I'm the CEO of a small remote-working startup with 5 employees. I pay $20/mo for Skype since some of people I meet with only use that and I need the group screen sharing feature. Whenever I have a Skype meeting, I'm nervous, because 50% of the time video or screen sharing won't work. Once I get them to switch to Hangouts there's no problems, ever.
Are you telling me that you experience the opposite? If so, that's very odd.
We've been using hangouts more or less exclusively for at least a year. Hangouts are very stable. When doing training we have hangout sessions that last for two days (minus the nights of course).
The problem with hangouts are with access control. Most people are not signed in with an ID that matches their email address and I still don't know how to schedule a hangout that is protected only by it's URL.
That will redirect you to a new hangout URL, and (in my experience) you can just copy/paste the new URL to other folks. To use it, they'll need to be logged into a G+ account, but it doesn't matter which one.
Oh upvote the shit out of this! The only hassle we've had with Hangouts is how to start one by yourself and then get a link that's easily pastable into IM so everyone else can join, and this works like a charm.
We use Skype chat as a daily tool to keep the team (a few remote) up-to-date. We have daily standup using a proper mic so the remotes can hear properly.
I find the screen sharing feature in Skype to be poor quality. We tend to use Skype for calls, and then join.me for screen sharing.
We sometimes have call quality problems on Skype too. We also switch to hangouts for this reason, and we are often surprised how good the call quality, video quality and screen share quality is on hangouts.
Only problem is that nobody can figure out how to login or start a hangout. The interface is damn awful. They need a simple app like Skype's that installs like Chrome does, and give me history for gods sake. How hard is that to deliver?
One of the reasons I shy away from hangouts, is that I use Skype to backfill my timesheet. I can see exactly what calls, video calls, chats I made going back to 2006 on Skype's history. Admittedly so can the NSA, but still, the feature is awesome from a work perspective.
I feel you.
I used to use skype for communication with my family, but grew tired of it not working properly.
My parents never were able to use properly Hangout because it is too counter-intuitive for them (log on gmail - oops forgot my password, find the chat bottom left window, "Why do you make me go to my emails to chat with you, son?").
Too bad because the few times I was able to connect with them, it was such a better experience than Skype.
I bought an iPad to my mom for Christmas and facetime with them now. It's the best I've found - even easier for them to use than Skype. They call me, I call them, there no confusion anymore.
No idea about the group chat, but I will agree on Skype working really badly (despite their 10+ years of experience) compared to newer solutions as hangout and facetime.
I've never really had a good G+ Hangout video call. The video from others is always so terrible. I used Skype Video for years, to remote parts of the world even, and had few problems.
I prefer Skype since although it has always been a huge CPU hog, its UI is perfect for beginners (i.e. family) and in the decade I've used it, I've never once been cross-sold some pointless feature the parent company are currently trying to promote.
Note Hangouts itself once was Gtalk, which I was a user of, prior to the first cattle herding on to Google+. Now Gundotra is out the door, there is no telling into which silo existing G+ users will be cattle-herded next. Hangouts might be technically superior (although I personally think Skype's rate-adaptive video is second to none), but the treatment of users by its parent company, and their endless thirst for personal data keeps me far away.
Skype just works, just like it has for the past decade, and just like I expect it will continue to in the coming years. I'd place a small wager on Hangouts being long dead, or at the very least rebranded before then
Really good point on Skype being friendly to beginners. I never realized it but my parents get really uncomfortable when I try to walk them over how to set up Google Hangout, and most of the time the conversation just continues on Skype and we drop the experiment. I mean for them its a hassle to install all those plugins and then invite and open emails and confirm and whatnot.
The Android experience is truly far superior to the web interface. My parents just hit the video camera button in the chat app and call me or my younger brother.
I'm a professional programmer that went to engineering school and I can't be fussed to start up hangouts with anyone. It seems like it takes a full 30 minutes to get everyone in the same hangout and I always feel like a buffoon for suggesting.
