There are other options though. Things lit jitsi are growing in popularity. Its frustrating that a few "big companies" decided to use these tools so the rest of the world followed suit without doing their own research
> But in many of the verticals in these sectors—such as banking or mobile phone services—no single company dominates the market.
I don't think that's true of video-conferencing either. Zoom is probably the most popular (and technically superior), but there is also: Microsoft Teams, Webex, Google Meet, Slack, and many others, including open source options like Jitsi. And they all pretty much do the job.
We've tried Jitsi multiple times (as recently as a month ago) and the experience has been uniformly bad at anything beyond a handful of people. When we scaled to > 20 it was completely unusable (feedback / echos, delays, stuttering, dropouts, you name it).
Was it with a self-hosted version or the meet.jit.si public instance?
Around 20 we had the same problem on the public instances but I wonder how much is server side or limitation on the client side.
It also definitely worked better in Chrome, it seems that the Firefox situation is much better now though.
On Safari echo cancellation was just not working.
Were you self-hosting, or using the free service? If self-hosting, I'm curious what resources you were devoting to your VPS, and which hosting provider?
Would you say the same if the user was compiling software or rendering video?if your computer fan is interfering with audio, that's an audio setup problem not a software problem.
And unlike many other services, the network effect is quite low because I can easily install multiple video conferencing software or even run some in the browser. If someone organising a meeting asks to use something unusual, I'm normally not that bothered.
New webex sucks for remote support. It forces me to re-request control every time I paste something. Yes I could manually type everything out but that is a pita when dealing with long Linux commands pulled from documentation.
Is it every time you paste something, or every time you leave the program and focus on another to copy something?
If the latter, and you're using X, it should be possible to write a program that takes the selection buffer and provides a different response to each SelectionRequest in turn, letting you walk through a script pasting a command at a time without having to leave the current window. I don't know whether such a thing already exists.
Working for a company that deals with security, I have definitely run into customers that would think I was crazy if I asked them to use anything other than Zoom or Webex. Some are even limited to webex only.
It goes in many combinations. Where I work now, it's Teams internally and Webex externally, with Zoom being explicitly banned, with at least two strongly worded e-mails reminding us to make it double plus sure we don't have the Zoom client installed.
At the same time, outside of work, I was videocalling people on Skype, and my wife had classes delivered via Zoom.
Not sure what' worse, Zoom or Teams. Seems like "pick your poison". A coworker once looked at Teams console. I had logged over 700 errors. Often we cannot hear people, although their tech is completely fine. It's just Teams being bug ridden and excluding people.
Not just that - in general, Zoom is just a videochat; Teams is an office productivity tool. It's pretty good at its function (I'm using it at work and I don't really have much to complain about, except the weird handling of code blocks in chat).
Really? If you want to one-click-add a Zoom meeting to your Google calendar, Zoom requires read history to your full Google Calendar (including all history!) That seems incredibly intrusive.
How do corporations even allow access for this particular features?
Most people in companies are not IT people or IT security people. The ones raising concerns are often only heard, when it is too late.
How often have I heard silly arguments against safer tech like: "The people are not IT people, they want something simple!"
This is possibly so Zoom can show other Zoom meetings you have been invited to. This is a useful feature as it means I can directly join a Zoom meeting without having to go through the Calendar.
My wife sees doctors at four different clinics. Each has chosen a different remote meeting solution. It's non-negotiable - to see your doctor remotely, you need to use their software. And that's just in one field.
With COVID my grandfather has been doing telepresence visits with his doctors, for COVID among other reasons.
Mostly they were using a 3rd party solution like webx/zoom/etc but one doctor (automated in an online form) noticed his number was tied to iMessage and offered to just FaceTime him at his appointment time. Super easy for him (at 94) to self-manage vs any other solution where we (my mother or myself) need to be around to set things up for him.
Not sure how they are doing this exactly, if this is something Apple specifically enabled for healthcare or whatever, but its a fantastic experience.
