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Comment by mattnewport | Hacker News Reader

Zoom is interesting. They don't really seem to have done anything particularly novel, they just made a product that works better than the competition. We use Zoom heavily on our fully remote team because it works better than free alternatives like Skype and paid alternatives that we're already paying for like Slack.

It's quite refreshing to see a tech company succeed by just making a better product and expecting that people will be willing to pay for it. They were able to grow so quickly in part because it was relatively easy for people to switch from other video conferencing solutions however. I'm not sure they will be able to build much competitive advantage other than just continuing to be a better product though. If Slack worked just as well we'd happily use it and stop paying for an additional service.

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MBA ideas of an economic moat - lock-in, stickiness, etc - are "dark patterns".

But there are "light patterns": you can stay ahead in a technological race if you keep running; sales are easier if you are known as better; you get more informative feedback if you have more users, etc.

> MBA ideas of an economic moat - lock-in, stickiness, etc - are "dark patterns".

Dramatic statement. I am an SWE and an MBA. There are merits to thinking about every aspect of the business. Tech/Product is just one - an important one in a Saas company, but still just one.

> But there are "light patterns": you can stay ahead in a technological race if you keep running;

This is another way of saying "build it and they will come". You have to combine good business/economic sense with great products.

Apple didn't just get to be Apple by staying ahead in a technological race. Arguably, they are behind a lot of other phone makers in specs. But they have a lot of people thinking about ecosystems, lock-in, marketing and other "MBA" concepts.

> There are merits to thinking about every aspect of the business.

This isn't a refutation of the parent - all you've said is that sometimes those dark patterns are worth exploiting. I'm rarely one for defending an absolute, so I think it would be far more interesting to say why it is worth using a 'dark pattern'. So far, it just feels like you're deflecting through masking the issue.

"Dark pattern" has a more specific meaning than it seems like you're using here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern

"dark pattern" was a phrase in use before that neologism.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q="...

" all you've said is that sometimes those dark patterns are worth exploiting"

Those are not 'dark patterns', moreover, the notion of building a quality experience is not beyond MBA's either.

Apple's core strength has been product design sensibility.

Their ability to exploit lock-in, to market well, to build an ecosystem have all derived from that original strength.

> But they have a lot of people thinking about ecosystems, lock-in, marketing and other "MBA" concepts.

People need to think about creating something of value that people want to use before they worry about locking them into an ecosystem.

Corollary is that lock in based only on inertia does not last top long. You have to be at least good enough for your core.

As in, nothing vastly better has to be present.

I always thought the economic moat was supposed to be some feat of R&D that is hard to replicate.

Like figuring out how to make an AI that functions as a human-quality call center representative. It's not that there's a network effect or something, just that noone else can figure out how to do it without a tremendous investment.

That's more light than dark, right?

A 'moat' simply refers to the ability of certain firms (over the long-term) to sustain or increase profitability and/or market share within a given industry. For most firms, profit and market share erode over the long-term.

The discussion of light vs dark patterns in this thread is more confusing than clarifying. Moats come in all shapes and sizes because a moat can pretty much be anything that satisfies the definition above; which doesn't preclude moats from frequently being of a certain kind(s).

Yes, delivering a better product is light. Delivering an equal or worse product but forcing your customers to pay you anyways is dark.

What about delivering a product in a way that makes it impossible for anyone else to attempt to deliver a better product than you?

For example, there might be a smart search algorithm researcher who could make a better search engine than Google, if given access to their data. But without the data, it doesn’t matter how good their algorithms are, the search will be worse.

Googles moat is so good that it precludes the very existence of viable competing services. Is this a dark moat or a light moat?

> Googles moat is so good that it precludes the very existence of viable competing services.

So how do you explain the existence of viable competing services? Plenty of people have switched to DuckDuckGo and while it still has a tiny fraction of Google's market share it appears to be viable and growing. Microsoft still operates Bing. Again its market share is tiny but at this point I imagine they continue to operate it because it is somewhat viable and not just for strategic reasons.

I agree with the general sentiment of your statement. Isn’t it ironic that the strongest defenders of capitalism are the ones which are trying the hardest (and often succeeding) to monopolize (a niche of) the market?

While I would not argue that there are never arrangements in which centralization and support of monopolies may make some sense (e.g., to speed up coordination or make it easier to enforce regulations), there should probably be more consideration about the societal down sides of “economic moats”.

