5 ms·

As much as I don't like consolidation of tech, I've had really good experiences with Google Meet. No scummy practices like forcing users to pretend that the app

by Twixes 6y ago

As much as I don't like consolidation of tech, I've had really good experiences with Google Meet. No scummy practices like forcing users to pretend that the app installer doesn't download just to connect from the browser either. What are Zoom's advantages?

jedberg 6y ago
The main reason I liked Zoom was because it was so easy to install. I've had zooms with non-technical people over 70, and not one of them needed help installing it. The same cannot be said of Google. Heck, as a technical person I have trouble getting Google Meet to work consistently. That was Zoom's main advantage -- their ease of setup and use, and "it just works". We now know that part of the reason that is the case is because they do some very unorthodox things that are security nightmares. Security and ease of use are always a tradeoff. Zoom has always been on the very far end towards ease of use and away from security.
- strogonoff 6y ago
  > Security and ease of use are always a tradeoff. Security and ease of use are not by default mutually exclusive. Depending on circumstances satisfying both may be a challenge, but it’s not a blanket impossibility and we could probably hold certain companies up to a standard that corresponds to their multi-billion valuations. A virtual “slider” on which you can only dial up security by hurting usability is only a useful map, not the territory.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    > It’s worth keeping in mind that even though security and ease of use tend to inversely correlate with each other, they are not by default mutually exclusive. I actually disagree with you. I think security and ease of use are mutually exclusive. I can't think of a single counterexample where security did not have an effect on usability. Now to be clear, I absolutely believe we should have a lot more security than we do, and we should be giving up usability to do it. But I think that it is necessary to give up usability.
    - strogonoff 6y ago
      I believe that the degree to which security negatively affects usability is variable, and in some cases could be negligible, depending on engineering and product teams’ competence. (Edit: remove many words)
    - saalweachter 6y ago
      I think security and usability are tradeoffs ... past a certain point. I have a hard time believing most products couldn't improve both substantially before needing to start considering the trade-offs.
    - ianstormtaylor 6y ago
      It's not hard to think of examples... 1. HTTPS everywhere has zero impact on the usability of a website, but makes visiting those sites much more secure. 2. Apple's App Store model for installing applications improves security and is also easier to use for the average user. 3. 1Password with Touch/Face ID can actually be easier these days than entering emails and passwords manually. 4. And more… Security doesn't always have an immediate effect on usability, and even when it does it isn't always negative.
      - jedberg 6y ago
        > 1. HTTPS everywhere has zero impact on the usability of a website, but makes visiting those sites much more secure. You have to install a plugin on every browser and device. That's not user friendly. Also some sites break and you have to understand why. > 2. Apple's App Store model for installing applications improves security and is also easier to use for the average user. You have to have an account on the app store. You can't log into the same account on more than five machines. You have to put your password in every time you install an app. That's all a lot harder than clicking on a link in an email. > 3. 1Password with Touch/Face ID can actually be easier these days than entering emails and passwords manually. You have to install 1password on all your devices. You have to mange your passwords with 1password. I'm an expert and even I have a hard time getting it to catch every update and every password field. 1password is a usability nightmare. Having the same password everywhere is a lot easier (and obviously less secure). You're looking at one aspect after the initial setup and ignoring maintenance.
  - deleted 6y ago
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- ultrabenos 6y ago
