant cost or about $50/hr (way too low in metros, but let's be conservative), that's 1600+ meeting hours or about $80k/mo in staff costs. (I see you do mention this but I wanted to call it out). I think an interesting way to look at it is, if it can make your meetings one minute shorter than what you do now, you'll actually save.
gedy 10y ago
> At a company of 12 people, our GoToMeeting bill was $15,000/yr. Am curious how? I think it's like max $50 a person/month, and that's only for huge meetings.
- FireBeyond 10y ago
  Actually, I appreciate the heads up... I wonder if we're still on "older" plans that are more expensive (I don't run the billing but I do get to listen to the complaints about the cost). Because yeah, at the current plans we should be seeing a max of $7k/yr.

Twirrim 10y ago

I've seen almost every solution used internally at Amazon to one degree or another. It's really telling that you get a bunch of highly competent technical people in the room and they still end up fighting with the conferencing software and waste a bunch of time in the meeting trying to get everyone connected. I'm really not surprised they built their own in the end. It's a clear pain point for companies. That said, my current employers (not Amazon) have been using Zoom (zoom.us) and it seems to be really quite good. I've had almost no problems with it at all.

ryandrake 10y ago

Most place I've worked, we'd waste anywhere from 5-10 minutes at the beginning of every meeting just trying to get A/V systems and voice conferencing to work. "Anyone there? Hello? Crap, someone needs to dial in as the host. OK Is everyone dialed in? Good. Oh, wait, Roger can't hear us. Roger, dial back in. OK. Hey, whoever is at the cocktail party, can you go on mute?? Thank you. All right. Who's projecting? The projector is VGA, does anyone have a laptop with VGA? How about a dongle? Great, we can see it now. Can everyone who's remote see the screen sharing? No? OK let's restart the screen sharing program. How about now? Shit, we lost Roger again! Why is the screen 640x480? Damnit, can we just use a different laptop? E-mail the presentation to Diane, we can use her laptop. Did Roger dial back in yet??" It's almost universally an awful UX.

bthornbury 10y ago
I'm convinced this exact scenario, bad A/V at the start of a meeting, has cost billions in lost dev time.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  I completely agree. Out of all the places I've worked at and all of the developers I've talked to, not being able to work AV with TVs for presenting or conference calls is the common, almost 100% of the time an issue. One place I worked at spent about $25,000 to get an AV system setup complete with conference calling that was supposed to make it "easy". Every single meeting without fail we'd waste 10 minutes trying to figure it out then have to bring someone from IT support who would then spend 10 minutes themselves fiddling with it.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    Perhaps if expectations were set before rolling out a new system, that IT Support would attend every meeting ten minutes early to get things working, conference system decision-makers would have priorities better aligned with the rest of the organization. Of course you could plan for a "Phase 2" in which mandatory attendance would cease, but that would be based on performance rather than timing.

tlianza 10y ago

I'm not sure where the optimism comes from. I too have been surprised at how mediocre most conferencing software is, and concluded that it's probably harder than it seems. What would great videoconferencing software look like, and what are the odds that this is it?

disiplus 10y ago
realtime protocols depend a lot on where are you and where are the participants, and even if you cover everything else you have random things that you have no influence on. like what route does your traffic go, how is the buffer set up on this route and so on. i had to debug voip and outside of some simple things like not enough resources/bandwidth it can be really frustrating.

greyman 10y ago

We used Outlook communicator and it wasn't that bad. There were some glitches sometimes but overall it was workable.

craigds 10y ago

We've tried loads of them. Skype, hangouts, appear.in, zoom, ... They all sucked with voice and video all cutting out and getting regularly garbled etc. And finally Slack added video, and is amazing. No problems since then, Slack has solved the problem for us.

amelius 10y ago

> I'm really surprised Google didn't go all in with making Hangouts a decent competitor. I have a feeling this will make a lot of money. I guess video conferencing is about to get really easy to implement over WebRTC. So I'm guessing there will be an explosion of competitors soon.

arjie 10y ago

Everyone has tried. If you're in SF and a BART user you will have seen at least three different ones being advertised. I believe the BlueJeans ones are still up. BlueJeans is pretty good.

yalogin 10y ago

I don't know Google even today comes across as a company that does technology very well but not solutions. It's a shame that no startup took this on till now.

karmajunkie 10y ago

We use hangouts at a client of mine and it works great—what else would you like to see out of it, out of curiousity?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

akerro 10y ago

>Enterprise conferencing software is so bad and so expensive I'm astonished it took this long for a decent competitor to come in Have you tried http://www.justchimein.com/chime-in.html http://www.justchimein.com/chime-in.html ?

emdowling 10y ago

Google did and I think they do make a lot of money from it. They've just chosen to target the business sector. We have the Asus Chromebox for Large Meeting Rooms[0] in every meeting room here and it works flawlessly 99% of the time. I'm amazed how well it works. Automatically integrated with Google Calendar, so walking into a meeting room has the upcoming meetings for that room displayed on the screen. Single tap and away you go. If you need to join another meeting, simply type in the name using the remote. So easy.

emdowling 10y ago

23443463453 10y ago

They are and were in the space with their Chromebox product and service. Unfortunately, kid of like how Google does, it seems they just kid of plateaued once they created it. Their whole Google Apps for enterprise suite is stale as can be. It kind of frustrates me to no end that, e.g., you can't set "smart filters" in gmail that can clean out noise emails (newsletters, notifications, etc.) based on age or quantity. All gmail filters can only be applied to incoming emails.

technofiend 10y ago

>Enterprise conferencing software Have you tried Cisco's offerings? Maybe I just have a really excellent IT department, but whether joining audio only, from a tablet, desk, desk phone or telepresence room it just works. It's impressive as hell.

Diederich 10y ago

I've used Google Hangouts at my last two companies. Overall, it worked pretty well.

gomox 10y ago

Best thing about Hangouts: it was rock solid and bulletproof at first, despite the clunky UI (and weird plugin system). Somewhere along the road, they removed all the crap UI, and in the process: - it became more unreliable (F5 to get sound working) - it introduced crazy bugs (says your muted, but not really!) - it remained software accelerated on mac so it kills the batt