It's funny, because a friend of mine wanted to video chat yesterday. I wanted to use Hangouts, but he doesn't have an Google account (he's a director of his own company so he lives and dies with the company email), in the end he said: - No problem we'll just use Teams. Not having to create an account was kind of mind-blowing for me (in the "where's is the business incentive in not taking my email, and spamming it?!" kind of way).

You should try https://meet.jit.si. Started using it this week, works great with no login necessary. And open source :)

Crashed the tab for me on Safari and they themselves say it's Chome only.

Will be following it though!

> Crashed the tab for me on Safari and they themselves say it's Chome only.

It apparently does work in Firefox, but only at higher bitrate HD mode so it's not great if you don't have the bandwidth.

Works great on Firefox for me

> so he lives and dies with the company email

While I don't see too many people take advantage of it, you can make a Google account without an associated Gmail account. You just have to choose "Use my current email address instead" on the signup page[1].

[1] https://accounts.google.com/signup/

https://www.skype.com/en/free-conference-call/ has had web video calling with no sign up for years now, although they were terrible at advertising it, because when they re-told everyone last week it was reported by almost every tech site as a new feature

Skype for business, zoom, WebEx all don't require you to give an email to join a meeting.

Please read what I said again, I think google should move more towards an integrated application that has several different kinds of communication modes in it vs. half a dozen applications in various states of languishing, usability, and availability.

They do, but this isn't it. You are comparing their personal video chat offering to Microsoft's business offering...

Google Chat and Google Meet are the equivalent of Teams, and have a fairly similar feature set.

There's a free tier that is open to individuals.

Here's what their faq say:

"Who’s eligible for the free version of Microsoft Teams?"

"Anyone with any corporate or consumer email address can sign up for Teams today.…"

Those elusive "consumer email" addresses.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-team...

Yeah but... I'm not putting my mom on Teams. Ever. She figured out Duo in 5 seconds because there's almost nothing to figure out.

Sure, but there is a difference between Teams having a corporate focus and Teams requiring an Office 365 subscription.