We've been using hangouts more or less exclusively for at least a year. Hangouts are very stable. When doing training we have hangout sessions that last for two days (minus the nights of course). The problem with hangouts are with access control. Most people are not signed in with an ID that matches their email address and I still don't know how to schedule a hangout that is protected only by it's URL.

I've been able to create URL-based "unlisted" hangouts with:

http://plus.google.com/hangouts/_

That will redirect you to a new hangout URL, and (in my experience) you can just copy/paste the new URL to other folks. To use it, they'll need to be logged into a G+ account, but it doesn't matter which one.

Oh upvote the shit out of this! The only hassle we've had with Hangouts is how to start one by yourself and then get a link that's easily pastable into IM so everyone else can join, and this works like a charm.

We use Skype chat as a daily tool to keep the team (a few remote) up-to-date. We have daily standup using a proper mic so the remotes can hear properly.

I find the screen sharing feature in Skype to be poor quality. We tend to use Skype for calls, and then join.me for screen sharing.

We sometimes have call quality problems on Skype too. We also switch to hangouts for this reason, and we are often surprised how good the call quality, video quality and screen share quality is on hangouts.

Only problem is that nobody can figure out how to login or start a hangout. The interface is damn awful. They need a simple app like Skype's that installs like Chrome does, and give me history for gods sake. How hard is that to deliver?

One of the reasons I shy away from hangouts, is that I use Skype to backfill my timesheet. I can see exactly what calls, video calls, chats I made going back to 2006 on Skype's history. Admittedly so can the NSA, but still, the feature is awesome from a work perspective.

It's a complete nightmare for you if you ever get involved in a court case. All that is discoverable-- truly a goldmine for the opposition.

I feel you. I used to use skype for communication with my family, but grew tired of it not working properly. My parents never were able to use properly Hangout because it is too counter-intuitive for them (log on gmail - oops forgot my password, find the chat bottom left window, "Why do you make me go to my emails to chat with you, son?"). Too bad because the few times I was able to connect with them, it was such a better experience than Skype.

I bought an iPad to my mom for Christmas and facetime with them now. It's the best I've found - even easier for them to use than Skype. They call me, I call them, there no confusion anymore.

No idea about the group chat, but I will agree on Skype working really badly (despite their 10+ years of experience) compared to newer solutions as hangout and facetime.

I've never really had a good G+ Hangout video call. The video from others is always so terrible. I used Skype Video for years, to remote parts of the world even, and had few problems.

You should try using Fuze. We replaced Hangouts and Skype with it. Best of all, it is free for 25 simultaneous users in a chat/video.