One interesting example for the economic and societal benefits of this “collaborative” kind of thinking could probabaly be the dutch health care provider buurtzog, which has been scaling like crazy but also seems to have been engaging with a variety of partners to actually help other people understand and replicate what makes buurtzog work. I bet that exchange was fruitful and interesting to both sides (there is always more to learn) but also premised on the idea that the primary goal of any business should be to help solve a problem and not to (primarily) defend its own existance. Encouragingly, both things generally correlate if done in the “right” order but it’s also hard work.

https://www.buurtzorg.com/collaboration/our-partners/

P.S. I know I am somewhat simplyfing here as there are certainly different phases in a businesses lifecycle where different trade-offs may be applicable. I am just commenting on a general mindset which seems to be pretty prevalent.

Or to paraphrase while the “dark patterns” require moment of inspiration creativeness, being better most of the times rehires diligence and discipline which are much lower hanging fruits.

But it’s also a real danger to just thinking in absolutes like “the best product always wins” are also supremely context dependant. For every example there is always a counter example

This nonsensical hate on MBAs has to got to stop. It's just so shallow.

There's nothing nonsensical or shallow about it. MBAs have a well-earned reputation for focusing on profit at the expense of quality and are responsible for the death of many of the products we once loved. Rather than insult people, why not be the MBA who changes things for the better?

I already am.

Dark pattern is just a tools, it is especially useful when the product is not that good.

Sometime as a sales or marketing person you are not really in control of the product, in these case these "dark" pattern are useful.

Once you install Zoom into all your workplace conference rooms (aka Zoom rooms), you're pretty much locked in. It's also pretty great from a work angle. We have remote workers who can Zoom into any meeting and it's seamless.

We had all Cisco/Tandberg rooms for years, then evaluated BlueJeans and HighFive, then trialed Zoom and Zoom won on the merits, even displacing existing deployed rooms with other tech.

So, sure, we’re not about to rip out our Zoom Rooms, but that’s because of the “Zoom” part not the “Room” part of that phrase.

We're a fully remote team so I haven't used Zoom rooms, that does seem like something of a moat if widely deployed in a company.

On the bright side, room based deployments can also happen with open standards like H.323 and SIP.

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/categories/200110033-H-323-...

I’ve seen multiple large companies swap out their video conferencing system to whatever was the vc system du jour. (Vidyo, Highfive, Bluejeans, WebEx, Zoom) I can’t comment on how expensive it is, but it is a thing that happens fairly regularly.

Hmm, how does it work?

If you have general-purpose hardware (e.g. a raspberry pi hooked up to a TV camera and microphone) then it seems you shouldn't be locked in...

It's general purpose hardware; our rooms use an Intel NUC with USB camera/mic, and an iPad to control it. There's no lock in as long as you're switching to something else that uses standard stuff.

Many years ago I used a Telenor-connected Norwegian service which worked very, very well. I think the service was appear.in.

When I used Zoom for the first time recently I got a déja vù (hope the accents are right).

Silicon Valley indeed has the biggest drum, word about Zoom is spreading fast. But how many have heard of or used appear.in?

We used appear.in for a few months, and paid for a premium "room". It was nice to just give someone a URL (no client or extension required). It could be better now, but we had a lot of problems with call quality.

Used Appear.in at my current employer for a while. IIRC it was P2P, like Skype used to be, with really easy onboarding though a single URL. (No sign up required.)

But it didn't scale to more that 3 users. That may have changed since.

https://appearin.helpscoutdocs.com/article/225-about-appear-...

"The Freeplan can support up to 4 participants in a room, while the Pro plan supports up to 12 participants in a room at a time."

Déjà vu

> They don't really seem to have done anything particularly novel

This just shows a lack understanding. They did something extremely novel: actually make the software work the way humans need it to. HN trivializing anything it doesn't understand gets tiring.

Eric Yuan was the founding engineer of WebEx where he stayed for 14 years, even after the acquisition by Cisco.

He left Cisco to finish what he started at WebEx because he knew Cisco wasn't doing what needed to be done and it was clear that every other piece of video conferencing software out there was terrible too.

Talk to people who've evaluated the software in the market today and anyone who's tried all of the conferencing solutions will tell you that Zoom is head and shoulder above the rest, including Google Hangouts.

