Hacker News Reader

Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

- 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.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com