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I have a need for Zoom, virus or no, but the point of the article is why I don't give them money. Give them money, while the company is apparently still going t

I have a need for Zoom, virus or no, but the point of the article is why I don't give them money. Give them money, while the company is apparently still going to worry about milking advertising dollars out of me? That's just going to be a strong "no". As the final paragraph of TFA says, either charge more or give away less for free. But if you're selling me out to advertisers after I've given you money, then you're one of "those" companies that I avoid if at all possible. Because they're skeezy. You don't want to appear skeezy, do you, Zoom? So for now Skype and MS Teams works fine, or at least fine enough that I don't bother with Zoom. Which brings me to a side question: what is the value proposition for Zoom? What does their product do so much better than the others that I'd put up with this shit? Why am I hearing the hell out of it lately? Outstanding PR department? EDIT: thanks for your answers to “why use it, then?” Because “it just works” seems to be the summary, which hoo boy, one cannot say about a lot of the competition.

binarymax 7y ago
To answer your last question - it works very well. I've used lots of virtual meeting software over the past 20 years, and zoom is by far the best. I agree with your sentiment though - it makes me angry that they're selling my personal data. But sadly I don't think that any companies will voluntarily be non-skeezy...we really need laws and regulations in this space. I don't trust capitalism to take care of my privacy. If companies can get more money without breaking the law, they will absolutely do so.
- chadash 7y ago
  Very very well. I haven't seen any issues with zoom and yet mine and everyone else's usage has gone up 10-100x. It's very user friendly and It Just Works. Meanwhile, my company's VOIP acting funny. Conference calls not working. My wife was having issues with skype. Yes, there are alternatives out there, but i'm yet to see one that is easy to use and reliable in the same way.
- mikestew 7y ago
  That, indeed, answers my last question, thank you. I suspected the answer might be along the lines of “it’s not a tech support shit show”, but my one opportunity to use it this week was cancelled. I’ll try again on Saturday for something someone else is hosting, and find out for myself.
bt3 7y ago
My take: Zoom is very approachable outside of enterprise. Skype (although historically has its roots with regular folks), is mostly used in a "Skype for Business" config. MS Teams is much the same way. Good PR helps too, I suppose.
- binarymax 7y ago
  Skype for business has terrible UX. Traditional Skype works great for one-to-one, but can't handle a room full of people.
  - mikestew 7y ago
    How does it fail to handle rooms of people? I ask because I’ve used consumer Skype to host a half dozen folks on two occasions in the past two weeks. Or is your definition of “room” larger than a mere six people?
    - mstade 7y ago
      We often run rooms of 200+ people in our organization, which zoom handles without issue. Skype however does not, in our experience.
    - sib 7y ago
      We just did a zoom w/ 1,100+ different connections and it worked fine. I was pretty impressed.
      - madwhitehatter 7y ago
        So were the people who got all your data
chanmad29 7y ago
Does anyone know what could Facebook do with such video calling data? PS- I hate misuse of my data as much as the next person.
- bryan_w 7y ago
  It's data to help them track if their ads lead to installs. It's not the content of the video calls themselves
impendia 7y ago
> What does their product do so much better than the others that I'd put up with this shit? I'll share my perspective as an academic. Many of us have adopted Zoom, practically overnight, for our teaching, for one-on-one meetings with students, and even for conferences [1]. The answer is: It just works. It's easy. It does what we want it to, with a minimum of fuss. As someone who now has a whole bunch of unanticipated shit to deal with, this is one less thing to worry about. I definitely share your objection in principle. If this situation continues long into the future (a terrifying thought), then perhaps I'll revisit my choice of software. But in the short term, to be honest, I don't much care. [1] https://www.daniellitt.com/agonize/ https://www.daniellitt.com/agonize/
- hobs 7y ago
  Really trying to figure out a response that isnt flip - but if you give up your principals when something is difficult, why have them at all?
  - wideasleep1 7y ago
    Particularly when excellent privacy-respecting alternatives exist.
    - impendia 7y ago
      I would cheerfully listen to recommendations. And I should add that I'm trying out MS Teams as an alternative. After six days, and multiple e-mails back and forth with our IT department, I think I've almost got it set up properly.
      - andrepd 7y ago