Here's a choice quote from an interview he gave:

"I got to this point in life by never giving up on my inspiration — which has always been to build a video communications solution that people will love. This has been a long-time passion of mine. I was born in mainland China. I first envisioned Zoom while I was a college student in China in the late ‘80s, and would take over 10-hour (each way) train rides to visit my girlfriend (now my wife). My desire for an easier way to see her face-to-face without the arduous travel became the impetus for my long path from student to entrepreneur. In 1997 I immigrated to San Jose, CA and secured a position as one of the founding engineers at a small start-up called Webex. I stayed with Webex for the next 14 years, and proudly grew the team I managed from 10 engineers to more than 800 worldwide, and contributed to revenue growth from $0 to more than $800M. In speaking with Webex customers, I realized that the solution suffered from some deep flaws due to its older architecture, particularly a lack of usability, reliability, and video quality. Simply put, it was hard to use and it didn’t work. I knew that Cisco needed to rebuild Webex from the ground up – from the back-end architecture to the user interface to the sales model. I told Cisco leadership, but they didn’t listen. I struck out on my own in 2011, and, fortunately, dozens of Webex’s most talented and visionary engineers soon joined me. Together we spent the next two years building Zoom 1.0, a unified video and web conferencing software that ran seamlessly across mobile, desktop devices, and conference room systems. Since then we’ve developed the product into the best video communications software in the world and built a global team of over 1,100 passionate people."

Full interview here: https://thriveglobal.com/stories/tips-from-the-top-one-on-on...

I didn't mean to understate the value of "just" executing better. That's exactly why I think Zoom is interesting. In tech I think people often overestimate the value of a novel idea and underestimate the value of consistently good execution. I don't think Zoom has succeeded through feature innovation but by implementing features better than the competition and making something that "just works". That doesn't mean I think their achievement is somehow less impressive or that they don't have a great product. Quite the opposite in fact.

I understood your meaning. Although I'm not sure what their tech looks like. It could very well be that they have invented many novel ways to maintain the level of quality that they do. If it was just UI that was better, I would say ya, nothing novel. But they also seem to serve up better and cleared streams than other software I have tried.

Fair! I mis-interpreted the spirit of your original comment.

I'm interesting in the claim regarding Zoom being head-and-shoulders above Google's product. Hangouts is certainly well past it's EOL but the Google Meet product (focused on the enterprise product) works very well and seamlessly integrates into the gsuite set of applications while also providing a great in-room experience.

I haven't personally used Zoom rooms (have connected to some via a laptop though). I have deployed and used Google Meet's in-room experience for a number of years... I suspect the combination of in-room and mobile workers is the key selling point around these products. Zoom have managed to tap that market very successfully while Google still struggle with selling their solution (despite it being very effective) - they seem to fail at making people aware it even exists.

Anyone deployed both? What has the experience been? Pain points of deploying / operating sizeable fleets of either product?

Hangouts suffers from the same thing that plagues every google product except for search: complicated interfaces made by warring teams of designers battling each other for a promotion. Nothing is ever fixed or improved, new UI flows are stapled in when someone needs to prove themselves to move up the corporate ladder. Vestiges of old flows remain to trip up unsuspecting users.

Always get anmoyed to see the crappy stock background image being so distracting, while using most of the screen real estate.

Same thing for the ambient mode on chromecast, doesnt even support suspend, so you either have to stare at a blindingly bright screen at night, or manually turn it off when your done with the tv.

I run on Linux currently and Macbooks previously. I've run into problems almost every time I tried a meeting in Google hangouts (which to be fair has not been often).

Zoom just works across Windows, Mac, and Linux. Problems with meetings are very rare. My previous employer VMware moved from Webex and GotoMeeting to Zoom. It added up to 5 minutes of productive times to calls for engineering teams due the fact that things actually worked and people weren't futzing around with audio, etc.

Try a Zoom call and a Meet for 5 minutes back-to-back. The difference in latency and quality is night and day.

I haven't used Zoom rooms but have used the Hangouts / Meet boxes a lot, and it's easy to see how the Zoom experience would translate.

Why invest in a product that might be “well past it’s EOL” in six months and which has a support model of: go read this FAQ?

So he was founding engineer of WebEx, build the team, build the product, but the product was not good enough because "of its older architecture, particularly a lack of usability, reliability, and video quality" !?! Wasn't that his responsibility as VP of WebEx ?

The hint is in his complaints: he probably lobbied Cisco for budget to have a Big Rewrite and they said no. So he upped sticks and did it elsewhere.

Are you proud of your code from 20 years ago? He probably wasn’t either.

Once Cisco bought, it sounds like a lot of control was removed from his hands? New company (Cisco) didn't want to invest in what they thought was a mature product that serviced the market well enough?

How many enterprise web tech products from 1997 do you think survive today with a healthy architecture and usable design?

Plus that whole "I told Cisco leadership, but they didn't listen" surely was not the first time it ever happened.

