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.