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Network effect. All my friends and family use Skype and Facebook. It's difficult to avoid using them when people have picked them as their sole method of commun
by ancarda 13y ago
Network effect. All my friends and family use Skype and Facebook. It's difficult to avoid using them when people have picked them as their sole method of communication.
- Groxx 13y agoVery much so. I use it at work because we use it for interviews, since most people have it, and their voice and screen-share are more reliable (on nearly every system) than alternatives (which people never have installed anyway). We universally hate it. We haven't found anything better :(
- code_duck 13y agoGoogle Voice/Talk/Hangouts does about the same stuff and has similar market penetration, as far as people's familiarity with the company and likeliness that they already have an account.
- Groxx 13y agoWhich is why we've been testing Hangouts for such things, yeah :) I have hopes. It's pretty nice for some things. That said, it isn't there yet. It has the ability to share windows (awesome!), but there's a persistent watermark that's annoying and covers stuff up. Quality is often worse than Skype, which means waiting a few seconds while it clears up the text. It has crashed and/or disconnected more often (never thought I'd say that, it's kind of hard to beat Skype here, but it has). Acceptably stable still, but it's still an annoyance. For communication purposes, it doesn't have real persistent chatrooms, so we lose history if someone doesn't check in for a day or so. Same with searching the history. -- All of which means we still have to resort to Skype for some things, at which point the annoyance of having multiple simultaneous communication systems outweighs our annoyance with Skype.