  I went around the office helping colleagues setup Zoom around mid-March before the UK went into "lockdown" and told people to work from home if at all possible, because it was obviously going to happen soon and the company wanted at least a stop-gap solution in place while everyone was still in the building with easy access to our IT team. In my experience setting up accounts and installing the Windows software for 15+ people in one afternoon, I cannot believe what you're saying. Unless Zoom has gotten way easier to setup and use since March, it is a nightmare. It's been a while, but I'm fairly sure was basically like this: 1) Enter email into website 2) Click link in email 3) Enter name and password 4) Invite others or skip 5) Click to start a meeting, which actually starts a download 6) Install software, meeting starts automatically 7) End meeting 8) Manually log in to Windows client despite it starting a meeting on your account immediately after installation That is not easy or accessible to non-technical people at all, especially with how they hid certain buttons as really pale grey during the signup process. It was also a nightmare trying to oversee this process, and repeating it on each machine for those who got lost trying to do it themselves took ages due to waiting for emails, people deleting the email thinking it was spam, downloads not starting due to requests timing out, etc. Then, a few weeks after we all started working from home, Zoom removed the automatic Company Contacts list and suddenly we could only contact colleagues through existing group chats. No warning, no explanation, not even a reference in the changelog or help pages on their website - rather, the help guides still said the feature was available and explained how to toggle it on or off. Everyone spent that morning adding all their colleagues as personal contacts by manually entering emails one-by-one and then accepting all the invites they received in return. Zoom is useful once you get it working, but it is definitely not easy to get it working for non-technical people.
- agakshat 6y ago
  Am I the only one who finds Zoom more difficult to use than Google Meet? I am not a regular user of Zoom, and do not want to install the app on my computer, but Zoom apparently requires the meeting organizer to go into their settings and enable a "Join from your browser" link for participants [0]. This is quite user unfriendly, and if I have to watch some seminar on Zoom I can't be asking the organizer to enable this option. Note this is coming from someone who uses Firefox and Duck Duck Go to resist Google's monopoly (i.e., I'm not a Google fanboy.) [0]: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115005666383 https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115005666383
  - Dayshine 6y ago
    Yes, if you refuse to use the features they have that make it easy to just use, it isn't easy to just use. Why is that a surprise?
  - ajmurmann 6y ago
    I think you are right that Google Meet in general is easier to use. However, I think that's at least in part because Zoom is so full of options. I mostly realize this when playing games via Zoom with friends. "your laptop that has no video on is making it so that we cannot see you iPad's video!" - "just turn on 'hide non-video participants'". "you need to get closer together or move the iPad further away because the edges of your video get cut off" - "Just double click the video and it will stop cropping". "Can you stop sharing your screen? I'd much rather see participants" - "Just click the icon in the top right to swap video and shared screen. You could also turn on dual monitor support".
    - agakshat 6y ago
      Fair point. The ever-present tradeoff between features and simplicity... I guess for my fairly vanilla use case of talking to my friends or colleagues at work, there are just a lot of easier options. I’m glad Zoom is forcing Google Meet to innovate, though.
jmknoll 6y ago
No idea. We're on Meet at my company, and I'm very happy with it. Works well in the browser, connects to Google calendar without any fuss, and I haven't had any issues with dropped calls or low quality.
nabergh 6y ago
Much better video quality in Zoom than Google Meet from my experience with both products.
fossuser 6y ago
I haven't personally used Google Meet, but part of what drew me to Zoom: - General preference for non-ad supported business model. - Google Meet wasn't an option until very recently. - I really dislike hangouts and how it leaks chat all over Gmail (among other things), and this has biased me against their other products. - Similarly, I was a huge fan of Google Voice which was way ahead of its time and which they abandoned for years until many other multi-billion dollar companies rose up and took the space. - I've anecdotally heard Meet had worse video/audio quality from friends. - I tend to try and avoid Google chat products since they're usually a mess and often killed. Of all of these, the first and last are really the only valid reasons. Google Meet does have its own scummy practices though (adding itself to meetings without asking which confuses participants and is extremely annoying, Benedict Evans tweeted/wrote about this). Maybe Jitsi works well enough to actually use? I already have a Matrix server, I could try getting friends to use that instead (realistically probably will be difficult).
- matwood 6y ago
