Most place I've worked, we'd waste anywhere from 5-10 minutes at the beginning of every meeting just trying to get A/V systems and voice conferencing to work.

"Anyone there? Hello? Crap, someone needs to dial in as the host. OK Is everyone dialed in? Good. Oh, wait, Roger can't hear us. Roger, dial back in. OK. Hey, whoever is at the cocktail party, can you go on mute?? Thank you. All right. Who's projecting? The projector is VGA, does anyone have a laptop with VGA? How about a dongle? Great, we can see it now. Can everyone who's remote see the screen sharing? No? OK let's restart the screen sharing program. How about now? Shit, we lost Roger again! Why is the screen 640x480? Damnit, can we just use a different laptop? E-mail the presentation to Diane, we can use her laptop. Did Roger dial back in yet??"

It's almost universally an awful UX.

I worked for over a year writing software for video conferencing systems. It turns out the market has a lot of very strong solutions, but no one is willing to pay for them. The cost of building great video conferencing solutions begins to sky rocket as you reach the higher echelons of quality. The first 75% of good video conferencing is super cheap and easy to make and as you approach the 100% mark things go up exponentially. We found that most people want quality in the 95th percentile but want to pay for the 70th percentile... There will need to be some serious cost reductions, integrations, and improvements on the hardware and video encoding side before enterprise video conferencing meets the quality and price expectations that customers want.

Also important, most video conferencing solutions suffer from the same problems because they all use the same hardware just with a different software layer written on top of it. There are very few providers of video encoding and processing hardware.

So what are the strong solutions? Every high end conference room AV system I've ever seen was total garbage from a UX perspective.

If you are only looking for UX vidyo has a decent product, Microsoft's latest enterprise offering is good, HPs halo now owned by polycom is good, polycom has some cutting edge stuff that is good but very expensive.

But it's important to remember that UX is only about a quarter of the total experience.

Many value UX higher than that, but even for those who don't, 25% is still a whole heck of a lot.

If the UX is so bad that people can't make it work and have to resort to putting someone's laptop at one end of the conference table instead of using the conference room AV, then it doesn't matter how good the other three quarters of your system is.

I simply don't believe this. The cost to develop a system that isn't a horribly complex, unintuitive UX disaster is that much more expensive? We aren't talking about amazing AV quality with lag, we're talking about a system that doesn't take 15 minutes out of a meeting to get working.

There are a lot of reasons for horrible complexity.... 1. There are many ways to roll out a video conferencing system because the hardware is all commodity. Many companies will have their IT department buy all the hardware and try to deploy it using the built in methodologies for connecting conference rooms. This is usually when everyone is given a 16 digit pin number to dial into a room, this causes the dial in nightmares. There are also 3rd parties that will basically sell the same solution as the "custom IT solution" as a service. 2. If you want a decent UI experience you move from snapping commodity hardware together to building a software engineering team, software release pipeline, software updates, and all the stuff that comes along with it. This is usually done by a third party but it still costs more than the commodity solution which it is priced against 3. Once you get a software engineering team involved they have to support the different types of hardware out in production. Most companies have generations of conferencing hardware installed with different configurations throughout the company and do not want to pay for all new hardware. Now your software has to be able to implement screen sharing with 5 different codecs and all those codecs have different bugs and different communication protocols. 4. HP tried to solve this by building their own codecs and forcing all rooms to deploy with the same configurations, but this ended up being the most expensive video conferencing system in the world. It also had the best quality and best reliability.

So yes the cost to building a good ui and less complex system can be way more expensive.

Gimme your specs, I'm curious to know what meeting infrastructure you're using. I can start a vidyo meeting in about 15 seconds.

What you need there then (if you are a Windows shop - unlikely), is Lync or Skype for Business.

Despite it being Microsoft, I've found it to be the most reliable and seamless system for multi-party Audio, Video, and Screen-sharing based meetings - and I've used at some time or another in my career almost all the other big hitters in the corporate virtual-conferencing space.

Combine Lync/SfB with one of those nice multi-camera units[1] that sit in the middle of the meeting table and provide audio tracking of the speaker (the active camera switches to the person speaking) along with always-on 360 degree video as well - and it's the closest you can get to being there.

---

[1] http://www.polycom.co.uk/products-services/products-for-micr...

