Skype Meet Now - Full Review

So a couple of days ago, I posted about Zoom being a risk. For being 'zoombombed', to having your personal identity stolen, installing malware on your machine, passing your browsing habits on to facebook and other serious and legitimate concerns for users.

On the back of that, today we tried our first Skype Meet now with 13 people.

In a nutshell, and by comparison (to Zoom) it was very poor. While it only took people a few moments to grasp the interface and no one seemed to have too many issues getting onto the call. People also seemed to like the 'blur background' option. The chat window and the peculiar bubbles that people disappeared into were odd, but ok. Swapping people into the four visible windows worked ok. But not having full grid view was odd. (There is only the option to view 4 at a time, but streams should have been live in the bubbles). People's video feeds kept dropping out (although the sound seemed to be connected throughout), and it was different people vanishing on different callers accounts. For example I could see some callers, but others couldn't. For the most, I could only see 4-5 people out of the 13 which simply isn't good enough.

In addition, people were still on the call, but I couldn't see them (or their bubble) but I knew that they were in the call, because I could still hear them and they were contributing to the chat. 

Skype Meet Now, we have tried your alternative to Zoom, but to be frank, it simply isn't a viable alternative. The technology is years behind where Zoom is and if Zoom can nail their security problems, this 'alternative' will never gain traction.

4/10 must try harder Microsoft.