Whatever solution they were using did have an "no I have an android and a 'use my computer' option" not sure what path they led down.
It’s a shame there isn’t seamless ability to Facetime with Android users like there is to make a voice call or text with them. We (read: tech community and/or society) should fix this. It’d be in society’s interest if a video call between android and Apple was as easy as a voice call is. (and I do think Facetime between Apple users is this easy... I sometimes use Facetime purely because my WiFi is a little better than my cell signal).
There are countless ways of making it happen by installing apps. And the user experience and integration has improved. But I mean out-of-the-box, universal functionality. So your 94 year old great grandparent can use it without anything.
Duo integrates into the latest Android like FaceTime integrates into iOS, it would be nice if Apple made FaceTime / iMessage available on Android (lol, never gonna happen) or allowed Duo to integrate into iOS like 3rd party apps can in Android (like WhatsApp video calling does). Probably the biggest feature I miss from Android since moving to iOS.
Apple is probably doing more harm than good at this point for themselves by keeping iMessage/FaceTime so locked down to their hardware since their revenue stream is trending more towards services and less weighted in hardware.
I'm not sure if Apple ever explained why they didn't open up FaceTime? I seem to remember that when they presented it they said it would become an open standard?
Google's built-in app (Duo) is made available on iOS, but Facetime isn't made available on Android.
Apple could easily open up Facetime and iMessage, and they've evaluated doing exactly this, but they ultimately determined that keeping these pieces of communication software exclusive to Apple devices is a big part of why the devices themselves are so sticky.
If they were texting the doctors messages would be blue if recipient had iMessage and green if normal SMS. Most likely how he found out he had an iPhone he could FaceTime.
I think this was your point but yea, I'd be more concerned that access to your doctor is contingent upon installing a specific proprietary software and accepting that software's terms of use. That's like a doctor saying you can only visit them if you drive there in a Chevrolet.
I can call my doctor using any phone I like, and E-mail her using any E-mail client I like. It is beyond unreasonable to require a patient to install specific client software in order to access care.
Microsoft Teams has improved quite a bit since the pandemic started also. They added things that were missing, like a tile view (max 9), raise your hand, and blurred or custom backgrounds.
Zoom is still better, but Teams now seems "good enough" to me.
Like backing up data, having a contingency plan is important. Even if you like zoom because of certain features, having a backup service you can use in case of emergency is important. If everyone knows beforehand "which link to try if zoom is down today", then it is merely an inconvenience instead of an emergency.
Yep, that's what I do, and work is easy to coordinate, but some other social events or organizations with inexperienced non-tech people don't have slack and don't think to check their email. It is easier for them to have a pre-specified backup option.
Is this a submarine written by Microsoft PR? Seems very likely it could be. Seems to boil down to: "Little upstart company can't be trusted with important business, better buy from an established player."
My company prohibited and even remote-force uninstalled zoom and mandated Skype or MS Teams right after the last rash of bad zoom PR.
I feel pretty certain there was coordination from our Microsoft account manager and Microsoft's PR team on this front.
The funny part is that Skype is famous for zero days while zoom is famous for people running pseudo public non-password protected conference calls that got invaded by teenagers.
The less funny part is that to the HN users who together made https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23555226 my current most upvoted comment on HN, Zoom is known for “a history of shadiness (MacOS hidden server to prevent uninstallation), outright lies (E2EE), and attacking the pillars of democracy (censoring Chinese Americans discussing Tienanmen Square).”
Not that MS isn’t shady, dishonest, or even a deep state tool of oppression (in light of the Snowden leaks, and at least in some people’s view Github’s ICE contract).
has anyone built something on top of twilio's video offering?
it looks relatively straightforward, and seems to me like most tech companies (and some university IT departments) could pretty easily build internal conferencing stuff on top of it if they cared to.
I deployed one of their demo repos [0] and had some medium usage of it in production. It didn’t get a lot of use (most use Zoom) and almost always had < 5 participants. It worked well enough. The cost seemed affordable too, though I never looked too closely. It didn’t make a dent on our overall Twilio bill.
