I find it amusing that Zoom’s user experience allowed it to capture the market to such degree that is now making waves in pop culture.
How did Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc get it so wrong all of these years?
How did Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc get it so wrong all of these years?
Cisco just saw a product that was successful at the time, and a senior exec that wanted to spend a lot of money to ultimately still only have video conferencing software. They were wrong with their decision, but it's an entirely understandable one.
And on the other side, Google was totally caught napping and assumed that everyone knew about Meet. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/technology/zoom-rivals-vi... "[Google’s chief business officer] Mr. Schindler tried placating the engineer’s concerns, the people said. Then his young son stumbled into view of the camera and asked if his father was talking to his co-workers on Zoom."
That and the fact Zoom had seamless integration with large meetings with relatively little-to-no performance/quality costs is a huge benefit. The luck of timing & advertising is what pulled it all together.
In March, when everyone suddenly wanted to do group video calls with their friends and family, most of whom are nontechnical, we settled quickly on Zoom for ease-of-access. Of all the options, it was the easiest one for me to get my parents into a family call.
You message someone a link, and they click the big buttons until they are in a call. No account, no confusion. We had 100% success rate on getting people in.
Also, it's asynchronous unlike something like FB messenger or Facetime (ie it doesn't push you the meeting, you can pull it at your convenience).
The school district ended up distributing their own Gmail credentials to use for the meetings, too, which was behind a hard-to-find edu-website login. That's a lot of friction that Zoom solves.
I used to use WebEx on a personal laptop for work conversations with other organisations because my work machine wouldn't allow it to run properly.
Also and perhaps more importantly, Google's approach is tied into its own ecosystem but anybody can join a Zoom meeting with just a link/code. Google had everything they needed but are too tied into the everything on the browser mindset and their own ecosystem to see they're shooting themselves in the foot before their horse is even out the door. At this point its too late, Zoom's aggressive pre-marketing, simplicity, and ubiquity is a real force now and everyone else is just playing catch up.
Disclaimer: I have not investigated how Zoom and other video conference apps work, but I do work with real-time video.
I don't see why the browser would be the limiting factor in performance / quality for videoconferencing.
What is the local client doing? Recording video and audio, and playing a real-time video stream. Sure, you want it to be low-latency, which involves its own bag of tricks.
But native-code libraries and/or hardware are doing all the heavy lifting (like H.264 encoding or whatever they use), the browser (and Javascript) is just the UI.
That might be because of my location or some other factor, but I really don't understand why people find Zoom so much better - it doesn't match my experience at all.
I just did a very quick skim through those patents (just reading what’s on that page and not the actual claims), and these are my impressions. ’390: obvious, prior art may also exist, as what it describes has been a standard technique even within video codecs for many years. ’900: obvious, also an abstract idea so it shouldn’t be patentable. ’511: obvious and probable prior art, the technique has been used for DRM for years. ’454/’218: no idea, could be valid, but (personal opinion) it doesn’t sound like it should be patentable anyway.
But with network software, the interesting part is out of reach, so you can’t reverse-engineer it.
Cisco charges money.
Google discontinued their video/messaging services too many times for people to get used to.
Heck for a moment I thought "Houseparty" was going to be a new social media, but I think their push notifications were too annoying.