  > I've anecdotally heard Meet had worse video/audio quality from friends. The best part of Zoom taking off is suddenly Meet appears to be getting new features almost daily. It's like a product Google suddenly cares about again. Audio and video quality have also greatly improved. It's really like a completely different product from 6 months ago.
  - disillusioned 6y ago
    I think the pandemic has brought into harsh relief how critical some of those quality of life features were, and advanced their urgency within Google. They're adding so many millions of users per day, and already had a strong initial base product, that building these additional zoom-competitive features is a no-brainer. And Google Meet is able to bring to bear some of their absolutely amazing advances with ML for things like predictive sound for dropped packets and the new denoiser function they've launched, along with live captioning and some other just incredible features. There are a few little things that bug me with Google Meet: their newly introduced grid view doesn't display yourself as one of the tiles, for some reason. I don't want to pay $25/mo/user for an enterprise account _just_ for the video recording feature, which I will have to do come September, if they don't extend the current offer to make that available to all GSuite tiers. And I wish it recorded the transcription. But overall, it's a pretty great product, and its tight integration with Google Calendar and Slack, along with its frankly fantastic meeting room hardware has made it our software of choice for some time now for conferencing. Plus, it's a sunk cost for GSuite users. Aside from a licensing fee for the meeting rooms, I'm not paying an _additional_ per-user monthly fee, which for a small consultancy like mine, matters.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
My company tried to use Google Meet. With a group of around 16 people, Google Meet had all sorts of connection quality issues—people's voices cut out while talking, sounded garbled, etc. A week later, we tried Zoom instead. We could hear everyone clearly. We've used Zoom ever since. I had some say in the decision to continue with Zoom, and I feel kind of bad about choosing it, but it's hard to argue with the results. We had similar issues with Slack video calls (although we still use those for small groups—not my decision!), Microsoft Teams, and a product from LogMeIn called Join.Me. Unlike Zoom but like Google Meet, these products are all based on WebRTC, and I'm starting to conclude that WebRTC is just a crappy technology for large-group video calls. We admittedly haven't tried Jitsi. Perhaps I'm part of the problem, but I don't want to be the one to suggest a random product no one has heard of. Especially when that product is also based on WebRTC.
- gniv 6y ago
  > Google Meet had all sorts of connection quality issues When was this? Google Meet has gotten a lot better in the last few weeks.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    About two months ago, so maybe it would be better now.
  - matwood 6y ago
    I made a note above that Zoom getting popular apparently lit a fire under Meet. It's gone from terrible to pretty good in a very short amount of time.
  - Larrikin 6y ago
    A little bit more than a few weeks ago when lock down was in full effect when everyone realized that products like Skype, line video, and Google meet etc had all had these massive head starts but were left to languish and were all actually awful when it actually matters. The more I learn about zoom as a company the more I can't wait to delete it but all the comparable products have all been terrible in comparison.
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
Doesn't google meet only work in chrome?
peterkos 6y ago
Zoom is SO much more seamless than Meet. Its desktop clients exist, are usable, and don't force you to keep trying Chrome whenever something breaks. (I swear Google never tests their prodcuts on FF/Safari...) Meet also has a very fixed layout. Its mic control bar on the bottom cuts off the names on the bottom row of participants. The UI on "waiting to connect" page is hilarious; it has a line of vertical dots for changing settings, and a line of horizontal dots for monitoring audio. There's a small concept in design called discoverability -- doesn't exist for Google, lol.
ajmurmann 6y ago
Not being bound to the browser can be a huge advantage. I usually use at least two Zoom windows. One with a panel view of all meeting participants and a second with either a shared screen or the speaker view. In some cases I split the chat out as well. I find it super important to not only see what's being shared, but also be able to watch people's reactions. Zoom makes it also easy to see who has noise coming from their microphone, what audio and video up and down bandwidth is looking like. Lots of little things like this that matter if you spend most of your day in remote meetings.
balls187 6y ago
Doesn’t Google censor it’s results in China? Google seems like at best lateral step regarding moral computing.

