how I only ever heard about Zoom through podcast ads before the beginning of the year, and it's become a genericized trademark for any video chat by now

A decade ago it would've been Skype. How badly did Microsoft fuck that up?

  • l0l [he/him,they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I thought the same about Google Hangouts. The startup I work for uses GSuite for emails and such, so Google Meetings was what we used pre-COVID. The we struggled with reliability on it and switched to Zoom. Judging by how obnoxiously Google tries to push Hangouts now, it seems that they realized they fucked it up.

    • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      They're discontinuing video calls in Hangouts, pretty sure their video calling thing is Allo Duo (guess Allo either got renamed or got the Google curse) now, and maybe like 35 other google projects that go nowhere. Honestly that's probably why it didn't get adopted, one of the main things companies look for is long term support, and outside of gsuite, android, and the search engine, very few of their products go too long before being discontinued.

    • LargeAdultSon [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      We also used hangouts a bunch pre-covid when my supervisor was on sabbatical overseas. And we used it because Skype was an unreliable, useless hassle in comparison. So the writing was already on the wall then.