Zoom is most definitely here to stay. I am confident that remote work culture will continue to be a part of normal working culture going forward. There's too many advantages for both labor and businesses to keep remote work alive.
If it's a problem in both environments I could see remote work with closed captioning being a big benefit for people with certain types of neurodivergence.
It’s a bit easier to resolve because there’s more context/body language available, but I still often ask people to repeat themselves. Sometimes overtly, sometimes by restating the portion of what they said that I understood and prodding them to elaborate so I can implicitly fill in the missing pieces.
I think Zoom is here to stay at the enterprise level. Video conferencing was always a niche product until the pandemic. It was a big business, but never quite large enough to experience network effects. Now that it's a mainstream part of most people's lives, that has all changed. Zoom was in the right place at the right time to capture that, and it's going to be very hard moving forward for someone to unseat them at this point.
Must be. It's become pretty standard across companies I've dealt with. Maybe a 9/10 split with MS/Google.
They've got CIOs utterly snowed, which is honestly a huge indictment of CIOs, including and especially those in "government" roles.
https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Why-is-the-Zoom-app-l...
Everyone else seems to be betting the farm on webrtc and web browsers. But video meetings in chrome or Firefox don’t look or sound as good as zoom does. And Google Meet and the rest are at the mercy of web standards. Its much easier for zoom to add features to their product because they’re in control of the entire stack.
I hope the situation changes, but I think it’ll be several years before browsers are able to meaningfully catch up to where zoom is today.
The principal architects and security team don't care that Teams is neither good nor secure. They just know that they can blame Microsoft if things go wrong. Slack was too startupy. God forbid people just start texting each other, or even worse, use Discord.
(Before you say, "But...", PAs don't care if Slack is owned by Salesforce now. SF is just some weird tool that Sales requires and won't stop screaming about.)
So, they already use MS for Office, file shares, Exchange, etc, why not just throw another piece of MS crap into the ecosystem? Who cares if it sucks? Who cares if it was a hastily thrown together piece of garbage that MS scrambled to make when they suddenly realized Slack was beating the snot out of them? They don't have to do any work because they're already in bed with MS.
- Most of the time, people don't setup a dialin number, so I can't use my phone
- There's no way to display both the attendees list and the chat at the same time
Those are two examples of things that just cause it to be an "also ran" in my mind. It's just missing a lot of the "nice to have" features; much the way Zoom did when it was first release... it feels incomplete and unpolished.
There's another one that I forget the name of that used to have the mute and hang up buttons right next to each other. I would constantly drop off calls because of it. Video and sound quality are important, but so is UX.
If everyone had a nice camera, nice microphone, and nice headphones (I think all three of these should be provided by employers to remote workers), and just used the video conferencing software the way it was designed, a lot of the friction and annoyances would go away.
4K webcam (Logitech BRIO), Blue Yeti for the microphone + a pop filter and a shock mount, and my noise cancelling headphones. All together they cost a fraction of what my work laptop does.
No one complains about my audio. Except when teams decides to randomly switch back to the built-in laptop mic which is hideous as it's right next to the cooling fans...
People calling in from a phone is a separate issue.
From a personal perspective, I prefer the phone for sound quality. I have poor hearing, especially when it comes to understanding speech. As such, I make sure to own a high quality phone with an excellent speaker-phone. The sound on the computer just doesn't compete, and it makes my experience a lot more difficult.
Oddly, various VC tools I've used with dial in properly map the caller unique pin code to the calling user.
In any case, I know that Google meets at least supports dialing in using phone.
FWIW, I live in the heart of Silicon Valley, but there's only one ISP available so it's perhaps unsurprising that service isn't stellar.
I've given it a fair shake (probably in the hundreds of hours of video conferencing) and I still feel like I don't understand how I'm supposed to use it for anything but pure video conferencing.
This is malware behavior, plain and simple.
From IT departments' point of view, buying MS Teams license is a no-brainer.
edit: typo
That is a long standing issue in many companies; the people who buy the software aren't the people that use the software. Which results in the people that use the software being unhappy with what winds up being an inferior product for their use case.
I will never work for any company that uses Teams as their internal communication tool again.
I'm done talking about "admins who set up groups wrong", or indicators that I'm holding it wrong...
I feel very strongly that Teams is a consequence of a company that doesn't care what it inflicts on workers, regardless of price.
The way teams shoves itself down my throat (we do not use teams at my current company and it was one of the reasons I moved here) is astonishing too[0].
So, no, Teams is not "pretty good".
Try make a header or footer and edit it in one of the other apps MS offers.
Try edit or move an image.
Try work out how much text fits on a page.
It’s incredible how much market share teams has achieved with such poor functionality for basic tasks.
Not a single time did we have a meeting on Teams that worked properly. Not once.
Guess that’s not everyone’s experience?
I would also consider joining a company in the future that doesn't use teams as a form of communication.
[1]: the 100% CPU, the fan noise in the background of many peoples calls, the 500-2500ms lag between clicks and a screen update, the UX disaster of teams vs chats vs private channels, etc.
