Ask HN: How Did Zoom Beat Skype and Google Hangouts? - highfrequency
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cameron_b
Having recently completed an extensive comparison (last year) of Zoom, Cisco
Webex (the conjoined legacy H323 and Webex tech), Hangouts, Starleaf,
Highfive, and Skype - Teams, I can tell you that usability is high on the
list.

For feature coverage, Zoom has basically every box checked apart from the
turn-key hardware and hardware management that are offered by Cisco, Starleaf
and Highfive. Highfive is probably the dead easiest to use, but only as long
as everyone you're calling is using it. It wasn't interoperable with anything
( they were working on H323 inbound call last year ), and that's a bigger
downside than most would consider at first, especially when it basically means
that the big board room full of people trying to call you is forced to us
laptop microphone and a browser experience.

Cisco's hardware is legendary, and as long as you're only calling room to room
it's phenomenal, and phenomenally expensive. And since no one is in those
conference rooms these days, you're left with the laptop experience, which is
abysmal when you can see, and more often than I wanted to admit, it just plain
didn't work. I went in to our pilot thinking Cisco would take it, and I was
blown away by how bad the remote user experience was or even in the office on
great wifi. The app sucked. But the socks are great. Wearing them right now
actually.

Zoom's biggest downfall is that they are a SaaS company. Relative to a lot of
other things, that's not bad but let me explain. They don't make microphones,
they don't make touch interfaces, they don't make speakers and they don't make
displays. Now you say, of course, let the folks who are good at that do those
things. But in the demonstration Zoom setup you have a who-knows-what Dell or
Lenovo or Mac mini, a TV, a webcam, probably an expensive one like a Huddly IQ
or a Logitech Meetup, and two iPads. iPads drop off wifi all the time and when
they're run all the time they do strange things. Also, if you're at all
concerned about the implications of having an iPad on your network, or walking
out the door, you've got to have some MDM like Jamf. I can't tell you how many
times I have been on a call with someone who supports Zoom and I hear that
they just use it as a no-user workstation, flipping to other applications or
loading other VC software on the Zoom system to test. So what you say? How
good is your network segmentation now? You've got iPads and the zoom machine
on the network together, because they have to talk. What else can that
computer reach if you exit the application? food for thought.

Hangouts suffers the same "don't make the hardware so it runs on everything"
but then it also suffers from the "terrible video experience" and "will Google
quit this too?" problems. And it's blasted expensive now that it's only
Enterprise. Zoom still has the freemium hooks and they're making hay.

Skype is turning into Teams which may eventually eat everyone's lunch but it
isn't there yet. But it's coming.

Starleaf was our incumbent and suffered from the same thing as Cisco, Great
conference room experience, but laptop experience was poor. They've made huge
strides and I think more folks should know about them.

Zoom just worked and your mom could already use it out of the box. UX wins.
You just have to make it secure.

it's like some shared-responsibility model or something. :)

~~~
highfrequency
This is very informative, thanks for posting!

Can you elaborate on the "terrible video experience" of Google Hangouts? As a
non power-user of video chat, it works fine for me. And the integration with
Google calendar is very convenient for setting up video meetings.

Also, I didn't realize that Zoom is interoperable. You mean I can use Zoom to
video chat with someone who just has Skype?

~~~
cameron_b
Yea, you can:

[https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/208219346-Skype-
fo...](https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/208219346-Skype-for-Business-
Lync-Integration)

but I would just use the browser experience there.

Laptop to laptop calls are silly to do cross-platform as almost all can be
done in a browser. The big thing with interoperability is when you've got a
whole room full of people, microphones and multiple displays to make
everything looks and sound good on both sides and then you can't call the
other party for whatever reason.

H.323 is the baseline for almost all video calls. Almost anything can use it.
It relies on SIP for call handling, so it's a pretty old-school but reliable
thing. Lots of new cool things don't think about interoperability but in order
to scale up it does matter.

Hangouts' video compression leaves a lot to be desired. If you do a side-by-
side comparison of how it handles packet loss or latency next to Zoom, Zoom
just looks better and keeps up better.

It is one of those little things that will add up when you're banging you head
trying to understand what someone is saying or pointing at or sharing to you
on call after call.

------
ignorantguy
I think it just works. Really simple to use.

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BossingAround
Beats me. Marketing? Price?