Our company has used 3 generations of polycom devices and they have all been terrible/unusable. Those units are just an IT nightmare because of how they are set up. The newer ones require two ethernet ports if you want them wired (because reasons?), and then also act as a weird computer joining the meeting. If you are in a room with a device, the room has to be invited and join the meeting, then you have to make sure that polycom device is set up with sound but that everything else in the room is muted or else the electronic Harpies will be unleashed. Then if you want screen sharing and video, since the video is regulated by the polycom but screen is shared on a laptop, you can potentially get the video in video in video recursive fun time which will result in fun buffering.

We have "quick" instructions on how to use these devices and they take up a whole page. Most of the devices are abandoned or just left there gathering dust while we use a simple Jabra speaker puck.

PS - Most of these experiences are with SfB. These devices are somehow worse with Webex.

Barfs.

Sorry, Lync/Skype for Business has been awful for us.

I'll be fair and state that I don't if it is Microsoft's or our tech teams fault.

> What you need there then (if you are a Windows shop - unlikely), is Lync or Skype for Business.

I've used that, and experienced comparable delays of at least 5 minutes of futzing on average to get everything working, with occasional bursts to 10 minutes.

Anecdotal, but our company uses SfB and it has been anything but good. We always have problems in voice calls (which forms the majority of use) - doesn't matter if we're all sitting on the same LAN with wired connections or on very good Internet connections away from the office. The number of disconnects, breaking audio, unable to hear someone, and of course, SfB deciding to crash sometimes after some updates - it's been terrible for people using it. The company has "saved" money by moving to it from using phone lines. Who cares about individual productivity anyway?

Having been on the other side of a Skype for Business installation I can tell you that it is extremely variable and can scale anywhere from a self-contained single server set-up[1] to a multi-region, multi-fail-over-cluster, highly available, extremely complicated set-up[2]. We had a few issues post initial install but spent the time to track them down to the point where our system was reliable and more usable than web ex and it's ilk. This is the crux of Lync, so much depends on your required set up and how well that was done.

[1] - http://bressner.com/ucbox-express/ [2] - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=550989

Well, we're on MS Office 365 and all that it provides, including Skype. I have no idea how things could be so bad even with that (it used to be bad before with an on-premise installation too).

Skype for Business (i.e. rebranded Lync) is complete garbage.

If I could even log in to Skype for Business, that would be great.

Skype for Business is abysmal. Login credential always seem to be a huge problem using the desktop client so we just join using the web client.

Most of my customers are located in a different city than the one I live and work in. You'd think videoconferencing would be perfect for someone like me.

But no, once or twice a month I rent a car and drive ~225km to meet with them personally. I supplement these in-person meetings with phone calls.

I'm not sure I've ever had a videoconference call go perfectly smoothly, and I found that these kinds of calls added all sorts of invisible friction to the customer relationship. My goal as a service provider is to take problems away from my customer, not to add new ones or make them feel technically inept.

My travel days are long and tiring, but most of my customers actually forget that I'm not local, which is exactly how I like it.

This product looks interesting, and purports to solve some of the issues, but color me skeptical.

Do you think a video wall would help? I often wonder if it is the size of the screen that makes people feel 'distant' when using video conferencing.

Super high def full wall screen, so they can see every hair on your head with minimal lag -- I think this would work, the only thing they'd miss was a handshake.

I don't think the friction has anything to do with screen size. It's the never-ending technical issues.

Oops, you're frozen. Dang, we lost the connection. There's a really bad echo, do you hear that? Bob can't connect. Etc.

Besides, I'm not particularly handsome in HD. :-)

Why do members of an online conference need to be seen at all? What is the benefit of adding video instead of just using audio -- y'know, the medium by which actually information is exchanged?

Human beings happen to be tuned for face to face communication. They exchange a relatively low bandwidth but high importance information through facial gestures, eyebrows, eye contact, etcetera. As long as businesses relationships are still happening between such human beings, there will be a value placed on seeing each other's faces.

Yeah, I get that. I'm sure there are benefits for a purely business-oriented meeting where people are guarding their cards and trying to make deals.

But I've had to be on conferences with purely technical topics where people use cameras. There's barely even a reason for the call to begin with when specs and questions can just be sent via e-mail, so why do we need to see each other?

I'm convinced this exact scenario, bad A/V at the start of a meeting, has cost billions in lost dev time.