Teams in comparison is heaven video and chat together... Wow. Of course it eats processing power like hungry, is slow and requires thrid party cookies.
My brief use of Teams (granted, like 3 years ago) put it firmly in the latter category. God that UI was a mess.
MS Teams is the worst of the bunch by far, mainly because it's not a video conferencing tool but wants to be everything. So it's hard to just schedule a call with someone in another organisation. Works fine with Zoom and Meets, doesn't work with Teams (also the HTML link in invites does not work in my calendar solution, why not just have a simple text link?)
Zoom is the easiest and has the best video and sound quality and is my prefered tool (also support raw audio which is excellent when working with my speech coach).
(I invest in my setup, Sony ZV1/Elgato HDMI, Bose QC, Rode Podcaster, 500mbit fiber and I don't like it when the software tool reduces this to 90s video internet for no reason).
I dread seeing a Teams meeting put together, because almost always, at least 1/2 of the people on it will struggle with sound, video, random crashes, and inability to share.
Zoom, for the same people, on the same equipment, doesn't have any issues. It's night and day.
However when people in suits take decisions then "why pay for N products instead of one?" becomes compelling for many. I saw a tweet last week saying Teams have 10x user count of Slack apparently. I guess some upselling from MS who already has Office does wonders.
I didn't use Teams more than 1h at once so maybe long term it's not that bad when you learn to use it? But Zoom and Slack seem aay better products for me.
I'm with you on the second statement. I don't see the first immutably flowing from it.
Zoom is dominant, but switching costs are small and their competitors are well capitalized and eagerly assaulting its fortress. Add to that their geopolitical vulnerability and their long-term dominance is far from assured.
Zoom's China links have put it in hot water before [1][2][3]. If tensions flared, it could find itself cut off from some combination of a large section of its customers and/or large section of its workforce.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/china-based-executive-u...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/technology/zoom-tiananmen...
But I don't see why Zoom would lose so much market share or revenue streams as to disappear or become a marginal player. Something extraordinary should happen for it to cease to be here to stay.
It wasn't anything extraordinary that made skype lose market share - just a gradual slide into irrelevance as competing products got stronger, and they tried to make a profit when everyone else was giving away the product for free.
Eric Yuan at Dreamforce - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7DmHSxsYoI&
There's another video of Eric and Benioff having a chat at Dreamforce.
real question though is who does SF acquire to gain a foothold in the email arena? superhuman?
Pre-pandemic almost no remote companies that I knew used Zoom. It was almost exclusively google meet with a few use of other, lesser well known services. Zoom did some great early pandemic marketing and was able to quickly capture market share, especially in the "meeting with a 1000 attendees") type calls. I've known plenty of teams that switched of zoom into other platforms relatively quickly. I suspect that zoom will replace Oracle's webex and similar products for "business meetings" but will not achieve dominance in day to day meeting space.
People already have solutions for the majority of their video chat needs:
- small office meetings: Google meet/slack video - family calls: FaceTime (or equivalent) - socialization: Discord
I suspect Discord will grow a bit as younger people enter the work force. Since they've optimized around gaming/livestreaming their screen sharing video is remarkably more crisp than either Google or Zoom.
Ironically, if anyone is going to threaten Zoom, its likely to be Microsoft with Teams, and only because so many organizations are already on Office 365 and Microsoft seems to be sinking some sales channel hooks into Teams specifically, and arguably Teams is good enough and has most of the same extension points as Zoom does, including its own add on store and API for most major integrations[2][3][4].
It seems Google is having a lot less luck here, first hand experience being that every business I've worked for in the last few years have been Google Workspace customers, yet still prefer to use Zoom over Google Meeting, despite Google Meeting being effectively free with the rest of the Google Workspace product.
I'm still mind boggled that Slack didn't capitalize on video meetings, they had all the technology and know-how, however execution matters like anything else, and I don't think they've been able to entirely execute on adding strong robust video offering to their core product.
[0]: https://investors.zoom.us/news-releases/news-release-details...
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/06/zoom-earnings-q1-2020.html
[2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2019/03/1...
[3]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/sam...
[4]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-teams-apps-d...
I loathe it when 3rd parties send a damn zoom or teams link cus they always want me to default to using their app that has settings/config issues with my hardware, etc...
Most of the ultra large 10k+ employee companies seem to not mind paying for both though. My wife works at big oil and they use teams internally cus it's included but then use zoom with external cus it's "cool".
I find that I’m using Slack’s “Hangout” features more and more often, especially for ad-hoc 1:1 meetings.
Intentionally or not, they seem to be taking an approach that allows them to embed themselves more deeply into work culture one piece at a time.
Before Zoom, it was always 10-15 minutes at the start of each meeting getting people online, able to see and hear, resolving questions, calling them out of band on the phone to walk them through getting started. Most of that didn't happen with Zoom.
I hate online video conferences, but Zoom is the least bad experience of the ones I've used.