I use like five different services every day that work about as well as each other. I do happen to think Zoom does the best job out of the set, but it is only a marginal lead. It would be nothing to use something else.
Likewise. I often use several different conference platforms a day.
This fixation on Zoom really mystifies me. A couple months ago trolls were wandering around in Zoom conferences, recording things and interfering, making headlines. I would have thought users would abandon this open wound immediately for any of a plethora of alternatives, but for some reason they're dogmatically faithful.
Somehow Zoom appears exempt from confidentiality or privacy concerns, even among corporate and government users. Have all the lawyers vanished with the appearance of COVID-19?
Zoom vs Hangouts is really like going from VHS to DVD. Hangouts' horribly pixelated video and frequent dropped frames and/or loss of video paints a huge contrast to Zoom's good video quality with very few glitches. Am surprised at people who think the two are comparable.
State Courts are too reliant on Zoom and using its breakout rooms for very sensitive communications. This IS infrastructure and should be very concerning. Its an area DHS needs to take a close look at.
Most of the internet that everyone in the world uses is constructed and maintained by companies that you don't give a single cent to, and who don't owe you anything if it goes down. This applies to a lot (maybe most?) things in the world. Say freight (trucks, trains, ships, etc) stops moving, for example. Within a month or two all the grocery stores would be empty. We'd have Mad Max-style convoys of cars driving around trying to find food and raid stores. It wasn't but a hundred or so years ago that most people survived on local food suppliers, and today almost none of our food is local.
It is critical infrastructure if you don't have a backup. I think that it would be easy to have a backup plan to replace Zoom, but this needs to exist.
The fact that people adapt to not having it does not mean that something isn't critical infrastructure. Everything considered critical infrastructure has, at one time or another, been something that humans were adapted to not having.
Zoom is only going to stay widely adopted until an easy, viable alternative comes along and gets in the good graces of people in charge. There are some alternatives now, like Facebook's group calls on WhatsApp but that one's fallen out of favour for obvious reasons.
Thinking about it another way, consider the poor usability and experience of WebEx/Lync and juxtapose that to Zoom -- Zoom just works without any friction.
A future Zoom-killer app would need to provide that much better service.
I'm curious as to how Zoom is that much different from Webex (at least from the user perspective). I've been using both working in a university setting with all remote classes and as far as the UI, Zoom is almost a copy of Webex with some minor differences.
In Webex I can either send someone the link to my personal room or I can schedule a meeting via Outlook (with a Webex plugin)or the Webex app.
With Zoom I can either start a meeting with my personal meeting ID or I can schedule a meeting via Outlook (with a Zoom plugin) or the Zoom app.
Inside both there are buttons to turn on/off mic, camera, change settings of those things, share the screen, and if I am the host, I can assign various privileges or revoke them.
I haven't used Lync in years so I have no idea what that's like, but from what I've seen, Webex and Zoom are basically in a back and forth to add the handful of minor features they're missing compared to the other. Zoom has been improving security options and defaults. Webex added virtual backgrounds and is about to add breakout rooms.
I understand that there are bigger differences in enterprise license options and backend, but for users they seem like similar-looking fraternal twins.
Small differences are huge though. I gave up on WebEx over two years ago when finding Zoom, so I cant speak to them adding copy-cat features and catching up feature-wise. However, I first switched to zoom from WebEx based on:
1. One click meeting starts w/ a simple URL
2. One click meeting joins w/ a simple URL
3. Standing reservation-less room with a URL to remove the hassle of booked by 15-minute segments that WebEx wanted
As for Lync, not sure where to start. There are times 3 or 4 years ago when you were lucky to be able to log in. Their auth was a mess and if -- God forbid -- you had a legacy Skype or legacy Microsoft account, there were strange auth/password reset loops where accessing your account was virtually impossible. You'll find plenty of discussion online about people who suddenly found themselves shut out of a decade-old Skype account because their Skype email was somehow mal-merged into a Microsoft account. I was similarly trapped in this endless loop of auth issues and gave up entirely on Lync.
