Google Video So Much Better than iChat

For years now, I have had an iSight on my computer but haven’t known anyone with whom I could use iChat. About a year and a half ago, I bought my daughter an iMac, and now we can have video chats with each other on iChat and it works great. Really fun, yes, but considering she’s sitting right next to me in the same room, a little unnecessary.

I then met a guy on a list I’m on and we tried to use iChat, him from Pennsylvania and me from Tennessee. It was okay, but the picture broke up a lot and looked scrambled, but we still had sound. Pretty disappointing. He said he communicated with his brothers on iChat, and they had varying levels of picture quality also.

More recently, I started work for a guy in New Mexico who also has a Mac, and we tried to communicate with iChat. It worked for maybe 3 minutes, before the scrambling started, then froze completely, not even any sound. We tried several times and finally gave up.

My sister-in-law in Oregon finally got a Mac, and we were pretty excited about communicating with iChat, letting Grandma see the kids and all— same old scrambling/freezing garbage. When my daughter iChats with her friends here locally, she also has the same scrambling/freezing problems. We are all working with either cable or DSL connections, but none of it works well, if at all. Why? I don’t know.

What I do know is that when Google’s video chat came out, I installed it right away and told my sister-in-law to do the same. We now use it for all our video chats and have had no scrambling or freezing problems whatsoever. It works flawlessly. What is Google doing right that Apple is doing wrong?