This is not negative in itself. I don't like that it's part of a bigger company because of privacy and focus from intelligence agencies and hackers, but that's just me. I could imagine someone else thinking it's positive because it shows professionalism.
Why is this a negative point for you? And why would something like Hangouts be better, or what would you suggest if you wanted to eliminate big companies' products?
And even if it were so: the product as it is today was mostly developed while it wasn't even under Microsoft.
Besides, even if everyone at Microsoft has changed attitude that's no excuse. Microsoft has had five years since the acquisition of Skype in 2011. Isn't it, by now, time to stop blaming their predecessors and own up to the current state of affairs?
It also freezes, a LOT. We finally forced our manager to let us use Slack and we love it.
That said, it's still far inferior to any commercial videoconferencing product I've ever seen. Literally, the only advantages are cost & integration with other Google services (which is only an advantage if you're already a Google Apps customer).
* No desktop client
* Connected to your google account meaning I'll need to juggle several google accounts to keep my personal and business chats separate
Just the fact it doesn't have a native desktop client makes it unusable. I know there are workarounds I can use like nativefier but it's still not as smooth as a desktop app.
Running in the browser:
- Gets grouped with my other browser windows in my taskbar, making it hard to find
- Notifications might or might not work, depending on firefox's whims
- If for any reason firefox crashes all your communication crashes with it
- Susceptible to every single browser bug that allows silent loading of extensions that scrape all your data
Seeing the level of shitty ported Linux programs I see this as a pro.
> Connected to your google account meaning I'll need to juggle several google accounts to keep my personal and business chats separate
This would be easier with Skype if you have 2 Skype accounts?
When using Chrome:
> - Gets grouped with my other browser windows in my taskbar, making it hard to find
Menu -> More tools -> Add to desktop
> Seeing the level of shitty ported Linux programs I see this as a pro.
Well, google manages to make a shitty Linux port of the plugin, so they've got their bases covered there.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=363358
to some extent. depending on how you start a hangouts, you have no idea what account it's going to start under. The number of times I've gotten on a work call on my personal account because google felt it should use that one
These problems are largely resolved by using chrome. Pop out any tab into its own window, notifications will work reliably, the security model is far stronger, and most important of all: when one tab crashes, it's an independent process so it can't take any other tab with it.
I use this every day without seeing any of these issues.
* A memory hog
* A bandwidth hog (its really inefficient about network usage, and uses a lot of bandwidth even when idle)
* Has much lower call quality (a consequence of the above), just try having a call in Hangouts or Skype and notice that Hangouts has much lower audio lag, doesn't kick out people constantly even when screen sharing, etc
* Is now owned by Microsoft
* Never cared about privacy or security (not that Hangouts does, but Skype just sets a very very low precedent)
* Group Messaging is a mess
* Individual Messaging is a mess
The list goes on and on. Its 2016, and "Let's Skype" is not cool anymore. There are much better options available.