I completely agree. Out of all the places I've worked at and all of the developers I've talked to, not being able to work AV with TVs for presenting or conference calls is the common, almost 100% of the time an issue.

One place I worked at spent about $25,000 to get an AV system setup complete with conference calling that was supposed to make it "easy". Every single meeting without fail we'd waste 10 minutes trying to figure it out then have to bring someone from IT support who would then spend 10 minutes themselves fiddling with it.

Perhaps if expectations were set before rolling out a new system, that IT Support would attend every meeting ten minutes early to get things working, conference system decision-makers would have priorities better aligned with the rest of the organization. Of course you could plan for a "Phase 2" in which mandatory attendance would cease, but that would be based on performance rather than timing.

> IT Support would attend every meeting ten minutes early to get things working

Why must these things be so complicated that you need IT support for them? The purpose of computers is to automate and make things easier.

That's the point: they shouldn't be. A situation like that would be seen as an intolerable waste in the C-suite (with the exception of their IT support guy). However, if the status quo were for the support to be there every time, that sets up a different conversation in the executive meeting:

CEO: "Why does everything take so long to get done?"

Everyone: "We can only have 15 meetings starting at the same time, and any additional meetings must be delayed 20 minutes, because there are only 15 IT support techs."

CEO: "What?!? Is this something to do with that teleconference project? That was like a year ago!"

CIO: "That's why I've suggested to the stakeholders, most of whom are here in this meeting, that they sign off on moving to Phase 2. That way we'll have more capacity to fix the ongoing issues with desktops and printers..."

Everyone: "Absolutely not! Your techs get there ten minutes ahead of time, and usually they're still struggling to get everything working five minutes after we should have started! The system you bought is crap!"

CIO: "We've always had a great relationship with that vendor, but unfortunately their product has had a few issues..."

CEO: "I know what 'great relationship' means... I don't care if the salesmen for competing products don't have comparable expense accounts, just get something in here that works!"

Well I guess this is what the Microsoft Surface Hub promises to fix. That makes 10(or 20k) per Device please.

Unless your tied to Microsoft Products (including Skype for Business), its not worth buying the Surface Hub.

Care to elaborate? What doesn't work? Can't you use normal Skype?

Its been several months, but I recall it is really tied to Skype for Business (Lync), and having a windows domain. The office that had one of these didn't use skype for business nor had an Windows domain. It can be switched into a dumb display mode though, but performance in that mode is iffy.

why isn't Google Hangouts good enough?

I've done a lot of deals, real high value business, and meeting coordination in them, in a variety of situations and companies.

Hangouts is so strange to me (like many Google products I guess). They got a ton of traction; first release immediately was super solid and then nothing. Nothing has changed in ages. No obvious features get implemented. I would love so much to have s tile view of all participants. Ideally we would get a codec that's actually supported by hardware instead of this battery draining mess. I'd love to have an option for the video not to be cropped. I can't count the confusion that has caused over the years with people in meeting wondering why someone is only showing their forehead out why everybody but them can see multiple people on camera but they only see someone in the center. All the hard work seems to be done, but Google refuses to polish and properly maintain it. It's bizarre.

Google desperately needs an "Executive Vice President of People Actually Using Shit". Someone who's entire job is to go to demos of products that are about to ship and cancel them until they at least work well enough to pass the laugh test.

Nearly everything Google makes is just some version or another of Google Home telling your Android phone not to handle that voice prompt to add a calendar entry (which your phone can do) because Google Home is there, so that Google Home can tell you that Google Home can't add calendar entries yet.

Hey, here's Allo. We think you're going to love it. I mean, it doesn't have SMS support, so no one is actually going to use it, but other than being pointless, ain't it great?

My EVP there would have walked in, saw the first slide about a new messenger, and said, "Let me stop you here. Does it transparently bridge IP chat and SMS into one conversation like iMessage? No? OK, I'm going to lunch. I'm sure your stickers are cool and all, but pass."

Why all the hate for Hangouts? I have used it for five years to build and run my company. There is never an issue with Hangouts unless someone in the meeting has a hardware problem (meanwhile everyone else can handle the meeting). It's fast and easy for anyone to use screenshots or video. If you use YouTube Live Events, you can even have a company meeting with every person joining. We have done these once a week for years for fifteen minutes prior to lunch.

Hangouts has been amazing for us.