        Jitsi Meet.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - maccard 7y ago
wenc 7y ago
I've used Skype (for business and normal Skype), FaceTime etc. The Zoom experience is just much better for larger groups (> 10). I use Teams at work and would say it is comparable to Zoom in terms of AV quality (Microsoft owns both Skype and Teams portfolios, but Teams is built on a modern codebase that runs on different, markedly superior infra than Skype). Unfortunately Teams only works in the enterprise (O365), and it is still fairly new so it doesn't have a lot of the collab functionality like whiteboarding and breakout rooms that Zoom has. Privacy issues aside, Zoom really is a better product. People are more forgiving of a product's peccadillos when it just works.
Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
I think you hearing a lot about it because (a) everyone is quarantined and wanting to use the tools they use at work to help setup book club meetings, table-top RPG sessions (did this last night and it actually worked great), etc. (b) it's perhaps easier to use than some others, (c) there's likely a huge PR push right now, and (d) I believe its pricing is better for non-enterprise use than others. My company's virtual meeting solutions are a mess; it's the one really messy area in our tooling. For the longest time we had GoTo, but then the dev team specifically also had hipchat for Slack-like interactions. Then hipchat went away, and for some reason the org took that as a cue to do an org-wide rollout of MS Teams, with no approval for us to use Slack. Somewhere along the way certain people somehow acquired Zoom licenses and started using those. Then just about two weeks ago the whole org was told to switch to Zoom, but now not enough people have licenses and all the old GoTo licenses are kaput. Anyways, the reason I have heard various people from the business side give for why they like Zoom is "GoTo was too hard to use." I don't really see that, and I also wonder if there's some sort of 'FOMO' going on. A couple big vendors we interact with use Zoom, Zoom is big in the news currently -- "everybody uses Zoom!" I do also think it's maybe a bit cheaper at enterprise scale. I don't mind Zoom from a UX/call quality perspective. I think Alt-A to unmute is super unintuitive but that's a very minor quibble, and for all I know shortcuts are customizable. I am, however, very discouraged by Zoom's privacy story as we're discussing here. --- As my own side note, I am generally on board with almost everything MS has been doing lately -- we're mostly a MS shop as they help us with pricing, given we're a nonprofit, while AWS told us 'no chance' -- but Teams has to be the single buggiest MS product I've ever used. Just now, over the past month or so, I've noticed it very slowly improving. But for the first year of our usage, we experienced constant issues. Dropped calls, silent crashes, daily sync failures. My favorite one was, every time I would shut down Teams, it would relaunch itself a few seconds later with a message saying "sorry, Teams has crashed, we're recovering." Apparently every time the program received a shutdown msg it just assumed "oops, another crash."
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
Zoom is the first video conferencing platform that I've used, that works reliably. They are gonna come out of this mess smelling like roses, no matter what carbuncles are exposed. I've been doing videoconferencing for over 30 years (Yes, they had it back then -we used PictureTel systems, over ISDN). I regularly participate in Zoom meetings with 20 or more attendees. I know of ones that have over 400. An amazing thing to me, is that technophobes can pick up on it very easily. Very little of that pre-meeting "Mute your mike!", "Can you hear me?", "Whose dog is that?", tons of texts, asking for help, etc, stuff. Skype is very bad for more than a small handful of attendees. WebEx and GoToMeeting are OK, I guess, and I've heard good things about BlueJeans. But Zoom is what I use, and Zoom is very popular with people that suddenly need to gather, and can't do so, physically.
- vosper 7y ago
  > WebEx and GoToMeeting are OK, I guess, and I've heard good things about BlueJeans. GoToMeeting has had a banner up for the past few days asking people not to dial in on time for their meetings, because they can't handle the current load. My company uses GTM for everything, but there have been problems. We'll probably switch to Zoom.
flattone 7y ago
Nothing works good enough to be worth forfeiture of our self respect
michaelbrooks 7y ago
Have you taken a look at [0]WhereBy? It's been recommended as a great alternative to Zoom. [0]https://whereby.com/ https://whereby.com/
- Dunedan 7y ago
  If I'm not mistaken they don't offer Desktop apps and their browser experience has been just plain bad for me. Using Firefox on Linux I wasn't able to get mic and camera to work. While it did detect them just fine, it didn't allow enabling them. I tried that on multiple devices with the same result, so my take is that they consider Firefox as a second-class citizen.
  - zimpenfish 7y ago
    I've had the opposite experience with a Mac - Whereby worked whereas Zoom just won't. Which means I'm forced to use the Zoom iOS app, sadly, because $work just migrated to Zoom because it can handle the (insane) video all-hands we have every Wednesday (with 20+ people).
- jwr 7y ago
  I use Whereby every day and it's fantastic for small meetings. People don't have to install anything, just click a link and it works.
- ksec 7y ago
  I think whereby deserve to get more attention from the HN crowd, although the Founder did say they are working hard on the extreme interest for the past few days. So may be give them a few more days before a separate submission on HN.
floatingatoll 7y ago
Compared to the other ten or twenty videoconferencing solutions, it's the only one that has worked reliably and without accessibility issues for technical and non-technical people in my life. The automatic video and audio processing features make it so that a day-one user has as good an experience as a year-two user, and I haven't had to answer any technical support questions about it to my family. FaceTime is the only serious competitor I can think of that's able to deliver as quality of a call experience in a 1:1 setting with non-technical participants, but it's inaccessible on Windows/Android for starters, and lacks the presentation chops to be used in a business setting.
epanchin 7y ago
Not much different to Microsoft. Buy Windows, still get tracking and ads. I use it because it’s convenient. Hard to justify moving from zoom to ms teams when Microsoft have shown they don’t care about privacy either.
memco 7y ago
So many replies here have identified the value of Zoom: it is easy to use and has reasonably good quality. So the questions I have: can we add to this? Are there ways to use Zoom more privately? Personally I haven't seen many people offer up alternatives that are clear winners. They all have tradeoffs. Since there's tradeoffs I have a hard time moving people to some other direction. If I could says, "Oh Zoom is nice, but Schmooz is the best!" I know people who'd make the move. Even if it's paid.
collyw 7y ago
Having used a few of these lately, it seems to have the best quality of call. Skype is terrible some days. Google hangouts is OK. Cisco Webx is dead in the water every time I have tried to use it. Maybe I just haven't used Zoom enough as the other two do have good days and bad days.
loudmax 7y ago
If your concern is privacy, why are you using Skype and MS Teams? If you don't want a third party getting your contact information, then use a private solution that's actually private. Jitsi and Matrix are open source solutions that both support video conferencing.
- jamaicahest 7y ago
  Because Teams actually has a decent privacy policy: "As a customer of Office 365, you own and control your data. Microsoft does not use your data for anything other than providing you with the service that you have subscribed to. As a service provider, we do not scan your email, documents, or teams for advertising or for purposes that are not service-related. Microsoft doesn’t have access to uploaded content. Like OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, customer data stays within the tenant. You can check out more about our trust and security related information at the Microsoft Trust Center. Teams follows the same guidance and principles as the Microsoft Trust Center" https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/security-compliance-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/security-com...
chaz 7y ago
> Give them money, while the company is apparently still going to worry about milking advertising dollars out of me? Does Zoom have ads? I haven't seen any. I believe all of the ad tracking is for the reverse: Zoom wants to see if their own advertising is effective. For example, if they buy an ad on Facebook that you saw and then you install the app, they can attribute the install to that ad and measure ROI.
- notreallyauser 7y ago
  They can track that from the clickthroughs. The adtech economy is far richer that just showing ads and tracking ads -- the suggestion is that they're feeding data from your use of Zoom to enrich your advertising id(s) to help others provide you the most relevant possible advertising experience / track the living daylights out of you. Delete according to world-view.
pergadad 7y ago
Alternatives might be Jitsi and the 8x8 supported by Jitsi tech.
gray_-_wolf 7y ago
> Because “it just works” seems to be the summary I am using it in chromium on linux, and I can tell you it does not just work. The audio is really really shit (constant crackling). I'm basically unable to attend meetings on zoom. Luckily most of them are in google meet which works fine in a browser.
- Dunedan 7y ago
  You could just install their native app which is available for Linux as well and just works. It's also a real native app and not the usual Electron-based crapware.
