And "when Zoom goes down, teachers can’t teach"? Come on. I am a college professor. In my class this fall I met my students on Blackboard on Day 1 and Zoom on Day 2. If one of them goes down for the day, we'll switch to the other.
I think it's for real. Think about elementary school instead. The kids are just learning to use computers. Their parents may be also, and if not they may be trying to do their own work from home while the kids are in class. There are many low-income and/or ESL families. Even the teachers aren't tech experts.
In my son's kindergarten class, everyone got school-supplied Chromebooks. They all have Google accounts for Google Classroom. That probably means they could switch to Google Hangouts Meet, but it wouldn't be smooth. They'd at least miss a day, and subsequent days would be rocky. The teacher has invested a lot of effort just in teaching the kids how to mute and unmute themselves without waiting for their grown-up to help, and they'd have to go through that again with a different UI.
This view is generally antithetical to innovation. Even if everyone already knows how to use Microsoft Office, it can and should be replaced if better software comes along.
It's only when a central single point of failure is introduced does critical infrastructure become ticking time bomb.
An open source peer to peer zoom would reduce such risk - and any sensible government would find that - cries of private business be damned
And if updates are disabled (or MS goes away), we can add yet-to-be-discovered security flaws to the mix.
Neither of these would impact all (or maybe even most) users, but I think it'd impact enough to make a dent. In contrast, Office 365 is probably less susceptible to such flaws, trading them for others.
Is "critical infrastructure" some sort of official US Government designation? What automatically happens in response to this designation?
Note that:
* I only said teachers sometimes can't teach when it's down—a claim of fact, not any suggestion of how it should be handled.
* The article's only extension of that is "Organizations that rely on video conferencing—and today, that’s most organizations—would be well served to put backup plans in place to minimize the disruption from future Zoom outages."
> This view is generally antithetical to innovation. Even if everyone already knows how to use Microsoft Office, it can and should be replaced if better software comes along.
I think you're suggesting calling Zoom "critical infrastructure" means it can't be replaced if a clearly superior video conferencing product is available? I disagree. In fact, it'd be reasonable to say this means it _should_ be replaced if Zoom can't give rock-solid reliability SLOs.
But the article goes a step further and says that Zoom specifically is of critical importance. I don't think this is true. Zoom is a brand, not a unique technology. If they suddenly made everyone pay $50/day, the world would switch to alternatives very quickly.
It's not all of them, and it may not even be most of them...but it's enough that I spend a decent amount of time handling it. Of course that's part of why I get paid so I'm not really complaining--more just surprised at times.
* Most kindergarteners are illiterate and innumerate. That alone severely limits their ability to quickly navigate an unfamiliar, complex UI, much less the extensive number of relevant abstract concepts and references they've yet to learn about.
* I've never bought into the "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" mentality, especially when simultaneously discarding the value of transferable experience. My senior-citizen parents know how to use iPads just fine, thank you. My dad started programming in the punch card days and has at least used computers almost every day since; don't you think there's some relevance to more modern computers?
If Zoom goes down, so long as there’s some other service, the teacher can send out URLs to the class via emails, and people should be able to get setup quite easily, and help each other out. There will be some corner cases which will involves a bit more of a struggle, but it should be relatively smooth (easier than the first time around).
I'm already sad about the time my son is spending learning about video chat etiquette instead of in-person etiquette or reading and math. Even as an ex-SRE who likes to be n+1 on many things, I can't get excited about kindergarteners spending extra time learning _another_ app. Packaging it as an essential learning experience about vendor lock-in isn't going to change that.
Perhaps I should add that, this past spring, I had a day where Blackboard failed on me, and where I lacked the presence of mind to think of a good Plan B on the spot. To my embarrassment, I ended up cancelling the lecture. That experience is why I thought to plan ahead this time.
When Zoom goes down, certainly we should expect some disruptions. As you say, some will be more serious than what I dealt with. But "critical infrastructure" still strikes me as a bit much.
