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Comment by tamcap | Hacker News Reader

From an outsider's perspective: AWS has a strong anti-google-tools policy. I appreciate Chrome is listed at all ;-)

One time I tried to have a video call with someone higher up in AWS, and they were unable to join a Google Meet call we have scheduled for that meeting (and only realized at t+2m).

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I always like that moment in a Chime meeting where some participant is having trouble with the tool and all the AWS people look embarrassed.

What’s chime?

Amazon's Chat, it's their Slack or Teams equivalent

I just realized that Ring and Chime are separate products and this wasn't about doorbells. Thanks.

Not quite - it's their Zoom equivalent. It's only used for video and voice calls. Amazon uses Slack for messaging.

Chime tried to be the internal Slack equivalent for an embarrassingly long time. Slack has only been used for a handful of months, and some (frustratingly) have not yet switched over.

At first it’s rough but it grows on you. Way more reliable than Hangouts.

Used it for an interview and was pretty disappointed in the video quality. Rather choppy and audio felt really compressed, but that might just be on the far end.

Google Meet, at least after their redesign, works really smoothly for me. We use it for our day-to-day meetings at work with non-government clients. Pre-redesign I really didn't care for Meet though.

This is every remote meeting in my experience, regardless of technology. The first 5-10 minutes or longer are spent getting everyone online, seeing and hearing each other, resolving echos and feedback, etc.

This has actually gotten better since covid I feel. Seems like people have gotten a lot more practice at joining online meetings

One of my best video conferencing purchases was a Jabra speaker/microphone that has a ring of LED's that tells me when it's muted. It's not always clear in a UI whether the mic is muted or not "The mute icon is bold white, does that mean it's muted or does that mean I need to click to mute?", but I can tell from the red LED's on my speaker, and it has a mute button on it so I always know how to mute.

And you know there's AWS people on the call, because that's the only reason you're using Chime.

Chime is one of the only video call technologies I've been completely unable to use from Firefox on Linux.

Everything else works to some reasonable degree: Zoom, Google Meet, Jitsi. Just not Chime.

Teams doesn't work reliably from Linux either

Why were they unable to? Is there some sort of Amazon corporate firewall that prevents access to Google services?

Probably it was some incompatibility between Google Meet and Firefox ESR.

Said it is the company policy to not use certain competitor's products, and it was neither time not place to drill down further. How it's enforced, I have no idea.

Enterprise IT usually have blacklists. Microsoft has teamviewer on the list :/

Beyond that, if you work at a company that large, they actually have to pay quite a lot to for their employees to use it.

sadly the AWS gui is horrifically slow in Firefox

Don’t think that’s Firefox. And what does it matter, really? Who cares how fast you can get to the wrong place, realize this looks not quite anything like the screen you are thinking of and have to message a coworker to see if they had bookmarked the screen you really want.

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