  - dmitrygr 7y ago
    RTFA? native app collects a LOT of data and sends it off god knows where and what for
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    It looks pretty non-native to me; kinda Qt-ish.
SnowflakeOnIce 7y ago
Many music teachers are doing online lessons now, mostly via Zoom. It seems that Zoom is the only popular videoconferencing software these days that allows you to disable all the postprocessing on the audio signal (echo cancellation, noise reduction, etc) through advanced settings. This postprocessing is very useful for /conversation/ meetings among many people with bad audio setups, but for two musicians and music signals, the postprocessing is highly detrimental, causing strange audio artifacts and causing instruments to drop out sporadically. (It seems like there would be a market for videoconferencing software optimized for musicians, where the audio signal is sent at higher quality, given higher priority, and not postprocessed in detrimental ways. And without all the privacy concerns.)
- eitally 7y ago
  This is an interesting use case. I know these features exist for what would be considered "enterprise" VC platforms. Having administered both Vidyo & Bluejeans previously, at least, I know the admin has pretty discrete control over the codec behavior.
gowld 7y ago
I don't get it. I get that you don't like the adalytics-based business model, you don't use the product. But I don't see a rational basis for making that conditional on cash price, which is an independent concern. It only makes sense if you value the product at somewhere between the cash price and (the cash price - the adalytics cost), and $0 cost is exceedingly unlikely to be the exact boundary. It only makes sense if you make the unsupported leap in logic that says that the cash price is itself promise to not use analytics. But you are willing to accept $0 adalytics-supported products, and FOSS exists and some has adalytics and some doesnt, showing that $0 is not any kind of meaningful boundary.
u801e 7y ago
> So for now Skype and MS Teams works fine, or at least fine enough that I don't bother with Zoom. Which brings me to a side question: what is the value proposition for Zoom? What does their product do so much better than the others that I'd put up with this shit? For me, it's one of the few video chat clients that works well in Linux. Skype may or may not work depending on the version and whether or not Microsoft supports the Linux client. And I have no idea whether MS teams works at all in Linux.
StreamBright 7y ago
>> what is the value proposition for Zoom? Energy consumption. Half hour hangouts drains 30% of battery 3 hours zoom is roughly 5-10%. UX and performance the two major factors why we chose Zoom.
bchociej 7y ago
I'm with you. I have no idea what people like about it that isn't already done better in e.g. Google Meet. Having to download a program is also really crappy IMO. Plenty of other video chat applications work in my browser.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > Having to download a program is also really crappy IMO. Plenty of other video chat applications work in my browser. You know, even two hours ago I'd have agreed with you, but my thinking is evolving. It's pretty clear from responses in this thread that there is a quality difference between Zoom and Hangouts/Slack/Teams/etc, at least under certain circumstances. In addition, anecdotal reports are that if you do insist on joining Zoom via a web browser (even though their user flow really pushes you not to), Zoom's quality goes down a lot. So perhaps the reason Zoom is superior is because of its native app. Whereas Slack and Teams's apps are just Electron clients that use WebRTC, Zoom is doing something truly custom. It seems to be paying dividends. Not everything has to run in a web browser.
  - curlypaul924 7y ago
    > Not everything has to run in a web browser. Very true, and not everything should run in a web browser. But if something is going to run outside the browser, I would like some explanation of why.
- holidaygoose 7y ago
  You might not using it that much I'm guessing. It's meant for power users like teachers, academics, government agencies, people who are doing video conference more than once every day and just need to get things done reliably. Everyone I know has switched to Zoom. It's a clear improvement in a technical sense than all the existing options out there. We're trying to do our jobs, not make a statement and end up embarrassing ourselves professionally. So no Zoom does not have to clean up its privacy act. Other companies need to improve their software on a technical level to be more reliable and be more optimized. It's ridiculous that companies who supposedly have amazing developers like Google, Slack, Microsoft, Facebook, can't even do teleconferencing well. PS: You don't have to download a program -- it has an online version.
imagiko 7y ago