I don't have kids, but my coworkers do and the ensuing aftermath was not pretty. Beyond the obvious, sometimes just making a parent to move to another platform that they just mastered ( because it is not just kids ) can be challenging. Heavens know if it happened to me, I would question move from say Zoom to FB messenger/duo/we..
The main enabler for this is that apparently the school considered something like this happening and actually trained the teachers for such event.
That's great for college. Not every educational experience is in a college with a big fat IT department to support it.
Think elementary and secondary schools. According to the newspapers this week, the school district where I live has 27,000 students unable to get computers to go online because there simply aren't affordable, or sometimes ANY, computers available for either the parents or the district to buy.
Another 20,000 have no internet access, so the school district rolls out hotspots on school buses each day to the worst-affected neighborhoods.
Do you really think tens of thousands of students will have no problem switching from one piece of software to another? Let alone the millions of ESL and low-literacy parents and students across the nation.
But once you're there lock-in is pretty minimal because joining a class is just "click the link the teacher sent out this morning."
That considered, at least in principle, it shouldn't be that hard for a competitor.
It helped also that there were native apps and fwiw the web conf quality is good.
But ya the ux is terrible. I think they are holding up a release of the web sdk that lets you configure ui to give product time to catch up.
It somehow disappeared from communal memory, but before Zoom, it was common for the first 10 minutes on any group skype/hangout/webex/gotomeeting call to be all about making sure everyone is heard and seen.
And with Zoom, it went down to an acceptable 1-2 minutes or so. Others have slightly improved their game since, but not much -- I still occasionally get Meet/Hangout invites for work and there's often problems, mostly related to authorization/authentication and occasionally video/audio feed.
Zoom is bad. But all the competition is still worse (and used to be much worse just a few months ago).
This does NOT come without cost - e.g. their MacOS "just works" setup was incredibly broken from a security perspective, to the point that apple pushed an OS update to block it. But people don't care - convenience consistently trumps security in any mass market system.
Google Hangouts/Meet invariably slows down my whole machine and causes the laptop fans to spin up. Zoom never does that. And the video streams in Zoom have higher quality to boot.
In the long view, the younger teachers are more able to learn the new technologies and switch new technologies. But we have to support the professors that are 5 years from retirement now.
Also, their employees probably have smartphones.
Of the many potential problems six year olds accessing education primarily through webconferencing may face, I'm not sure inability to choose their own preferred videoconferencing service is high up the list, and I doubt Zoom servers have more outages than their home internet and wifi...
Periodically losing connectivity is an occupational hazard of doing things with webconferencing made worse if the people at each end aren't particularly computer literate. But I'm not sure Zoom lockin ranks high on the list of threats to kids' education right now.
And the reality is Zoom is much easier to switch away from if and when its outages are more than temporary inconveniences.
Look elsewhere for work of this is your actual existence.
If this is just some off the cuff anecdote, meh. Stick to real problems not made up ones thanks to hands off clueless management edge cases
I feel that jitsi for some unbeknownst reason is ignored in favour of zoom, but don't understand why.
Also, Zoom's network effect. A lot of people simply aren't aware of jitsi.
* Do most teachers and/or students have sufficient upload capacity to send n-1 copies of their video stream in an n-person chat? (A 20-person chat might be typical for a K12 classroom.)
* Is it possible to do multicast across the Internet?
I assert the answer to both questions is "no", so all the video streams need to go through a server/reflector. You're suggesting that self-hosting; a follow-up question:
* Does your average school district have the bandwidth for simultaneous duplex video streams for every student and teacher?
* Would they be able to acquire this bandwidth quickly?
Also no.
I've never used jitsi and don't know if there are other problems, but this one's a dealbreaker anyway.
Did you hear about network effect?
Some of the conference tools need/want a client or a specific browser, so there's some amount of benefit from already having used it, so you don't need to install it, but not a whole lot.