Cut em some slack, they've been holding the world together with sticky tape for about 9 months now.
We have identified the issue causing users to be unable to authenticate to the Zoom website (zoom.us) and unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars
Even with a distributed architecture, auth/login flows are often some of the harder problems to horizontally scale without introducing inconsistencies of behavior.
I wish 'em a speedy recovery!
Cisco blew it.
We're partnering with both, rest is also ran. Massive deals in F500 globally underway. Both also have accelerating roadmaps, visible in the last Zoom update that pre-empted 50% of mmhmm's offering.
As a competitor, do not publish your roadmap, both Zoom and Teams have highly able and agile product teams running them. Super impressive people with a lot of resources.
Zoom’s audio & video feels way better though.
Completely agree re Cisco as well: I also have Cisco Jabber and it’s basically terrible at everything — audio, video and especially screen sharing. Dunno what happened there.
Let's wait until the first person asks if they use 'Kubernetes' yet.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/most-zoom-runs-aw...
Guessing egress discounts are what drives Zoom's picks for infrastructure.
They talked about it before, must have got a great deal from Oracle trying to push their cloud aggressively against AWS. Zoom is global and multi cloud so it makes sense to get a few more datacenters if they're served on a plate.
I realize that the old internet of distributed services and actual competition is likely something those who grew up in the facebook world will not even have a conceptual understanding of, but all of the monopolistic type centralization of services (everyone on Zoom, everyone buying from Amazon, everyone using Uber, everyone getting information through Google, etc.) is immensely dangerous, to a degree that simply cannot be overstated. Its digital, literal monoculture, where one event can have devastating cascading impacts.
In many ways the current virus situation is precisely that, a devastating impact due to a monoculture created and pursued by globalism, where diversity is destroyed and everyone is an equal and controlled human entity. The very crowd that is always demanding "diversity", is also the crowd destroying actual diversity by destroying differences and trying to turn us all into the same, equal thing.
Nobody would accept that. Yet for video calling we’ve gone down a path where it’s normalised. Yet the underlying technologies are not so different to those used for traditional audio calling, video codecs and audio codecs and transports for them can mostly be treated the same.
I dunno, I realise this is somewhat of a tangent to your point but I think about it a lot and it bugs me to imagine how it could have been if we went the other way. Feels a bit like how large infrastructure project don’t seem to be possible like they were 40 years ago... something makes it that much less likely that a common good will come into being.
People want convenience. Tools are there to serve us for as little effort from our end as possible. Zoom does that. And even for audio calls, people will often prefer private gardens like WhatsApp, FaceTime, Skype or whatever to simply avoid the cost of a carrier call because you can't beat free and easy.
The rest of your argument makes sense, but this part doesn't.
Not being beaten by police or being verbally abused because of your skin colour is the opposite of 'turn us all into the same, equal thing'
Those peopl just want equal rights. Is it that hard to understand?
- It was very easy to get people to get on the same zoom call as everyone else
- It had the best quality for video conferencing.
We also thought that Zoom had encryption. (Turns out ...). There were very easy screen shares.
The startup I joined is remote-first, though it did not start that way. After I joined from out of state, we just all started doing that. We used Zoom a lot.
In short, I think Zoom got as big as they did because they addressed enough of the pain points in the end user experience.
Today, I don’t even have skype installed anywhere.
Microsoft originally had a product suite called Lync which had chat and calling. It was pretty good. Then MS rebranded it as "Skype for Business." It was the same infrastructure and program with a facelift to use Skype's styling. That did not work out well, and was rebranded as Microsoft teams.
I'd suspect the whole point of acquiring Skype was to move it to enterprise, which it only did cosmetically and turned out to be a failure. MS Teams is alive and well though.
This. Zoom had the highest chance of success when you found yourself in the middle of a call and thought « Hey, it would be great if we got Tom on this call » and Tom barely knew how to use a computer.
Getting someone on a WebEx would’ve taken several minutes on software installs alone.
I'm told it's much better than most others. I haven't really noticed a dramatic difference, but that seems to be the consensus.
Zoom had the lowest friction, most idiot proof solution while still being decent quality and having enough useful features for classes and meetings, etc.
(as it turned out, some of those low-friction design choices also had some negative security and integrity consequences)
It can't be overstated! They won over with sheer quality. I suffered through evaluating several video conferencing products over a few month period, and Zoom was the only one that worked properly.
The created a product that works, setting themselves apart in a sea of garbage.
Over the past year I've clocked more than 50,000 minutes in Zoom alone, and it is much better than any other I've used.
Using zoom was frictionless, specially pre-Corona Times.
- Keyboard shortcuts for most common tasks (new meeting, copy meeting id)
- Just send a link to invite someone to a meeting (no need to wait for the "e-mail" to arrive, or to download an ics attachment with the meeting details).
- Just click on the link to join a meeting
- Just click share to share screen (no more "can you make me the presenter" conversations)
- Super easy way of asking remote control (no "click to take remote control" message)
- Easy to use audio testing feature
- Meeting ID on top of every meeting so it was easy to see and share (this was been deprecated though, after someone from the Uk gov't published their meeting id on social media)
- Added everyone on your domain name as a contact (this was disabled as a default setting after this happened with an European ISP e-mail addresses)
While competing solutions still required meeting id, meeting password, typing your name and e-mail, "taking the presenter role" before screen sharing, downloading a temporary executable file, showed weird gray boxes during screen sharing.
Other nice features where; Multiplatform Win/Mac/Linux/Browser based, Android, iOS, lots of dial-in phone numbers, even in my third world country (!), also audio/video quality was more stable even with our third world internet.
Did I also mention their executable clients where super responsive.
Enterprise
For them, something mediocre but gaplessly sufficient is preferable to something being mostly excellent with a few big caveats.
For example, it has to run as a on-premise hosted service, or has to tie into an arcane security environment which hasn't been updated in a long time where bandwidth is already an issue.
Imagine running that many copies of custom software in one environment, each with their ideal solution
And a lot of these former WebEx customers have now moved over to Zoom[1]. It’s a relatively easy transition for corporate IT to make.
They lied about and continue to misrepresent their security.
They keep adding and then removing personally invasive features (eg. the linkedin sharer).
There are more: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com...
I don't know why people are so willing to forgive them.
Zoom just made a tool that could be used by everyone, everywhere, for free. And they saved us.
Yeah, I think that's something to celebrate.
Lots of people are using their paid zoom accounts more than their cell phone during the day and even for work.
Downtime means work is down too - not just for classrooms.
Needs some setup, but if you are using Jitsi that seems reasonable
Jisti. Can’t dial in. Utterly useless for anyone with bad internet for this reason.
You can dial in (at least for a call on https://meet.jit.si - I don't about self-hosted instances).
Click the person symbol ('Invite more people') in the bottom-right of the window, and a modal dialog will appear with a phone number and PIN code to enter.
If you click 'more numbers' you will be shown alternative phone numbers for many countries (UK, US, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland).