It's disappointing to see a company that has better tech than its rivals playing these games. I have been singing Zoom's praises, but this really makes me want to look elsewhere. What a bummer.
Yesterday by comparison half the people on a Skype meeting had to dial into an audio bridge with their cell phones because their computer audio didn't work for no fucking reason, and screen sharing kept lagging unless restarted every so often.
The good marketing for zoom is that webex is awful.
100% this. We switched to zoom as stay home orders came out. And only because it worked 100% every time, with little to no fiddling. The non-tech literate employees at my place are patting themselves on the back for being able to set up and host a zoom meeting. Because it's one button.
And that's why they're used so much. They are the literal definition of it just works. People aren't worried about anything else right now.
Engineers code shitty apps to fill requirements. Lie to project/product managers about what is complete, or have a "good enough" attitude. Managers communicate to marketing that Zoom is end to end encrypted.
What do people like about zoom?
1. It's actually cross-platform:
- Still can't use Webex across Linux, Windows and Mac in 2020.
- Same goes for Skype, plus half the users who have Skype don't realise it's Linc and the two are completely different.
2. It's far more bandwidth efficient than things like Slack.
The codecs are much more resilient, this applies (from what I can tell) to all the embedded options that are just using the browser.
3. It's going to be around.
- Google Hangouts has previously been renamed and deprioritised. They also dropped their low-bandwidth codecs and cpu usage went through the roof in my personal experience.
I'm unclear on some of the items against Zoom. But there's a lot of hate and emotion around it in the last 10 days - my sense is that some people have an axe to grind - I'm always cautious of a crowd with pitchforks.
No extra software to download, no jumbling around with meeting codes, no "are you the meeting leader" bs. Straightforward and simple UX.
Crazy theory, so just hear me out for a second. Maybe the fact that they do some things that violate security is the reason that "it just works". I'm not saying Zoom shouldn't do better here, I'm just saying that there are probably legitimate product/business reasons.
From Steve Yegge's platform rant:[0]
Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil twin who, jilted by the unbalanced affection displayed by their parents in their youth, has grown into an equally powerful Arch-Nemesis (yes, there's more than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security. And boy howdy are the two ever at odds.
But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.
Instead I think it's that Zoom is better: easier to join, it can show you more faces at once, more controls for the meeting owner, lower CPU usage, etc.
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
Have you tried just running webex in a browser? Works fine for me on Chrome in windows or linux
The “pitchforks” are people who pay attention and do not trust Zoom for established reasons. We are now forced to use it because I guess business in 2020 requires the ability to look like you’re on a beach in your sweat pants.
Schools like it because it can handle hundreds of participants in a single meeting and you can pay for extras to handle over a thousand.
I tried multiple other tools over time, zoom was the first one where all attendees had it working on all systems without problems.
Hangouts hides people in meetings with more than about 5, so psychologically you don't even realise they are there.