You used to be able to press two buttons and have a hangout up, then copy/paste the URL and send it to someone.
Most elegant video chat product in existence.
Then it got super complicated with circles and adding people via their g+ accounts and people who use 3rd party chat programs and permissions etc etc etc..
As a user of several Google products, the "cattle-herded" metaphor is perfect. Not a week goes by without my needing to counsel a former Picasa users nursing wounds from the great G+ herding of 2013.
Google Hangouts work on PCs, laptops, and phones. When I get a hangout call, it rings on all devices where I'm currently logged into hangouts.
TV is the only place Xbox wins today. Though google does have some TV toys right now (Google TV and Chromecast). They could probably look into adding a webcam to that with hangouts.
I prefer G+, but the onboarding - actually getting disparate folks easily invited and notified has been inscrutably hard. Part of the prob is that I have multiple gmail accts and address books as do the folks I'm inviting, but another prob seems to be the less than ideal invite workflow. When Goog gets calendars, gmail, docs and hangouts well integrated, Skype will have a serious threat on its hands.
My invite workflow is "Skype everybody the G+ URL"... If they could make a better workflow that'd be great. Maybe they could stop tripping over their feet trying to make everything social and just make this workflow make more sense!
Funny, because I dont know anyone who use G+ at all. Except these who was forced to make G+ profile while was registering just for e-mail.
And same time I know hundreds who use skype on daily basic on literally every device they own. Including TV. Only device in my house lacking skype it's refrigerator.
You dont need to use G+ to use Hangouts. If you have a gmail account you're a one step install away from using video chat. Doesn't matter if you have multiple gmail accounts or not, you just need a link, which hangouts gives you in the invite modal.
>> "Heck, even FaceTime's video quality was better."
I've noticed this too. For a while I was on a really poor internet connection and on Skype calls video just didn't work. However FaceTime was practically flawless on the same connection.
Same experience here. Facetime had near-HD quality even when chatting with people overseas on an unstable 1Mbit line. I really want to know what magic Apple used.
I suspect it's some magical data compression technique, because my overseas video calls usually suffer from serious stuttering on Skype, but on Facetime it's smooth as silk.
Either that, or better bandwidth because less people use Facetime.
Better bandwidth is not a function of number of users, but of what you want to spend per user.
I don't have personal experience comparing the qualities of Skype vs FaceTime, but I guess Apple is willing to spend more per user. That makes sense: FaceTime sells hardware, and that brings in money, while Skype seems more like a land grab, especially with this 'group calls are free, too' change. It could also be defensive, with Microsoft thinking they have to offer this to prevent would-be Office 365 users from migrating to Google docs.
Seriously? I live abroad and skyped with my family weekly until we switched to G+ to never go back, the quality of the calls and or video difference is not even funny.
Yeah everyone I know hates switching to G+ for group calls. We have to use Skype to guide people through the G+ interface and get them on a group call.
I too would be interested in knowing where you found that. It has a beautiful interface and solves my #1 annoyance with google hangouts which is: "Where do I go to start one?". Every time I try to use Hangouts I invite a friend but they never get the invite or the other way around and we spend 5min getting it setup when we could have used Skype and had zero issues. Trust me I am all for getting off Skype but hangouts has neither been easy or fast to get going in my experience.
You have always been able to just visit https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/ to directly open a new empty hangout. This is equivalent to clicking "New Video Hangout" in the G+ sidebar. Also, you can give anyone a direct link to any hangout (e.g. via email or text).
That is in theory a great link because I have the problem of trying to figure out how to actually start a hangout all the time with users. I say in theory because, oddly, if I sign in with one G+ account it takes me right into a Hangout after authentication and any other G+ accounts take me to the beautiful landing page which is completely broken (nothing happens after filling in the form).
Every "technical" person. I most times find myself using team-viewer to get G+ to work whenever I have a group chat with my school pals. G+ is great, but unfortunately I have found many non technical people I know have a hard time using it.