by Twixes 6y ago

jedberg 6y ago

The main reason I liked Zoom was because it was so easy to install. I've had zooms with non-technical people over 70, and not one of them needed help installing it. The same cannot be said of Google. Heck, as a technical person I have trouble getting Google Meet to work consistently. That was Zoom's main advantage -- their ease of setup and use, and "it just works". We now know that part of the reason that is the case is because they do some very unorthodox things that are security nightmares. Security and ease of use are always a tradeoff. Zoom has always been on the very far end towards ease of use and away from security.

strogonoff 6y ago
> Security and ease of use are always a tradeoff. Security and ease of use are not by default mutually exclusive. Depending on circumstances satisfying both may be a challenge, but it’s not a blanket impossibility and we could probably hold certain companies up to a standard that corresponds to their multi-billion valuations. A virtual “slider” on which you can only dial up security by hurting usability is only a useful map, not the territory.
- jedberg 6y ago
  > It’s worth keeping in mind that even though security and ease of use tend to inversely correlate with each other, they are not by default mutually exclusive. I actually disagree with you. I think security and ease of use are mutually exclusive. I can't think of a single counterexample where security did not have an effect on usability. Now to be clear, I absolutely believe we should have a lot more security than we do, and we should be giving up usability to do it. But I think that it is necessary to give up usability.
  - strogonoff 6y ago
    I believe that the degree to which security negatively affects usability is variable, and in some cases could be negligible, depending on engineering and product teams’ competence. (Edit: remove many words)
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    I think security and usability are tradeoffs ... past a certain point. I have a hard time believing most products couldn't improve both substantially before needing to start considering the trade-offs.
  - ianstormtaylor 6y ago
    It's not hard to think of examples... 1. HTTPS everywhere has zero impact on the usability of a website, but makes visiting those sites much more secure. 2. Apple's App Store model for installing applications improves security and is also easier to use for the average user. 3. 1Password with Touch/Face ID can actually be easier these days than entering emails and passwords manually. 4. And more… Security doesn't always have an immediate effect on usability, and even when it does it isn't always negative.
    - jedberg 6y ago
      > 1. HTTPS everywhere has zero impact on the usability of a website, but makes visiting those sites much more secure. You have to install a plugin on every browser and device. That's not user friendly. Also some sites break and you have to understand why. > 2. Apple's App Store model for installing applications improves security and is also easier to use for the average user. You have to have an account on the app store. You can't log into the same account on more than five machines. You have to put your password in every time you install an app. That's all a lot harder than clicking on a link in an email. > 3. 1Password with Touch/Face ID can actually be easier these days than entering emails and passwords manually. You have to install 1password on all your devices. You have to mange your passwords with 1password. I'm an expert and even I have a hard time getting it to catch every update and every password field. 1password is a usability nightmare. Having the same password everywhere is a lot easier (and obviously less secure). You're looking at one aspect after the initial setup and ignoring maintenance.
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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ultrabenos 6y ago
I went around the office helping colleagues setup Zoom around mid-March before the UK went into "lockdown" and told people to work from home if at all possible, because it was obviously going to happen soon and the company wanted at least a stop-gap solution in place while everyone was still in the building with easy access to our IT team. In my experience setting up accounts and installing the Windows software for 15+ people in one afternoon, I cannot believe what you're saying. Unless Zoom has gotten way easier to setup and use since March, it is a nightmare. It's been a while, but I'm fairly sure was basically like this: 1) Enter email into website 2) Click link in email 3) Enter name and password 4) Invite others or skip 5) Click to start a meeting, which actually starts a download 6) Install software, meeting starts automatically 7) End meeting 8) Manually log in to Windows client despite it starting a meeting on your account immediately after installation That is not easy or accessible to non-technical people at all, especially with how they hid certain buttons as really pale grey during the signup process. It was also a nightmare trying to oversee this process, and repeating it on each machine for those who got lost trying to do it themselves took ages due to waiting for emails, people deleting the email thinking it was spam, downloads not starting due to requests timing out, etc. Then, a few weeks after we all started working from home, Zoom removed the automatic Company Contacts list and suddenly we could only contact colleagues through existing group chats. No warning, no explanation, not even a reference in the changelog or help pages on their website - rather, the help guides still said the feature was available and explained how to toggle it on or off. Everyone spent that morning adding all their colleagues as personal contacts by manually entering emails one-by-one and then accepting all the invites they received in return. Zoom is useful once you get it working, but it is definitely not easy to get it working for non-technical people.
agakshat 6y ago
Am I the only one who finds Zoom more difficult to use than Google Meet? I am not a regular user of Zoom, and do not want to install the app on my computer, but Zoom apparently requires the meeting organizer to go into their settings and enable a "Join from your browser" link for participants [0]. This is quite user unfriendly, and if I have to watch some seminar on Zoom I can't be asking the organizer to enable this option. Note this is coming from someone who uses Firefox and Duck Duck Go to resist Google's monopoly (i.e., I'm not a Google fanboy.) [0]: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115005666383 https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115005666383
- Dayshine 6y ago
  Yes, if you refuse to use the features they have that make it easy to just use, it isn't easy to just use. Why is that a surprise?
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  I think you are right that Google Meet in general is easier to use. However, I think that's at least in part because Zoom is so full of options. I mostly realize this when playing games via Zoom with friends. "your laptop that has no video on is making it so that we cannot see you iPad's video!" - "just turn on 'hide non-video participants'". "you need to get closer together or move the iPad further away because the edges of your video get cut off" - "Just double click the video and it will stop cropping". "Can you stop sharing your screen? I'd much rather see participants" - "Just click the icon in the top right to swap video and shared screen. You could also turn on dual monitor support".
  - agakshat 6y ago
    Fair point. The ever-present tradeoff between features and simplicity... I guess for my fairly vanilla use case of talking to my friends or colleagues at work, there are just a lot of easier options. I’m glad Zoom is forcing Google Meet to innovate, though.

jmknoll 6y ago

No idea. We're on Meet at my company, and I'm very happy with it. Works well in the browser, connects to Google calendar without any fuss, and I haven't had any issues with dropped calls or low quality.

nabergh 6y ago

Much better video quality in Zoom than Google Meet from my experience with both products.

