I have not used Google's hangouts. I'm on Arch Linux, so it'd be some work to do so; I cannot hazard opinions on it, but I was implying that competition is good.
My parents use Skype to talk to my grandparents in Russia weekly; I use it at times as well. I'm grateful for the technology. That said, it's not nearly as seemless (for me) as the phone, even beyond issues of finicky hardware (I'm on Linux, I don't expect much there): phone calls drop, frames stutter or disjoin from the audio, sound might warp, and so on. These are all things that sound like software issues (yeah, my pipe is only so big, but one could degrade more gracefully). I'm just hoping competition can improve things a bit, in a way that giving Skype even more of a stranglehold on the market would not.
My parents use Skype to talk to my grandparents in Russia weekly; I use it at times as well. I'm grateful for the technology. That said, it's not nearly as seemless (for me) as the phone, even beyond issues of finicky hardware (I'm on Linux, I don't expect much there): phone calls drop, frames stutter or disjoin from the audio, sound might warp, and so on. These are all things that sound like software issues (yeah, my pipe is only so big, but one could degrade more gracefully). I'm just hoping competition can improve things a bit, in a way that giving Skype even more of a stranglehold on the market would not.