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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 opt

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.
deleted 6y ago
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jaekash 6y ago
> - General preference for non-ad supported business model. I don't see how google meet is ad supported, but even if it was, there are paid options, so you are welcome to pay for it.

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.

deleted 6y ago

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jaekash 6y ago

> - General preference for non-ad supported business model. I don't see how google meet is ad supported, but even if it was, there are paid options, so you are welcome to pay for it.