Where I see effort needing to be spent is an easily setup/usable/configurable video-conferencing package of sorts. A good product would have two things: 1) easy to setup and scale video conferencing out of the box (like literally point at an aws account or k8s cluster and hit "go"), and 2) sdks for manipulating server-side rooms and client-side room/video appearance (but still the default rooms and default grids are in the box).
These two things as a common toolkit would accelerate offerings that could decentralize the marketplace. I've seen jitsi offerings (scalable setup isn't as straightforward last I checked which admittedly was a long time ago), twilio (still someone else's servers), etc. I'm sure these toolkits are being worked on (heck I'm working on one), it just takes a bit of time for the players to catch up in a market that exploded overnight.
Not sure why there isn't more open source alternatives in this realm. Since I only run Linux, I was amazed the first time I used Zoom that it had an actual working linux client. I've always had hopes that webrtc would take over. There's been demo's of video conferencing done over webrtc 5+ years ago and I always hoped it would get more traction. The best I've found lately is "Unamed"[0] but it is the product of one author.
The reason is because it's a hard problem that requires a lot of work to solve.
Dynamically change video quality to fit in the bandwidth, work correctly with a hundred different types of webcam, do echo cancellation, and wrap the whole thing up with a simple UI. Echo cancellation by itself is a hard problem.
A bit tired of the "critical infrastructure" argument. People are very quick to put all sorts of things into the category. He mentions network effects as the only real moat in the article.
If Zoom fails at being a product, people will move away.
I mean are you upset that landlords get a default judgement when tenants fail to be physically present because they don't have a car, good access to public transportation, time to take off work?
In terms of access to the legal system, being able to phone it in at home or get to any public library is actually doing a lot better than the status quo where you have to take off work to appear downtown.
Honestly, this one is so strange to me. UK government services somehow generally tend to be total rubbish but one of them is actually top-tier: gov.uk
They have accessibility and access and all these baked into the design AFAIK. I don't understand why American govs have such a hard time on this. Some are larger than the UK and have problems!
The UK is a deeply centralized place. There are only a few layers of devolved government, that you may or may not be subject to. There is an ability to set and enforce standards centrally.
The US is not. A federalized system means that various components work mostly separately from one another. A county court has sharply limited resources, and no ability to ask the federal government to send it a cadre of web developers. The state it's in may not provide a ton of resources for such things at the county level either.
The actual question here that may wind up a big deal is if a Zoom hearing is the equivalent of a physical one. If it is, failing to show up means forfeiting the right to be heard. Whether it's Jitsi instead might not be a substantive difference.
I agree. I thought there would be evidence in the article but I couldn't find any. The Internet (with net neutrality) is critical infrastructure. But some tech company's product definitely isn't.
Yup, this article misses the difference between a mission critical category of tools vs a single mission critical piece of infrastructure. If your organization has a backup solution like Meet (which is easy to do) Zoom stops being mission critical.
I think at work we have three IT-approved solutions: Zoom, Meet, and Slack calls (which are admittedly much more limited).
> organizations aren’t going to want to pay for licenses to non-Zoom videoconferencing platforms that they may rarely or never need.
Yeah..so what does this have to do with Zoom? If my organization refuses to pay for anything but Meet we have the exact same issue.
In the short term, it is critical infrastructure. Take Zoom offline permanently, tomorrow, and let us see how the world will handle it. It would find alternatives, and competitors would fill the void, but it would undeniably cause massive disruptions to industries and education. There isn't much of a failover right now for video calling - people have put their eggs in one proprietary basket with no backup plan.
I think Zoom has become critical infrastructure, but not from a technological perspective. As @nicoburns points out in another comment, there are many companies that can do the job (MSFT, Google, Cisco, etc. have perfectly comparable alternatives here), and if you're willing to look outside of the biggest companies explicitly targeting business meetings, you have other companies with working technical infrastructure targeted at a different market (i.e. FB, Appl) and a batch-ful of YC startups trying to provide the same functionality to the same market.