fossuser 6y ago

I haven't personally used Google Meet, but part of what drew me to Zoom: - General preference for non-ad supported business model. - Google Meet wasn't an option until very recently. - I really dislike hangouts and how it leaks chat all over Gmail (among other things), and this has biased me against their other products. - Similarly, I was a huge fan of Google Voice which was way ahead of its time and which they abandoned for years until many other multi-billion dollar companies rose up and took the space. - I've anecdotally heard Meet had worse video/audio quality from friends. - I tend to try and avoid Google chat products since they're usually a mess and often killed. Of all of these, the first and last are really the only valid reasons. Google Meet does have its own scummy practices though (adding itself to meetings without asking which confuses participants and is extremely annoying, Benedict Evans tweeted/wrote about this). Maybe Jitsi works well enough to actually use? I already have a Matrix server, I could try getting friends to use that instead (realistically probably will be difficult).

matwood 6y ago
> I've anecdotally heard Meet had worse video/audio quality from friends. The best part of Zoom taking off is suddenly Meet appears to be getting new features almost daily. It's like a product Google suddenly cares about again. Audio and video quality have also greatly improved. It's really like a completely different product from 6 months ago.
- disillusioned 6y ago
  I think the pandemic has brought into harsh relief how critical some of those quality of life features were, and advanced their urgency within Google. They're adding so many millions of users per day, and already had a strong initial base product, that building these additional zoom-competitive features is a no-brainer. And Google Meet is able to bring to bear some of their absolutely amazing advances with ML for things like predictive sound for dropped packets and the new denoiser function they've launched, along with live captioning and some other just incredible features. There are a few little things that bug me with Google Meet: their newly introduced grid view doesn't display yourself as one of the tiles, for some reason. I don't want to pay $25/mo/user for an enterprise account _just_ for the video recording feature, which I will have to do come September, if they don't extend the current offer to make that available to all GSuite tiers. And I wish it recorded the transcription. But overall, it's a pretty great product, and its tight integration with Google Calendar and Slack, along with its frankly fantastic meeting room hardware has made it our software of choice for some time now for conferencing. Plus, it's a sunk cost for GSuite users. Aside from a licensing fee for the meeting rooms, I'm not paying an _additional_ per-user monthly fee, which for a small consultancy like mine, matters.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

My company tried to use Google Meet. With a group of around 16 people, Google Meet had all sorts of connection quality issues—people's voices cut out while talking, sounded garbled, etc. A week later, we tried Zoom instead. We could hear everyone clearly. We've used Zoom ever since. I had some say in the decision to continue with Zoom, and I feel kind of bad about choosing it, but it's hard to argue with the results. We had similar issues with Slack video calls (although we still use those for small groups—not my decision!), Microsoft Teams, and a product from LogMeIn called Join.Me. Unlike Zoom but like Google Meet, these products are all based on WebRTC, and I'm starting to conclude that WebRTC is just a crappy technology for large-group video calls. We admittedly haven't tried Jitsi. Perhaps I'm part of the problem, but I don't want to be the one to suggest a random product no one has heard of. Especially when that product is also based on WebRTC.

gniv 6y ago
> Google Meet had all sorts of connection quality issues When was this? Google Meet has gotten a lot better in the last few weeks.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  About two months ago, so maybe it would be better now.
- matwood 6y ago
  I made a note above that Zoom getting popular apparently lit a fire under Meet. It's gone from terrible to pretty good in a very short amount of time.
- Larrikin 6y ago
  A little bit more than a few weeks ago when lock down was in full effect when everyone realized that products like Skype, line video, and Google meet etc had all had these massive head starts but were left to languish and were all actually awful when it actually matters. The more I learn about zoom as a company the more I can't wait to delete it but all the comparable products have all been terrible in comparison.

Polylactic_acid 6y ago

Doesn't google meet only work in chrome?

peterkos 6y ago

Zoom is SO much more seamless than Meet. Its desktop clients exist, are usable, and don't force you to keep trying Chrome whenever something breaks. (I swear Google never tests their prodcuts on FF/Safari...) Meet also has a very fixed layout. Its mic control bar on the bottom cuts off the names on the bottom row of participants. The UI on "waiting to connect" page is hilarious; it has a line of vertical dots for changing settings, and a line of horizontal dots for monitoring audio. There's a small concept in design called discoverability -- doesn't exist for Google, lol.

ajmurmann 6y ago

Not being bound to the browser can be a huge advantage. I usually use at least two Zoom windows. One with a panel view of all meeting participants and a second with either a shared screen or the speaker view. In some cases I split the chat out as well. I find it super important to not only see what's being shared, but also be able to watch people's reactions. Zoom makes it also easy to see who has noise coming from their microphone, what audio and video up and down bandwidth is looking like. Lots of little things like this that matter if you spend most of your day in remote meetings.

balls187 6y ago

Doesn’t Google censor it’s results in China? Google seems like at best lateral step regarding moral computing.