Hangouts was (is?) pretty good. But it hasn't been immune to Google's inability to figure out how to make a thing people want.

Initially it was IP only. Then it added SMS support. Then it added merged conversations between SMS and IP. Then it unmerged those conversations. All the while only really working well on the desktop inside a weird Chrome extension that burned through battery like kindling because there was no hardware support for encoding and decoding the video.

I still use it on my phone, but again, the only actual feature anyone really wants from a text/chat/IM program is the one that enables "I just want to send a message to Alice. You figure out how to get it to her appropriately" -- a.k.a. iMessage. If you put stickers and crap in there, sure, people will use them I guess, but the one absolute core feature anyone should expect for at least five years now is still the one Google can't figure out how to do.

And they were actually close with Hangouts at one point. Close enough, in my opinion. It lacked the automatic routing of iMessage, but just showing any message I've received from my wife in one conversation and giving me the ability to toggle how I send a reply right there in the conversation view was fine.

I think Hangouts is absolutely a viable product as it is. It just seems like it got released and then everyone moved on instead of making it better.

At one time this was a function of how Google did promotions/pay raises. I'm not sure if Hangouts got caught in that catch 22 or not but it did kill a lot of decent projects.

Had that team remained relevant they could have conceivably done a "Chromebox" Hub like the Surface Hub and given Microsoft some competition in that space.

EDIT: Ok so as is pointed out there is a chromebox for meetings. Pretty nice. Seems to be out of the Enterprise group though, is that still part of Google or is it an 'Other Bet' now?

It's out of Google "other". Accounted along with Cloud all under Diane Greene.

Also, modern GVC is fucking amazing.

We had it at my old company and it was garbage. Super frustrating to join meetings (type your automatically generated, super long meeting name on a tiny keyboard), random crashes freezes and relatively poor video quality. Another super annoying thing was screensharing had an extremely low bitrate. It was so bad that it was pretty pretty useless to demo any nice UI features or animations. The framerate was 2-5 fps.

Completely opposite experience. Where Skype and Gotomeeting would lag, Hangouts was 99% smooth. Perhaps you've got terrible firewall?

The only problem I used to have is audio would die whenever I mess with browser plugins (disabling that WebRTC feature that leaks your internal IP for privacy, and some other Googlyeish feature).

We use Hangouts pretty extensively (2300 employees) but for anything involving more than 4 people we've switched to Zoom; all of the OP's problems creep up quickly and intermittently in Hangouts.

Also we keep WebEx around for screen control, it seems still best bang/buck for that.

we use it at work. it hooks into meeting rooms' calendars and you just have to use the chromebox remote to select the right hangout in the agenda. no typing involved (unless you were doing an ad-hoc meeting, then you'd just type one of our names as the hangout name). It works quite well.

Yeah we have the same experience, I'm surprised hangouts works so badly for others. As long as you invite the chromeboxes to the same meetings as everyone else, it's super simple to operate and for everyone to join.

Does it work with non-google Calendars?

Yes. We use it with clients frequently.

Most everything you're describing is a part of the new beta hangouts.

If you're a part of a large Google Cloud account, have your IT person contact your gCloud account manager and get on the beta. Actually, if you're a part of a large account and your IT team is risk tolerant.

You're right in that 99% of them are complete garbage. However I was pleasantly surprised when my company switched to Zoom[1]. A company I had never heard of before. In terms of call quality I've never experienced anything better. Beyond that their mobile experience is almost better in terms of raw features than their desktop app (which is still very good in its own right).

1.) https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zoom-video-communica...

Zoom is consistently garbage for us. The latency is high, the audio quality is low, and the apps have a really terrible user experience.

I wonder where the closest Zoom PoP is to you? I've had the opposite experience, Zoom worked on connections where Hangouts was terrible.

If two participants are in EU, the latency is awful. I don't get the impression they have multiple POPs.

I'm based in the EU (until Brexit anyway) and often do calls with mainland Europe. Never had that problem. Seen a high CPU warning a couple of times but it goes away. Overall I'm a fan. I have friends who use it for virtual conferences even.

Do you have people using the POTS gateways?

I use the free version out of the box to onboard new people (mostly independent coaches/consultants from around the world) as partners - see https://www.agendashift.com/partners to get a feel of geographic coverage

We use uberconference (nothing to do with Uber!) in North America and Europe (multiple countries) and it works like a charm.