What I think the article is pointing out is that when Zoom goes down, schools can't teach. And that's true. I think this is indicative of a usability / coordination / culture problem of missing fallbacks. For example, when Zoom goes down a teacher (at least to my knowledge) can't/won't quickly email out a "Hey class, Zoom is down so here is the Google meet link for today".
However, this is true of many technologies (if gmail is down I'm not getting email, if slack is down I'm not reading messages, and if Github is down I'm not pushing code). I think the larger problem is HOW MANY institutions it's a critical point of failure for. If Zoom goes down, our courts largely pause, our education largely pauses, our economy largely pauses, etc. The same is not true of Github or Gmail. In this regard it's closer to a powergrid failure.
This should go away as verticalized solutions and fallbacks appear (leading to broader diversity, where not all courts use the same platform), but I think the key things to think about until then are:
1. Is there anything Zoom could do to create stronger network effects (https://ayushsood.com/zooms-missing-platform/) preventing new entrants from entering the market?
2. If they did those things, how could we respond to ensure Zoom's incumbent position didn't allow them to prevent new entrants? An old-internet answer would be to centralize the key nodes, effectively utilitize them, and then allow anyone to make a platform that connects to them (i.e. AT&T doesn't own telephony, DNS' don't own the internet, Gmail doesn't own email).
I'm not sure how likely this is given (1) we're moving towards centralization generally (2) the importance of performance in video streaming. Any abstraction creates overhead, and that might be a critical failure to open standards in the video streaming space.
Zoom's lack of security focus has been a competitive advantage for them. It's clear that many users don't actually care that much about the confidentiality of their video meetings.
The low-friction nature of jumping on a Zoom call with a meeting code and PIN dominates security concerns. In fact, this phrase I've heard people use, "jump on a Zoom," indicates that the speaker expects it to be easy and fast to start the call.
Hopefully it's still possible to develop something that's both secure and convenient. But I fear there's no economic incentive to do it.
Zoom seem to have switched in recent times to using a Meeting ID and password. Most meeting links I get now are very long URLs which seem to hash the meeting ID and password. Hopefully this is a step in the right direction.
> When Zoom goes down...business meetings, conferences, and webinars grind to a halt.
I mean that's a bit of stretch. I work for a company that uses primarily Cisco Jabber (absolutely god awful, atrocious piece of software), but we also interact with folks using Microsoft Teams, Webex, Slack, Skype, join.me, etc. There are no shortage of video conferencing platforms.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadI don't think that's true of video-conferencing either. Zoom is probably the most popular (and technically superior), but there is also: Microsoft Teams, Webex, Google Meet, Slack, and many others, including open source options like Jitsi. And they all pretty much do the job.
The phone app is great too. You can setup a room that people can jump in and out of, which is pretty convenient.
If you're looking for that office feel for your small team, then Jitsi might be worth a shot.
And, I think you can host your own server if you'd like to!
I'm no Zoom fan, but in the Zoom meeting I had this morning with 38 people my 2015 MacBook Pro's processor peaked at 11%.
Zoom knows how to do something better than the other companies. They really need to catch up.
Wasting CPU/heat is a different problem.
If the latter, and you're using X, it should be possible to write a program that takes the selection buffer and provides a different response to each SelectionRequest in turn, letting you walk through a script pasting a command at a time without having to leave the current window. I don't know whether such a thing already exists.
I had a videoconference with some Apple people this month, and they were all on WebEx.
Maybe there's a reason. I couldn't tell you. My company is a hodgepodge of Zoom, Teams, BlueJeans, and who knows what else.
At the same time, outside of work, I was videocalling people on Skype, and my wife had classes delivered via Zoom.
How do corporations even allow access for this particular features?
I'm not concerned about Zoom monopoly at all.