I just Ctrl+F'd Google Meet and no one seems to be really talking about it. We've been using it for our meetings for a long time and it works really well. I'm wondering why it doesn't have widespread adoption. You can call-in via phone, can log the minutes of the meeting and seems to "just work" too
- detaro 7y ago
  My impression is that to use it you'd need to sign up the organization for G Suite. Whereas Zoom you can just start for free and then if they want individual users can upgrade their accounts to paid ones. That helps with grass-roots adoption in companies. It's also a clear "we pay for video conferencing", not "we pay for video conferencing and all this other stuff we don't want to use because we already have solutions for it"
- squeaky-clean 7y ago
  Requires a G Suite enterprise account. It also doesn't help that Google Hangouts Meet and Google Hangouts are two similarly named and looking but incompatible products. https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/7317473 https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/7317473
  - chinathrow 7y ago
    No, it requires G Suite Basic or better.
tmpz22 7y ago
I said this at the beginning of the crisis and first major rush to Zoom by many companies: their start-up friendly business model is going to bite them hard when they have to blitzscale services and there will be growing pains while they find the right non-vc-subsidized pricing model for long-term customers. I think we can cut them some slack for now as they are under more pressure then many other tech companies. They managed to make a great product - so presumably they'll be able to build the right processes for the company itself soon too.
imhoguy 7y ago
It also just works on Linux - video, screen sharing, window sharing, remote control, whiteboard. Moreover: recording, simple way to mute anyone as host, host less rooms. 1-100 peers? no problem. No need to create account for guests to participatie.
gregkerzhner 7y ago
I am also confused about why zoom is the de-facto conference tool now. I have been working remotely for 6 years and haven't really noticed it being significantly better than other tools like Lifesize or Bluejeans. Also, the inability to draw on the presenter's screen is a big negative in my opinion. Trying to pair lately over Zoom always ends in a bunch of stammering like "erase that dot over there.. no... over there... no, up left..."
sytse 7y ago
Zoom decided to remove the Facebook SDK in their iOS client https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/03/27/zoom-use-of-facebook-sdk-in-ios-client/ https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/03/27/zoom-use-of-facebo... fixing this issue.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  There’s still a number of creepy things that Zoom does.
matheusmoreira 7y ago
> the company is apparently still going to worry about milking advertising dollars out of me They will never not do that. Paying customer or not, no business is ever going to say "let's give up a huge amount of revenue so we can avoid invading people's privacy and annoying them with ads they don't want to see". To do so would be to miss an opportunity to make even more money. The fact you're a paying customer also implies you have disposable income and you're willing to spend it. Ironically, paying money to avoid advertising makes your attention even more valuable to advertisers. The only way they'll stop advertising is if it's not profitable. The only solution is to block all ads and reduce their return on investment as much as possible.
- drdrey 7y ago
  The other way they'll stop is regulations
- jamaicahest 7y ago
  Wrong. Read Microsoft's policy https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/security-compliance-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/security-com... "As a customer of Office 365, you own and control your data. Microsoft does not use your data for anything other than providing you with the service that you have subscribed to. As a service provider, we do not scan your email, documents, or teams for advertising or for purposes that are not service-related. Microsoft doesn’t have access to uploaded content. Like OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, customer data stays within the tenant. You can check out more about our trust and security related information at the Microsoft Trust Center. Teams follows the same guidance and principles as the Microsoft Trust Center."
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Paying customer or not, no business is ever going to say "let's give up a huge amount of revenue so we can avoid invading people's privacy and annoying them with ads they don't want to see". Some companies do this and capitalize on it by advertising it.
TheKarateKid 7y ago
> But if you're selling me out to advertisers after I've given you money, then you're one of "those" companies that I avoid if at all possible. Sadly, this happens everywhere. Verizon and ATT? Selling your location and data usage patterns for years. Bank accounts and credit cards? Selling your purchase patterns for decades.