I guess like every option mentioned here they all suck for someone. We have used Uberconference and the audio quality is terrible. And it's not uniformly terrible either which is even more frustrating. Some of the attendees won't be able to understand some people and other attendees everything sounds fine (although it always sounds like a poor quality cellphone conversation).

With Google Hangouts we have poor quality audio as well and at least once per day we have someone that their audio won't come thorough unless they restart their Mac.

I'm secretary for an org. We're trying to use uberconference for our executive board meetings. I like that remotes can call into conference bridge via phone.

I bought a SABRA bluetooth thingie for the room. Seems to work well.

Our results are mixed. We test out the conf room before the meeting starts. Good to go. Then weird stuff happens. People being muted. Their icon shows them talking, but no sound. People being dropped.

I don't mind the unreliability so much. 7 laws of networking and so forth.

I frikkin hate that I don't know what's broken, so can't hope to fix it. Especially DURING the frikkin meeting.

I've used Uberconference (pro) over fiber for a couple of years, and it's been rock solid. In cases where one caller is bad, the web interface will show you who is killing the call quality and lets you mute them.

Except in rare cases, I find the problems you're describing are usually a problem with the end-user, their equipment, or their network. Cheap phones, bad cell connection, bad voip, etc. An unmuted speakerphone with a noisy background can bring most calls to their knees.

We too have used Uberconference, I forget why we ditched that as well, might have been down to the cost of the thing. I actually quite liked it, the web application was solid and it encourages ad-hoc meetings.

We (2300 employees or so) use a mix of

- Zoom (larger meetings where we need it to be rock solid),

- Hangouts (for smaller / quick meetings since we are in Gsuite), and

- WebEx (for external tech support / keyboard sharing)

- Slack / Screenhero (internal chat and keyboard sharing)

Zoom has been a revelation especially with large videoconferences. Rock solid global performance.

When is Slack going to release Screenhero as part of their standard product? They swallowed the latter well over a year ago, and nothing's come of it.

The answer I received when I asked about linux support for SH may be helpful here: Instead of porting screen hero, they are (were? 6 mos ago) working on integrating the features into Slack.

I refuse to use anything that requires proprietary plugin/app. AFAIK so far the only thing that works natively in the broswer is Hangouts.

The power drain from Hangouts/Chrome is astounding. I admit it's convienent but native does have its benefits it you need a lot of video conferencing (like all day pairing)

Adobe connect allows participants on desktop to enter in the browser without software downloads aswell (http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect/meetings.html).It's expensive though. Anyone know any more inexpensive options that work natively in the browser? Would be nice to get a little list going.

Hangouts requires a proprietary plugin in Firefox on Linux. I'll use it for work, on my work computer, but I'll never use it on my personal computers for that reason.

appear.in

appear.in requires a plugin for screen sharing but otherwise, I do like it.

The plugin is dummy, required by chrome and just gives permission to share screen. Appear.in has been whitelisted on firefox and requires no plugins there.

Saw your comment too late and already made my own (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13641706).

I'm wondering what your CPU usage looks like in Zoom sessions when just participating vs. when you're sharing your screen.

Sharing screen with Zoom takes a decent amount of CPU, compared to just talking, which eats only about 5-10% from my experience.

Is this for audio only?

Which platform and hardware are you on?

Depends on what programs I have open. The ultimate combo to make my Macbook cry is running a Zoom meeting with video enabled and asana.com open.

+1 to this.

We're across 24 hours of time zones and conduct a majority of internal and external meetings over video conference. We've pretty much tried them all and Zoom has been the best.

That said, there are still things to improve, so will be interesting to compare.

We've recently switched to Zoom too, and had pretty good experiences with it.

I'll also +1 - Zoom has consistently excellent video and audio, and is a breeze to use.

Chromebox for Meetings (basically, Hangouts video conferencing in a box) is actually pretty awesome: https://enterprise.google.com/chrome/video-conferencing/

Disclaimer: I work for Google, albeit not on Chrome, and use this every day.

Yes, agreed. It is great — use it where I work (10k employees) and it was such a relief over all the conferencing solutions we tried (my team was a guinea pig for several).

The coolest thing is that the company rolled out hangouts in a weekend to 100% of the conference rooms, replacing all projectors in the process. It completely democratized remote work and remote offices since people are using Hangout by default.