I'm sorry you were downvoted for an interesting remark. It resonates with me that sometimes you are stuck within a structure that was created by you and need to completely change environment to be able to achieve new goals. Quite interesting point here.

> Eric Yuan was the founding engineer of WebEx

The article and wikipedia don't say he was a founder of Webex; just a early and lead engineer.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that he was a founder with founder-level equity.

I see "founder" and "founding engineer" as distinct from each other.

"Founding engineer" in my mind just means key early engineer who played a part in building v0 of the product.

I’m just hearing all these nice things about Zoom today - after the fact.

What other companies have dedicated, hard working founders, who are focused on the customer?

AirTable.

I wonder how many other products in the enterprise space could be built by startups, by simply doing a much, much better job than incumbents, despite incumbent moats and lock-in. On the other hand, there are also examples of poor products that attempted to "solve" things like word processing better than MS Word or Google Docs and yet are simply much worse products than the incumbents.

I think in the video conferencing space, all existing solutions were simply bad. Video conferencing has been bad everywhere I have worked and we just shrug our shoulders and joke that someone first needs to build strong AI, and only then will video conferencing be solved. Zoom decided to do something about it top-to-bottom, end-to-end. Very inspiring founder and company.

Notion is amazing so far. So easy to use. Similar to airtable I think

The top comment on the Zoom S-1 discussion said the same:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19465860

Google Meet and their conference room solution work fine where I am across thousand+ conference rooms.

My experience with Meet has been nothing but nightmarish.

It’s not surprising but Meet is Chrome only. Tat was a dealbreaker for me.

It works with the latest Firefox.

Technically true that Meet works in Firefox, but in Firefox Developer Edition at least, the participants sidebar and controls on top of the video layer flicker incessantly during a call making for an unusable experience. I switch to Chrome for Meets daily because of this.

Zoom requires installing a separate app. Why isn't that a dealbreaker but installing/using Chrome is?

I would prefer a separate app if the only alternative was something that required Chrome.

That seems petty.

Has something changed since May 2018?

https://blog.mozilla.org/webrtc/firefox-is-now-supported-by-...

> Zoom is interesting. They don't really seem to have done anything particularly novel, they just made a product that works better than the competition.

Isn't https://dialpad.com in the same category? I find their products to be on-par with zoom. There cannot be no competent players in the market, surely?

Why pay for zoom and slack? Is something lacking from https://zoom.us/feature/messaging vis-à-vis slack ? Easy 'bot integration perhaps (slack certainly have a lot of integrations out of the box)?

Slack has the stickiness / lock-in that I think Zoom may lack (at least for the video part). We have years of history in Slack that we wouldn't really want to lose moving to an alternative. We do also make fairly heavy use of integrations. Trialling and switching to an alternative would be a much bigger investment and less incremental than starting to use Zoom for video calls was, even for a relatively small startup like us.

They may also have a bit of a marketing problem. I was vaguely aware they had some chat functionality but didn't realize it was as feature competitive with Slack as it appears on that page.

Thanks for the replies;I guess there aren't any obvious reasons to use both (unless one really likes slack;I'm not sure that I do, although slack is bearable through wee-slack / weechat plugin).

I am a little confused about the pricing model for zoom;it looks like it's roughly one "host" pr team lead + extra money for "rooms"? And/or one host pr team member if you want full flexibility?

I think most people start with Slack and it becomes ingrained, then they outgrow Hangouts / Meet or try Zoom and realize it's less laggy and a better experience for video overall. I've never heard of their chat app before now.

I am a heavy Zoom video conference user but I had no idea about Slack-like chat features. Thank you!

You think they don’t have a dedicated team just to try to build moat? That’s the whole challenge of a highly visible company like this, build moat, high switching costs etc

I'm sure they do, I just don't see what it is yet.

Agreed- we recently switched from WebEx to Zoom at work and we also use Slack as well. Zoom is forsure the superior product when it comes to virtual meetings.

I'm on a remote team as well that primarily uses Webex. It has kinda been the gold standard for me. Lately the audio has been declining and we started to use the Slack calls more often, which have been fantastic especially with the drawing tool. Other than drawing, voice, or screenshare is there something Zoom does that has made remote work easier? Or are you referring to better in terms of reliability and usability?

90% of Webex calls I've been on for some reason didn't allow using computer audio. I couldn't even tell if it's disabled or somehow broken. That makes it hard to use good headphones. I usually ended up calling the webex phone number via hangouts, so that I can use a real headset. However, in a way it doesn't really matter because it's hard for other participants to use good audio equipment as well and so everyone else is using some echoey conference room speakerphone or worse put their phones on speakerphone. Zoom treats computer audio like a first class citizen and I've typically found that 80-100% of participants call in via that and end up using a good Sennheiser headset or similar. That makes for a so much better experience.

