It really Just Works. We’ve used Skype previously and literally every group call had issues, 75% of the time requiring everyone to restart the app entirely.
We’ve been using Zoom for a year now and have had zero issues. None at all.
FWIW, we use AWS chime. It's absolutely fantastic. Call quality is always good to great, super easy to use for all parties. We found skype and zoom didn't work well for conference calls such as NYC to Cape Town.
Being able to walk in to a room and dial a room at a different site and then have individuals connecting for screen share has been such a quality of life improvement.
not a moat per.se. - seems they have powerful enterprise sales team. Ability and luck in building it is a kind of a quasi-moat ( that for example Google still can't cross in their enterprise endeavors like the Cloud)
That sales team makes them (at the current multiples - see Mule, Qualtrix, GitHub, etc) into a $4B public or a $6-8B acquisition (my bet is that somebody of a big ones will snatch them before the IPO).
We are G-Suite at work so obviously use Hangouts Meet everywhere. However, whenever we need a company-wide meeting we switch to Zoom as apparently HM can't handle this.
I've got to say that I've always wanted to love hangouts but it always makes my laptop (reasonably powerful macbook pro) immediately max out CPU and make fan noise like a spaceship taking off, and for comparatively worse AV quality than the competitors. The only thing that kept me using it was that I didn't have to install crap. Just used meet for the first time yesterday, reserving judgement there, but honestly I didn't need yet another rebrand from google.
Zoom is the exact opposite: You have to get the client but it client works with minimal resources, on many platforms (phone / laptop is seamless for me) scales perfectly with large meetings / screenshare and video at the same time, laggy mobile connections etc etc. Most importantly it ALWAYS works. I never have to futz with it ever (whether in terms of connections, or "your link doesn't work", "you have to invite me", "user is from a different organization than you" etc). Just get the meeting ID and connect. This is how technology should work in 2018.
Meet isn't exactly a rebrand, it's an enterprise-oriented product variant. It includes a bunch of extra features that the consumer one doesn't have, and isn't free.
Zoom works more reliably than hangouts does. I use hangouts every day for some business calls, but I pay for Zoom. If you're looking for something that will work so you can close a sale, Zoom wins. Potential customers struggling to hear you on a hangout isn't a winner.
Scheduling, calendars, easy phone dial ins, and way better mobile performance make it clutch. I'm a GSuite customer, but it's still better to pay Zoom.
Zoom is also focused on one thing. Hangouts/chats/meet/whatever Google wants call it /do with it is an afterthought. If Google wanted to make a real run at the market, they should buy Zoom immediately.
disclaimer: Used hangouts and zoom extensively, for several years now.
Unless Google rewrites or majorly reworks hangouts, it's not going to touch zoom. You do need to be worried about msft building something though, almost anything is better than hangouts right now.
Hangouts has been a miserable experience for me. My CPU fans spin up instantly when I start using it, and as a multi-account user I'm often greeted with "There's no one in the meeting" messages (not "you don't have permission for this meeting", just a false "no one here") because I forgot to put ?authuser=1 in the URL to switch to my work account.
Totally, there are only 10-20 features missing to make me do that, and then the surveillance part and maybe support. The 10:1 energy consumption advantage is also there but maybe not as relevant.
We’ve been using Zoom for a year now and have had zero issues. None at all.