binarymax 7y ago

To answer your last question - it works very well. I've used lots of virtual meeting software over the past 20 years, and zoom is by far the best. I agree with your sentiment though - it makes me angry that they're selling my personal data. But sadly I don't think that any companies will voluntarily be non-skeezy...we really need laws and regulations in this space. I don't trust capitalism to take care of my privacy. If companies can get more money without breaking the law, they will absolutely do so.

chadash 7y ago
Very very well. I haven't seen any issues with zoom and yet mine and everyone else's usage has gone up 10-100x. It's very user friendly and It Just Works. Meanwhile, my company's VOIP acting funny. Conference calls not working. My wife was having issues with skype. Yes, there are alternatives out there, but i'm yet to see one that is easy to use and reliable in the same way.
mikestew 7y ago
That, indeed, answers my last question, thank you. I suspected the answer might be along the lines of “it’s not a tech support shit show”, but my one opportunity to use it this week was cancelled. I’ll try again on Saturday for something someone else is hosting, and find out for myself.

bt3 7y ago

My take: Zoom is very approachable outside of enterprise. Skype (although historically has its roots with regular folks), is mostly used in a "Skype for Business" config. MS Teams is much the same way. Good PR helps too, I suppose.

binarymax 7y ago
Skype for business has terrible UX. Traditional Skype works great for one-to-one, but can't handle a room full of people.
- mikestew 7y ago
  How does it fail to handle rooms of people? I ask because I’ve used consumer Skype to host a half dozen folks on two occasions in the past two weeks. Or is your definition of “room” larger than a mere six people?
  - mstade 7y ago
    We often run rooms of 200+ people in our organization, which zoom handles without issue. Skype however does not, in our experience.
  - sib 7y ago
    We just did a zoom w/ 1,100+ different connections and it worked fine. I was pretty impressed.
    - madwhitehatter 7y ago
      So were the people who got all your data

chanmad29 7y ago

Does anyone know what could Facebook do with such video calling data? PS- I hate misuse of my data as much as the next person.

bryan_w 7y ago
It's data to help them track if their ads lead to installs. It's not the content of the video calls themselves

impendia 7y ago

> What does their product do so much better than the others that I'd put up with this shit? I'll share my perspective as an academic. Many of us have adopted Zoom, practically overnight, for our teaching, for one-on-one meetings with students, and even for conferences [1]. The answer is: It just works. It's easy. It does what we want it to, with a minimum of fuss. As someone who now has a whole bunch of unanticipated shit to deal with, this is one less thing to worry about. I definitely share your objection in principle. If this situation continues long into the future (a terrifying thought), then perhaps I'll revisit my choice of software. But in the short term, to be honest, I don't much care. [1] https://www.daniellitt.com/agonize/ https://www.daniellitt.com/agonize/

hobs 7y ago
Really trying to figure out a response that isnt flip - but if you give up your principals when something is difficult, why have them at all?
- wideasleep1 7y ago
  Particularly when excellent privacy-respecting alternatives exist.
  - impendia 7y ago
    I would cheerfully listen to recommendations. And I should add that I'm trying out MS Teams as an alternative. After six days, and multiple e-mails back and forth with our IT department, I think I've almost got it set up properly.
    - andrepd 7y ago
      Jitsi Meet.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - maccard 7y ago

wenc 7y ago

I've used Skype (for business and normal Skype), FaceTime etc. The Zoom experience is just much better for larger groups (> 10). I use Teams at work and would say it is comparable to Zoom in terms of AV quality (Microsoft owns both Skype and Teams portfolios, but Teams is built on a modern codebase that runs on different, markedly superior infra than Skype). Unfortunately Teams only works in the enterprise (O365), and it is still fairly new so it doesn't have a lot of the collab functionality like whiteboarding and breakout rooms that Zoom has. Privacy issues aside, Zoom really is a better product. People are more forgiving of a product's peccadillos when it just works.

