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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

Every government and school meeting I've had to attend over the last two years is on Zoom. We tried to go with someone else but peer pressure made us get a contract with Zoom for all classes.

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Zoom UI & UX remains atrocious, I don't understand why they got that much traction.

It’s cross platform and not owned by a FAANG company

It’s really good at one thing, which is getting people into calls in the Zoom client quickly and painlessly, no matter what device they're on. And, those calls have much better quality than any in-browser solution I’ve tried (e.g. Google Meet).

And unlike Google Meet or MS Teams, it doesn't cause my Macbook's fans to spin into orbit.

The video and audio quality is still more reliable than anything else I've tried. In the sense of not "breaking up"; not that it's actually high-res audio or video. It's the only one where regardless of participants network or machine quality, the conversation hardly ever gets interrupted.

It also still can show more simultaneous "squares" of video than most (maybe not all anymore) of it's competitors.

Also it's atrocious UI and UX may still be better than MS Teams.

Really? It works well for me. I've never had a problem participating in a Zoom meeting.

I teach on zoom every week, and the UI is head and shoulders above every other competitor for screen share and annotation.

Google meet, and jitsi meet are both depressingly bad for this use case.

Agreed; I also teach virtually, across a number of platforms, and Zoom is the one that just works easily and intuitively for everyone. Screen sharing and breakout rooms are a pain in all the other tools I've tried.

It's not my favourite piece of software, but for virtual teaching, it is head-and-shoulders above the competition.

I also taught on zoom -when I had connection issues I had no idea how to reconnect to a dropped call. Meanwhile students where thrown out of the call when I took to long.

Compared to google meet it all felt like a bad joke.

Interesting contrarian opinion. I have literally never met a person who thought this, and I have managed Zoom migrations for multiple companies

Agree, recently changed jobs and went from Zoom to Teams and it's a complete dumpster fire. Never had a single issue with Zoom.

I agree. Also, those who claim it's more reliable than alternatives seem to have no qualms installing a native app. Like-for-like comparison with browser-based alternatives doesn't perform favorably.

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