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Comment by cheschire | Hacker News Reader

Cisco voice / video products feel like they're designed to look good on a product comparison chart rather than to provide a robust user experience.

It's so hard to explain to senior decision makers about why the cisco product should be replaced because on the surface it looks like cisco does everything that the competitors do.

And large companies can't easily compare KPIs for a product they already have against the unknown third order effects of a competitor's product. Cisco knows that so they keep doing the bare minimum.

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I'm not following where you're going with this. Over the last decade Webex has been far and away the most reliable voice/video product I've used outside of a small window at the very beginning of COVID.

They also haven't been caught repeatedly lying about their security practices and silently sending meetings through China.

Do you have some examples of Cisco "doing the bare minimum"? Or things they can't do that competitors do?

Literally my only complaint over the years with the service is around the storage of recorded meetings and that may just be an issue with how my company manages it.

- The ONE MONTH OUTAGE that WebEx suffered a while back was embarrassing beyond belief and I can't believe my company kept the service after that.

- The "mute" button status does reflect whether you are actually muted!!! I've had the entire meeting hear me even when "muted". This would be hilarious if it weren't so dangerous. It occurs if you have a simple network hiccup, btw.

- The innumerable variations of "WebEx" encountered that all behave and suck differently. I recently discovered "WebEx Events" where I had to hand over contact info (twice!) in a browser to join an entirely internal meeting. Then I had to quit right away and add Audio access in macOS and join all over again, since it wasn't the same "WebEx" and didn't have permission.

- For text chat, I primarily use WebEx through a browser as there is no native Linux client. It's atrociously bad. For example, clicking a link does not open a new tab. No one wants this behavior. It would be less bad if WebEx didn't take 5 forevers and 10+MB to load. I've hacked around with TamperMonkey for now.

>The ONE MONTH OUTAGE that WebEx suffered a while back was embarrassing beyond belief and I can't believe my company kept the service after that.

Citation? I've been using webex throughout 2020 and 2021 nearly every day. I recall an outage of ~24 HOURS, we definitely didn't miss an entire month.

>The "mute" button status does reflect whether you are actually muted!!! I've had the entire meeting hear me even when "muted". This would be hilarious if it weren't so dangerous. It occurs if you have a simple network hiccup, btw.

I'm not one to "blame the user" but, what? On mobile it's a picture of a microphone that is a white background with black text fills up with green as it hears sounds when you're unmuted, and white with red text and a line going through it when you're muted.

On desktop it's basically the same, except the icon also literally says "mute".

>The innumerable variations of "WebEx" encountered that all behave and suck differently. I recently discovered "WebEx Events" where I had to hand over contact info (twice!) in a browser to join an entirely internal meeting. Then I had to quit right away and add Audio access in macOS and join all over again, since it wasn't the same "WebEx" and didn't have permission.

There's literally 3 options. There's a webex for conferences that's slightly different because it allows hundreds of participants. There's the standard webex meet that people use daily, and there's the competitor to slack that you'd never need or likely ever use.

>For text chat, I primarily use WebEx through a browser as there is no native Linux client. It's atrociously bad. For example, clicking a link does not open a new tab. No one wants this behavior. It would be less bad if WebEx didn't take 5 forevers and 10+MB to load. I've hacked around with TamperMonkey for now.

I've never had webex on linux not load a link in a new tab. Given you're grossly inaccurate summary of the rest of the app I'm questioning whether you've ever actually used it.

Are you suggesting I don't know how to use a mute button? I don't even know what to say there. To reproduce, get your router to drop the conntrack entry. It's not hard at all. Again, it shows your status as muted but still sends audio (because the control and data streams apparently have no sync at all?).

The month long outage was in 2018 and there was permanent data loss on top. It was a swell time.

> there's the competitor to slack that you'd never need or likely ever use.

Yeah, that's WebEx Teams. It's what we've been using since 2018 and is 99.9% of my WebEx experience. Someone below even said WebEx Meet is discontinued? I would wager that you're the one that's not super familiar with WebEx.

>Are you suggesting I don't know how to use a mute button?

Yes, I am, because you literally said:

>The "mute" button status does reflect whether you are actually muted!!!

The mute button absolutely indicates whether or not you're muted, and I can tell you across hundreds of webex sessions with thousands of people, nobody once has claimed they muted themselves without actually being muted. It turns out if that's happening, and you can so easily prove it, you could actually sue Cisco for millions of dollars and win. That actually happened to them back when they turned on video by default and didn't let you know in the early 2000s.

>The ONE MONTH OUTAGE that WebEx suffered a while back

Nobody would consider 3 years "a while back". And you didn't actually provide a citation. And I actually can't find anywhere on the entire internet a recorded log of webex being down for a month in 2018. I was using webex in 2018, there was no month long outage.

>Yeah, that's WebEx Teams. It's what we've been using since 2018 and is 99.9% of my WebEx experience.

So... you didn't actually have to download the webex version for presentations? Because that's built into Teams.

