Ask HN: Why is Google Meet so much worse than Zoom?

3 points by harshgupta 5 years ago | 4 comments

As an engineer, I do not understand this. Google has unlimited software talent, compute and money. Any ideas why they haven't been able to catchup to Zoom?

_odey 5 years ago |

Incentives!

- Zoom is a company that sells it's conferencing software directly, and it's the core of what they do and sell, if it's bad people don't buy it and they go bankrupt.

- Google does whatever they want since most of their money comes from ads. You don't buy Meet from them directly, it's just a small unit in a sea of thousands other things they do. If it's bad and people don't use it, or they get bored of it, they'll just throw it in the graveyard[0] and carry on...

Basically it does not matter how much talent and manpower you have, all that matters is the business model.

[0]https://killedbygoogle.com/

comeonseriously 5 years ago |

I feel Google is a lot like me. I start side projects for the sake of learning, but I rarely finish them because, for me, finishing isn't the goal.

peheje 5 years ago |

Zoom is an entity built almost exclusively on this product. Their culture is geared for this piece of software.

Google may have many clever engineers but lack focus in many products which feels half-baked.

E.g. their podcast app, music app, weather app, fit app. All feel kind of half compared to many of the dedicated alternatives.

Grazester 5 years ago |

Worse how? What metric are we measuring? Is this opinion? There have been threads here where with people saying that one or the other was terrible.