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Amazon Chime

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Re: Amazon Chime

#41

Post by tschwimmer »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #29
ajmurmann wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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…

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.

Re: Amazon Chime

#42

Post by chrisper »

dsacco wrote: post #24
manishsharan wrote: post #21

...application available for Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows Why not Linux?

Probably because they crunched the numbers and came to the conclusion that the potential revenue didn't justify the development costs.

I am speculating that they are probably using some Electron app. So they could have probably done Linux. I am just guessing that it's a support issue since Linux comes in so many different ways.

Re: Amazon Chime

#43

Post by jwilliams »

ryanSrich wrote: post #36
krashidov wrote: post #17

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

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…

+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.

Re: Amazon Chime

#44

Post by [deleted] »

ec109685 wrote: post #34
jpatokal wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Chime

#45

Post by projectileboy »

ryanSrich wrote: post #36
krashidov wrote: post #17

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

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…

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

Re: Amazon Chime

#46

Post by Narkov »

Their claim of "a third of the cost of traditional solutions" is an apples and oranges comparison.

The basic and plus pricing options, while cheap, are practically useless with only 2 maximum attendees and the $15/user/month pro plan is hardly "a third of the cost...".

Looks like a great product with an average price point.

Re: Amazon Chime

#47

Post by psybin »

ryanSrich wrote: post #36
krashidov wrote: post #17

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

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

Re: Amazon Chime

#48

Post by Twirrim »

krashidov wrote: post #17

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

Re: Amazon Chime

#50

Post by ryandrake »

krashidov wrote: post #17

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

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.

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