I would really like to know what went wrong with Google especially. They've had years to develop Hangouts and Meet, yet it's so, so behind in both performance and quality. Are both of these products just riddled with technical debt to the point that these improvements take significantly longer than normal?
I would venture that the problem with Google's products is that they run in the browser and in spite of all the improvements in browsers these days its just not ready yet when you need the kind of quality and performance that huge meetings demand.
Also and perhaps more importantly, Google's approach is tied into its own ecosystem but anybody can join a Zoom meeting with just a link/code. Google had everything they needed but are too tied into the everything on the browser mindset and their own ecosystem to see they're shooting themselves in the foot before their horse is even out the door. At this point its too late, Zoom's aggressive pre-marketing, simplicity, and ubiquity is a real force now and everyone else is just playing catch up.
> I would venture that the problem with Google's products is that they run in the browser and in spite of all the improvements in browsers these days its just not ready yet when you need the kind of quality and performance that huge meetings demand.
Disclaimer: I have not investigated how Zoom and other video conference apps work, but I do work with real-time video.
I don't see why the browser would be the limiting factor in performance / quality for videoconferencing.
What is the local client doing? Recording video and audio, and playing a real-time video stream. Sure, you want it to be low-latency, which involves its own bag of tricks.
But native-code libraries and/or hardware are doing all the heavy lifting (like H.264 encoding or whatever they use), the browser (and Javascript) is just the UI.
You have much more leeway if you can tune ffmpeg decoding settings manually, skip frames whenever you want, etc than if restricted to what webrtc gives you. Also Zoom is built with Qt which is pretty efficient :-)
I have repeatedly found Meet much higher quality than Zoom - straightforward to launch from the browser with a single click, clearer settings, better video quality, and no scummy installed app practices.
That might be because of my location or some other factor, but I really don't understand why people find Zoom so much better - it doesn't match my experience at all.
