text: Ask HN: How Did Zoom Beat Skype and Google Hangouts? - highfrequency
  ======
  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.
  
  ------
  BossingAround
  Beats me. Marketing? Price?
  
  