My employer switched to Zoom long before COVID. We formerly used Webex. From a quality-of-life perspective, the contrast is stark. Things I used to struggle with in Webex:

- Multiple versions of the Webex client

- UI so slow I couldn't start/stop sharing quickly in many meetings

- Extremely high CPU/RAM consumption (Zoom suffers from this, too, but generally doesn't completely lock up my computer)

- Email client plugins that only occasionally work

I'm a remote product manager (even before COVID), and spend most of my days on virtual meetings. The reduction of daily/hourly friction by moving to Zoom cannot be overstated (in my case, anyway).

I'm unhappy with Zoom for philosophical reasons, but would choose Zoom over Webex 10 times out of 10 from a UX/quality of life perspective.

The one thing that I find superior in WebEx over Zoom is how the calendar events are presented. In Zoom, it often is unclear and I have to hunt for the event that I want to join, whereas in WebEx, it was always right where I needed it to be.

Does Webex allow you to wait in a virtual waiting room until the meeting starts by now?

I've been forced to use Webex for our governmental client a few times and the experience is awful compared to all alternatives on the market I've used (Zoom, Teams, Skype for Business, Hangouts, LetsMeet, etc.)

In the example above, say your meeting starts at 11:00. You want to be professional and prepared (and rule out issues with the client) so you try to open the meeting at 10:55. With all other products, that's perfectly fine, you'll see a spinner until the meeting actually starts.

With Webex I had to wait until the organizer logged in. If I tried to open the meeting before that it would show a message indicating the meeting hadn't started yet and completely close out the client.

The virtual background feature is woeful too and exactly as GP described. Barely enough to satisfy a check mark on a comparison chart, nothing more.

Audio and video quality was subpar compared to the other alternatives too. It was a grating experience and I 100% ehco what the person you were responding to has said.

>Does Webex allow you to wait in a virtual waiting room until the meeting starts by now?

I believe it's a tweakable setting. Ours does that by default, it says "waiting for X to start the meeting" if you join early, and the client just waits. IIRC, you can also set it to allow someone else to start the meeting.

>The virtual background feature is woeful too and exactly as GP described. Barely enough to satisfy a check mark on a comparison chart, nothing more.

I would agree, it didn't seem to be a priority for them until covid hit. Then it was solid on mobile, and non-existent on desktop. I believe desktop is finally on-par with the last few releases but I rarely use it.

>Audio and video quality was subpar compared to the other alternatives too. It was a grating experience and I 100% ehco what the person you were responding to has said.

This one I don't quite get. Video for me has been far, far better with webex than the others. I've got a 4K camera as do a few of my coworkers and webex is the only one that actually appears to stream in something approaching 4K. Teams and zoom down sample like crazy.

The audio I had issues late last year but haven't ever had a problem otherwise. Zoom has been an absolute dumpster fire the last month with every vendor I work with - people just randomly dropping for no reason but zoom doesn't actually drop their connection on their end. People dropping and zoom just repeating whatever their last word was over and over and over on loop, etc. Teams is... teams. If everyone is coming in over the internet audio it sounds amazing, anything that transits internet >> phone is hit and miss with mediocre being the high water mark.

It's a well-circulated story that the guy who started Zoom (Eric Yuan) left Webex because he got tired of visiting customers and being embarrassed by the product performing like crap.

There's a good reason that Zoom has taken over a huge chunk of Cisco's market share. It's not because Webex is a good product.

"I was 37 and Corporate Vice President of Cisco-WebEx. It was a year before I left the company when in the feedback we came to know that WebEx did not have a single happy customer. So I felt embarrassed. The WebEx Cisco collaboration wasn’t a good service to customers."

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/news...

just got off a webex meeting, the audio delay is still over a second for phone participants, this causes a lot of problems. fun issue to have in 2021

Webex was a big step up from adobe connect.

I wonder if Webex issues people are experiencing had to do with VPN capacity issues while working from home

WebEx is by far the worst and least reliably video service I’ve used (compared to Cisco jabber, jitsi, google meet, etc.)

We use WebEx as our VC of choice where I work. Turns out the only reason people used it was that there was no alternative when using the VC in the office.

When we switched to WFH people dropped WebEx immediately in favor of Google Meet. Now I hear that GMeet will be available in our physical office when we return. One lost customer for Cisco.

It's hard to explain the problem with WebEx other than GMeet (Or Zoom, or really any other platform) just works and feels better.

When we switched to WFH people dropped WebEx immediately in favor of Google Meet

Out of curiosity did they "just do it" or was this an official decision?

The "new normal" has really turned a lot of stuff on its head and brought "shadow IT" into the mainstream like never before. It's one thing to replace a video calling app but I wonder if we will ever see employees self-organise to boot out incumbents like SAP as well, that like Webex and Teams are sold on the golf course.

It was informal. No doubt it relly helped that we are G-Suite users and adding Google Meet to a calendar event is a one-click operation (although it is possible to add other providers now).

Compared to the ultra clunky WebEx client, buggy web version and no native integration with GCal at the time, it just faded out of existence for us.

Webex gets more abuse than deserved imo. If you like Zoom you should be ok with Webex.

