Or were you you referring to Duo, which is also called Google Meet now. Or Hangouts, the other Google video chat app which also exists for some reason? Or Google Hangouts Meet, which also existed? Or Google Allo?
It's better than Google Meet because Zoom won't shut itself down in 6 months, replace Zoom with a different app with a different name, change the name, change the name again, then shut that down and repeat the cycle 6 months later.
You go to meet.google.com and it works without too much hassle.
This is a technical feat that somehiw still escapes most of the other videoconferencing platforms (except maybe Zoom, but then they try to hide it as much as possible).
What do you have against Meet? It's a better solution than Zoom. It doesn't have built in whiteboarding, granted, but for that you can use an online whiteboarding tool.
Predefined hosts is a place that is lacking. In general Meet started as a "everyone is mostly trusted" tool which is way better for office meetings so their host controls are behind (but slowly being added). Zoom is by default "only the host is trusted" which is very annoying in my day-to-day use. (For example you can't have a weekly meeting because the "organizer" is on vacation and can't start it. You can't screenshare because the host needs to approve, you can't join before the host... Most of these can be changed by default in your settings but I'd course most people in my company haven't done this so we run into problems at least weekly and need to scramble to send around a new link and hope that we manage to get everyone into the same call.
But that being said I think Zoom is still the better option for "untrusted" setups like seminars, presentations or other complex or large events. Meet is far better UX for meetings.
You are very, very wrong:
1) Old people get very confused even when the interface changes.
2) The changes are irritating even if you know Google products
3) Change for the sake of change (someone at Google wants to get promoted) is just a waste of time, especially as the products are half baked. Maybe you are very young and your time is worthless, but most people want products that just work, with a non confusing interface. Change for the sake of change is something that busy-bodies do to prove that they are useful
4) Google has killed its own products multiple times, so at some point the stuff just stops working. Why bother using a product that will not work?
Seriously, it has been few years that everyone knows that Google does its business wrong: those on top should be removed, since it is a lot of money lost. In both of marketshare lost and lots of programmers reinventing the wheel multiple times to offer a half baked product.
Every few days I see people who cannot use Microsoft TEAMS (which has a poor interface) and I can easily see that if they used Google products, those constant unnecessary changes would make their lives miserable and make them less productive. Maybe reason why Google products are a joke in corporate environment.
I dont really use Zoom, used it mostly to see how it works - and from technology perspective it can be full of holes, but from UI perspective it is much better than the competition. Also probably wont be shut down in 3 months like Google Meet Duo Allo v5.
That's a very ageist and ignorant comment. There are plenty of Tik Tok videos of young people getting confused over very simple things as well.
Sometimes age can be related but being "old" isn't a sentence to being confused by UI/UX changes.
I’ve found that the screenshare quality in Zoom is rather strikingly better than in Meet, to the point that sharing a large screen with an editor full of text is frequently unreadable on Meet but perfectly crisp in Zoom.
Also, Zoom does some sort of background noise cancellation that is really impressive. I don’t know if other apps don’t do it, or do it worse, but it’s noticeable on calls (I use both Zoom and Meet daily). I was curious so I tested it from a coworking space recently: recording my headset mic in the open room I could hear voices, an espresso machine and some distant music pretty clearly. Joining a Zoom and doing the same and my background audio was genuinely silent.
I don't recall meet being this bad a few years ago (I used to be at a company that used it for all internal meetings) so I don't know whether some infrastructure changes have occurred to make it so.
Doesn’t require a Google account to login.
Zoom also requires an account to log in.
And one of the recent Google meet offerings (not sure exactly which one but it was about a year ago) required an account before I could connect to the call. Perhaps it’s different now.
the few times I used zoom there always was problems with audio, camera or people struggled to join