Mostly they were using a 3rd party solution like webx/zoom/etc but one doctor (automated in an online form) noticed his number was tied to iMessage and offered to just FaceTime him at his appointment time. Super easy for him (at 94) to self-manage vs any other solution where we (my mother or myself) need to be around to set things up for him.
Not sure how they are doing this exactly, if this is something Apple specifically enabled for healthcare or whatever, but its a fantastic experience.
Whatever solution they were using did have an "no I have an android and a 'use my computer' option" not sure what path they led down.
Apple is probably doing more harm than good at this point for themselves by keeping iMessage/FaceTime so locked down to their hardware since their revenue stream is trending more towards services and less weighted in hardware.
Apple could easily open up Facetime and iMessage, and they've evaluated doing exactly this, but they ultimately determined that keeping these pieces of communication software exclusive to Apple devices is a big part of why the devices themselves are so sticky.
I can call my doctor using any phone I like, and E-mail her using any E-mail client I like. It is beyond unreasonable to require a patient to install specific client software in order to access care.
Zoom is still better, but Teams now seems "good enough" to me.
Like any mission critical infrastructure, it's up to organizations to have some redundancy. Nothing new.
I feel pretty certain there was coordination from our Microsoft account manager and Microsoft's PR team on this front.
The funny part is that Skype is famous for zero days while zoom is famous for people running pseudo public non-password protected conference calls that got invaded by teenagers.
Not that MS isn’t shady, dishonest, or even a deep state tool of oppression (in light of the Snowden leaks, and at least in some people’s view Github’s ICE contract).
it looks relatively straightforward, and seems to me like most tech companies (and some university IT departments) could pretty easily build internal conferencing stuff on top of it if they cared to.
[0] - https://github.com/twilio/twilio-video-app-react
I used like 5 different services in the last 7 months and all worked reasonably well.
This fixation on Zoom really mystifies me. A couple months ago trolls were wandering around in Zoom conferences, recording things and interfering, making headlines. I would have thought users would abandon this open wound immediately for any of a plethora of alternatives, but for some reason they're dogmatically faithful.
Somehow Zoom appears exempt from confidentiality or privacy concerns, even among corporate and government users. Have all the lawyers vanished with the appearance of COVID-19?
Tell us more?
A future Zoom-killer app would need to provide that much better service.
In Webex I can either send someone the link to my personal room or I can schedule a meeting via Outlook (with a Webex plugin)or the Webex app.
With Zoom I can either start a meeting with my personal meeting ID or I can schedule a meeting via Outlook (with a Zoom plugin) or the Zoom app.
Inside both there are buttons to turn on/off mic, camera, change settings of those things, share the screen, and if I am the host, I can assign various privileges or revoke them.
I haven't used Lync in years so I have no idea what that's like, but from what I've seen, Webex and Zoom are basically in a back and forth to add the handful of minor features they're missing compared to the other. Zoom has been improving security options and defaults. Webex added virtual backgrounds and is about to add breakout rooms.
I understand that there are bigger differences in enterprise license options and backend, but for users they seem like similar-looking fraternal twins.
1. One click meeting starts w/ a simple URL
2. One click meeting joins w/ a simple URL
3. Standing reservation-less room with a URL to remove the hassle of booked by 15-minute segments that WebEx wanted
As for Lync, not sure where to start. There are times 3 or 4 years ago when you were lucky to be able to log in. Their auth was a mess and if -- God forbid -- you had a legacy Skype or legacy Microsoft account, there were strange auth/password reset loops where accessing your account was virtually impossible. You'll find plenty of discussion online about people who suddenly found themselves shut out of a decade-old Skype account because their Skype email was somehow mal-merged into a Microsoft account. I was similarly trapped in this endless loop of auth issues and gave up entirely on Lync.
These two things as a common toolkit would accelerate offerings that could decentralize the marketplace. I've seen jitsi offerings (scalable setup isn't as straightforward last I checked which admittedly was a long time ago), twilio (still someone else's servers), etc. I'm sure these toolkits are being worked on (heck I'm working on one), it just takes a bit of time for the players to catch up in a market that exploded overnight.