I've seen almost every solution used internally at Amazon to one degree or another. It's really telling that you get a bunch of highly competent technical people in the room and they still end up fighting with the conferencing software and waste a bunch of time in the meeting trying to get everyone connected.

I'm really not surprised they built their own in the end. It's a clear pain point for companies.

That said, my current employers (not Amazon) have been using Zoom (zoom.us) and it seems to be really quite good. I've had almost no problems with it at all.

Zoom seems to be a lot better for pricing.

At a company of 12 people, our GoToMeeting bill was $15,000/yr.

But uhh, call-in rates of 1c/min/participant? That's going to add up. We would regularly have meetings of two hour duration (programming, planning) with up to six-eight attending is a $10 meeting in itself. Chicken feed compared to salaries but I could easily see pricing of up to $1k/mo with this.

Shame.

Compare the 1c per minute to the staff cost of meetings and it's not even pocket change. It's like a 1% tax on meetings.

To get a $1k meeting bill with $100k fully loaded avg participant cost or about $50/hr (way too low in metros, but let's be conservative), that's 1600+ meeting hours or about $80k/mo in staff costs.

(I see you do mention this but I wanted to call it out).

I think an interesting way to look at it is, if it can make your meetings one minute shorter than what you do now, you'll actually save.

> At a company of 12 people, our GoToMeeting bill was $15,000/yr.

Am curious how? I think it's like max $50 a person/month, and that's only for huge meetings.

Actually, I appreciate the heads up... I wonder if we're still on "older" plans that are more expensive (I don't run the billing but I do get to listen to the complaints about the cost). Because yeah, at the current plans we should be seeing a max of $7k/yr.

We've tried loads of them. Skype, hangouts, appear.in, zoom, ... They all sucked with voice and video all cutting out and getting regularly garbled etc. And finally Slack added video, and is amazing. No problems since then, Slack has solved the problem for us.

I'm not sure where the optimism comes from. I too have been surprised at how mediocre most conferencing software is, and concluded that it's probably harder than it seems.

What would great videoconferencing software look like, and what are the odds that this is it?

realtime protocols depend a lot on where are you and where are the participants, and even if you cover everything else you have random things that you have no influence on. like what route does your traffic go, how is the buffer set up on this route and so on.

i had to debug voip and outside of some simple things like not enough resources/bandwidth it can be really frustrating.

Google did and I think they do make a lot of money from it. They've just chosen to target the business sector. We have the Asus Chromebox for Large Meeting Rooms[0] in every meeting room here and it works flawlessly 99% of the time. I'm amazed how well it works. Automatically integrated with Google Calendar, so walking into a meeting room has the upcoming meetings for that room displayed on the screen. Single tap and away you go. If you need to join another meeting, simply type in the name using the remote. So easy.

Everyone has tried. If you're in SF and a BART user you will have seen at least three different ones being advertised. I believe the BlueJeans ones are still up.

BlueJeans is pretty good.

I don't know Google even today comes across as a company that does technology very well but not solutions. It's a shame that no startup took this on till now.

Best thing about Hangouts: it was rock solid and bulletproof at first, despite the clunky UI (and weird plugin system). Somewhere along the road, they removed all the crap UI, and in the process: - it became more unreliable (F5 to get sound working) - it introduced crazy bugs (says your muted, but not really!) - it remained software accelerated on mac so it kills the batt

>Enterprise conferencing software is so bad and so expensive I'm astonished it took this long for a decent competitor to come in

Have you tried http://www.justchimein.com/chime-in.html ?

> I'm really surprised Google didn't go all in with making Hangouts a decent competitor. I have a feeling this will make a lot of money.

I guess video conferencing is about to get really easy to implement over WebRTC.

So I'm guessing there will be an explosion of competitors soon.

>Enterprise conferencing software

Have you tried Cisco's offerings? Maybe I just have a really excellent IT department, but whether joining audio only, from a tablet, desk, desk phone or telepresence room it just works. It's impressive as hell.

I've used Google Hangouts at my last two companies. Overall, it worked pretty well.

We used Outlook communicator and it wasn't that bad. There were some glitches sometimes but overall it was workable.

We use hangouts at a client of mine and it works great—what else would you like to see out of it, out of curiousity?

Have you looked at Zoom(zoom.us)? We have been using it for a while now and it seems to work very well for us.