Everytime I am on some damn webex with people yelling into their conference room speakerphones, I just want to hang up.

By "works better" I mean that it largely implements all the same features of other competing video conferencing products but does them better / more reliably / with better usability. "It just works."

Compared to Slack we have fewer problems with people dropping out of calls or losing audio or video and audio and video quality are generally better. Screen sharing is better quality and less buggy and let's you share individual windows. For calls with people outside the team we have fewer problems connecting than with Skype or Google Hangouts. It handles people calling in by phone or from mobile devices with poor connections more robustly. Overall no real revolutionary features, just consistently good execution.

In addition to everything already mentioned, Zoom has great screen sharing quality and very, very importantly, is the only solution that supports Linux with a native client, which means proper screen sharing and much more.

Linux desktop adoption may not be great, but many good software engineers use it for work. In our team it's hard to find a windows laptop. Zoom is the only software that works for us.

My company pays for Slack and despite have 1Gbps fiber I constantly have issues hearing via Slack. It was so bad the entire company switched to Zoom just so the remote people could participate properly.

Webex.... I’d rather use Skype. We replaced webex at work with Google Meet. No longer have the issues we had with webex like people not being able to join or not hear audio.

They also offer better user experience (good features, intuitive UI) compared to some alternatives.

Besides finding it more reliable in general than alternatives I've tried, Zoom is the only conference software I've found that allows me to share my screen on Linux.

Google meet works for me on Chrome, also, appear.in works great on Firefox.

Can echo this... Have been running a linux desktop for 10+ years and google meet is one of the few systems I don't have issues with.

The drawback is that Chrome is a requirement for some functionality which kind of sucks. But I think that's particularly because they have been in the driving seat with webrtc for years and have implemented things in Chrome to test the water before proposing it as part of the standards.

Check out Serge Lachapelle who has been leading Google's engineering efforts for years...

Works for me on Uber Conference, Gentoo/Xfce

Slack? At least my colleague shares his screen with me weekly and he uses Linux mint

Slack is browser based, even the "native" client option. This means your colleague cannot choose which screen to share in Linux, so if he has two screens he has to go at great lengths to make it work properly (either share both or share a specific app instead of a screen).

Also Slack's screen sharing quality is terrible and ofter you cannot read letters in the remote end's screen. Zoom's codec is much more crisp with text and graphics, almost like a native app running in your computer instead of video.

Are you paying for slack? Since we started paying the quality vastly improved.

We do pay, for us, it doesn't make any difference in the quality.

The Slack screen sharing is so laggy it's painful. Which is weird because pre-acquisition Screenhero was incredible. It was the best screen sharing software I'd ever used.

We use zoom and slack. Slack video is just terrible. It is so bad that I frequently change to zoom. So yes, I think they have deserved their place

Agreed. Between slack, skype and zoom. Zoom for video conferencing and sharing screens is so much better.

Never used zoom. I use Uberconference. What's the difference?

Zoom is like what WebEx would have been in an alternate universe without Cisco acquiring them.

Zoom requires native install and has better resolution.

I've used many different screensharing / video conferencing solutions.

I especially miss the one called Screen Hero - purchased and killed by Slack.

I must admit though Zoom has been great, and everyone on the team loves it. They also give you a great try-before-you-buy setup (unlimited 40 minute meetings)

Screenhero was the greatest for screen sharing with low latency. Still searching for a replacement.

There just isn't one. :(

> Zoom is interesting. They don't really seem to have done anything particularly novel, they just made a product that works better than the competition

I'm VERY convinced that listening to your customers and doing it WELL is a massive competitive advantage.

I've been building an app for the last six months and have been listening to our customers pretty aggressively:

https://getpolarized.io/

Lots of HN users use Polar so smart crowd.

Part of it has been to build in tools that allow me to manage all the information and to collect as much as possible.

Analytics on everything the user does (but respect their privacy). We're interested in exceptions and things like that...

One our big wins has been to integrate net promoter score and to build out a few tools to analyze the data.

Cohort analysis is also key.

I've been really focused on this and we're gaining about 1% additional retention per week over the last 2 months so this has been great to see it slowly climbing.

I remember reading about this and liked what I saw, so believe me when I say this is coming from a supporter, but...

Why? Why here? Stop that! You could have made your point without the plug and humblebrag.

This. It feels like spam

It's a constant pattern with this user.

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