[0]: https://www.irif.fr/~jch/software/chat/
Dynamically change video quality to fit in the bandwidth, work correctly with a hundred different types of webcam, do echo cancellation, and wrap the whole thing up with a simple UI. Echo cancellation by itself is a hard problem.
its quite funny if you think about it
If Zoom fails at being a product, people will move away.
Literally. As in being evicted from their home: https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2020/spring/trial-by-proprietar...
In terms of access to the legal system, being able to phone it in at home or get to any public library is actually doing a lot better than the status quo where you have to take off work to appear downtown.
They have accessibility and access and all these baked into the design AFAIK. I don't understand why American govs have such a hard time on this. Some are larger than the UK and have problems!
The US is not. A federalized system means that various components work mostly separately from one another. A county court has sharply limited resources, and no ability to ask the federal government to send it a cadre of web developers. The state it's in may not provide a ton of resources for such things at the county level either.
The actual question here that may wind up a big deal is if a Zoom hearing is the equivalent of a physical one. If it is, failing to show up means forfeiting the right to be heard. Whether it's Jitsi instead might not be a substantive difference.
I think at work we have three IT-approved solutions: Zoom, Meet, and Slack calls (which are admittedly much more limited).
> organizations aren’t going to want to pay for licenses to non-Zoom videoconferencing platforms that they may rarely or never need.
Yeah..so what does this have to do with Zoom? If my organization refuses to pay for anything but Meet we have the exact same issue.
In the short term, it is critical infrastructure. Take Zoom offline permanently, tomorrow, and let us see how the world will handle it. It would find alternatives, and competitors would fill the void, but it would undeniably cause massive disruptions to industries and education. There isn't much of a failover right now for video calling - people have put their eggs in one proprietary basket with no backup plan.
What I think the article is pointing out is that when Zoom goes down, schools can't teach. And that's true. I think this is indicative of a usability / coordination / culture problem of missing fallbacks. For example, when Zoom goes down a teacher (at least to my knowledge) can't/won't quickly email out a "Hey class, Zoom is down so here is the Google meet link for today".
However, this is true of many technologies (if gmail is down I'm not getting email, if slack is down I'm not reading messages, and if Github is down I'm not pushing code). I think the larger problem is HOW MANY institutions it's a critical point of failure for. If Zoom goes down, our courts largely pause, our education largely pauses, our economy largely pauses, etc. The same is not true of Github or Gmail. In this regard it's closer to a powergrid failure.
This should go away as verticalized solutions and fallbacks appear (leading to broader diversity, where not all courts use the same platform), but I think the key things to think about until then are:
1. Is there anything Zoom could do to create stronger network effects (https://ayushsood.com/zooms-missing-platform/) preventing new entrants from entering the market? 2. If they did those things, how could we respond to ensure Zoom's incumbent position didn't allow them to prevent new entrants? An old-internet answer would be to centralize the key nodes, effectively utilitize them, and then allow anyone to make a platform that connects to them (i.e. AT&T doesn't own telephony, DNS' don't own the internet, Gmail doesn't own email).
I'm not sure how likely this is given (1) we're moving towards centralization generally (2) the importance of performance in video streaming. Any abstraction creates overhead, and that might be a critical failure to open standards in the video streaming space.
The low-friction nature of jumping on a Zoom call with a meeting code and PIN dominates security concerns. In fact, this phrase I've heard people use, "jump on a Zoom," indicates that the speaker expects it to be easy and fast to start the call.
Hopefully it's still possible to develop something that's both secure and convenient. But I fear there's no economic incentive to do it.
I mean that's a bit of stretch. I work for a company that uses primarily Cisco Jabber (absolutely god awful, atrocious piece of software), but we also interact with folks using Microsoft Teams, Webex, Slack, Skype, join.me, etc. There are no shortage of video conferencing platforms.