I’ve worked with it for years, and while Cisco is glacial with improvements, it’s probably the most secure enterprise platform and is better than the Microsoft and Google alternatives. Zoom has better UX, but the security story isn’t as good and their future depends on how they can pivot into more lucrative business.

It’s a fast moving target though, and if they don’t get their shit together, Microsoft and Zoom will close the security gap.

> If you like Zoom you should be ok with Webex.

Webex lacks a native Linux client, and the browser-based version has limited features and in my experience has had some recurring issues with audio and screensharing. So, purely from a user experience point of view, the shift from Zoom to Webex hasn't been painless.

FYI we're actively working on native Linux support. It will be rolled out in phases, but we're targeting parity with the Mac and Windows platforms. The first release is planned for this April.

The client is in early field trials right now. I don't think we have public links to the client as yet. Also, we're still fighting the "which distros" battle. We'll start with Ubuntu and CentOS / RedHat, with more to follow.

Here's our announcement about it from a few months back: https://blog.webex.com/team-collaboration/webex-community-me...

Cool, thanks for sharing!

Yeah, I am on Webex much of the day and it's generally great, even over a slow vpn with many attendees and video feeds. But I use the native client on MacOS. I wonder if a lot of the complaints are coming because of the browser-based version. For sure, the security story is the best around.

tot be fair. WebEx seemed to work just as fine as most of the alternatives.

I think the Cisco attitude (my experience) is more focus on value-driving features rather than "maintenance". Unfortunately, robust user experience ends up being more expensive than starting over sometimes with that attitude

COVID was the first time that someone in our c-suite really had to use the our video chat platform at the time, Webex.

Within two weeks we got Zoom plus MS Teams as a backup. I notice that Webex is really being developed now, and I’m sure the devs are perfectly fine people but Cisco is absolutely mercenary with their resources and the second they think reallocating dev resources will make them more money, they will again leave Webex to rot and die.

One of the upsides to COVID is that it has forced more exceutvtiv

Disclaimer: current/new Cisco employee, though I don't work anywhere near Webex.

Webex is... amusing, from an internal perspective. Partially because of the namespace collisions: Webex Teams, Webex Meetings, or Webex Trainings? I've run into all three, and all three are different.

As far as I can tell, Teams is supposed to be our Slack-adjacent/competitor. It works... fine. My previous corp had switched from Flowdock to Microsoft Teams, and M-Teams was truly, truly awful as a chat client. At least W-Teams behaves how I would expect a chat client to. (Though I dearly miss the full emoji reaction selection.) The media viewing behavior, or the group creation behavior (I can't just make an ad-hoc group chat between people, I have to create a 'space'--Why?!)

Webex Meetings seeeeeemmmsss to be just the realtime video component? The Zoom-adjacent/competitor? Teams integrates this on its own, so it's hard to tell sometimes. Broadly I think the Webex UI for calls looks/feels/behaves better than the Zoom equiv, and I have felt that the AV/screenshare quality is notably better than Zoom or Hangouts. But on Zoom I'd always bumble through the menus, or feel like I had a zillion buttons in front of me and didn't know what they did, or be annoyed with how to even create a meeting. (This last one is really counfounded for me, 'cuz the calls are integrated into Teams, so I never have to leave the chat client to make a call, which is likely not the case for other Webex users.)

Webex Training is... Hillariously frustrating. It feels like it hasn't been updated since inception (which looks like it was 2004). There are so many terrible, terrible UX decisions that the Cisco meeting facillitators call out every time they run up against. ("We're going to play a video, so everyone make sure you've muted yourself so the audio doesn't leak and that your laptop speakers are on so you can hear the video," or "We're going to forcibly unmute all of you so you can have control over your own mute/unmute <unintelligble hash of insane noise from all participants>", the mute/unmute/reaction buttons being impossible to find and CHANGING POSITION DEPENDING ON ROOM AUGH)

Anyway. Point is, I've felt similarly to the above, but only within specific Webex domains. I've really been meaning to find a Webex engineer to sit down and ask why this stuff hasn't been fixed, but I suspect I already know and the answer is the same as at my previous corp: Maintenance was de-prioritized, and now minor issues have become egregious, but it would require massive engineering effort to even begin solving them.... and those resources would be better spent on $Successor to get it fully up to spec to replace the aging/ailing incumbent. Meanwhile, the "modern" versions of Webex (Teams, Meetings?) seem to work well enough within the corporate boundaries that we don't feel the pressure. Doubly so because Cisco employees don't get the opportunity to see what life is like "on the other side of the fence" with Zoom/Slack/Flowdock/whatever--which, yay, dogfooding, but boo, lack of contrast.

Well Webex Meetings is discontinued now dunno where you’ve been.

Regarding dogfooding: I’d say an equally large problem is that many Cisco employees (ESPECIALLY in Collaboration units) are issued hardware endpoints for office or home use. So we spend unnaturally few minutes in-call using actual, normal-people Webex desktop clients and instead join meetings using DX80s, Desk Pros and other desk units.

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