Gene_Parmesan 7y ago

I think you hearing a lot about it because (a) everyone is quarantined and wanting to use the tools they use at work to help setup book club meetings, table-top RPG sessions (did this last night and it actually worked great), etc. (b) it's perhaps easier to use than some others, (c) there's likely a huge PR push right now, and (d) I believe its pricing is better for non-enterprise use than others. My company's virtual meeting solutions are a mess; it's the one really messy area in our tooling. For the longest time we had GoTo, but then the dev team specifically also had hipchat for Slack-like interactions. Then hipchat went away, and for some reason the org took that as a cue to do an org-wide rollout of MS Teams, with no approval for us to use Slack. Somewhere along the way certain people somehow acquired Zoom licenses and started using those. Then just about two weeks ago the whole org was told to switch to Zoom, but now not enough people have licenses and all the old GoTo licenses are kaput. Anyways, the reason I have heard various people from the business side give for why they like Zoom is "GoTo was too hard to use." I don't really see that, and I also wonder if there's some sort of 'FOMO' going on. A couple big vendors we interact with use Zoom, Zoom is big in the news currently -- "everybody uses Zoom!" I do also think it's maybe a bit cheaper at enterprise scale. I don't mind Zoom from a UX/call quality perspective. I think Alt-A to unmute is super unintuitive but that's a very minor quibble, and for all I know shortcuts are customizable. I am, however, very discouraged by Zoom's privacy story as we're discussing here. --- As my own side note, I am generally on board with almost everything MS has been doing lately -- we're mostly a MS shop as they help us with pricing, given we're a nonprofit, while AWS told us 'no chance' -- but Teams has to be the single buggiest MS product I've ever used. Just now, over the past month or so, I've noticed it very slowly improving. But for the first year of our usage, we experienced constant issues. Dropped calls, silent crashes, daily sync failures. My favorite one was, every time I would shut down Teams, it would relaunch itself a few seconds later with a message saying "sorry, Teams has crashed, we're recovering." Apparently every time the program received a shutdown msg it just assumed "oops, another crash."

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

Zoom is the first video conferencing platform that I've used, that works reliably. They are gonna come out of this mess smelling like roses, no matter what carbuncles are exposed. I've been doing videoconferencing for over 30 years (Yes, they had it back then -we used PictureTel systems, over ISDN). I regularly participate in Zoom meetings with 20 or more attendees. I know of ones that have over 400. An amazing thing to me, is that technophobes can pick up on it very easily. Very little of that pre-meeting "Mute your mike!", "Can you hear me?", "Whose dog is that?", tons of texts, asking for help, etc, stuff. Skype is very bad for more than a small handful of attendees. WebEx and GoToMeeting are OK, I guess, and I've heard good things about BlueJeans. But Zoom is what I use, and Zoom is very popular with people that suddenly need to gather, and can't do so, physically.

vosper 7y ago
> WebEx and GoToMeeting are OK, I guess, and I've heard good things about BlueJeans. GoToMeeting has had a banner up for the past few days asking people not to dial in on time for their meetings, because they can't handle the current load. My company uses GTM for everything, but there have been problems. We'll probably switch to Zoom.

flattone 7y ago

Nothing works good enough to be worth forfeiture of our self respect

michaelbrooks 7y ago

Have you taken a look at [0]WhereBy? It's been recommended as a great alternative to Zoom. [0]https://whereby.com/ https://whereby.com/

Dunedan 7y ago
If I'm not mistaken they don't offer Desktop apps and their browser experience has been just plain bad for me. Using Firefox on Linux I wasn't able to get mic and camera to work. While it did detect them just fine, it didn't allow enabling them. I tried that on multiple devices with the same result, so my take is that they consider Firefox as a second-class citizen.
- zimpenfish 7y ago
  I've had the opposite experience with a Mac - Whereby worked whereas Zoom just won't. Which means I'm forced to use the Zoom iOS app, sadly, because $work just migrated to Zoom because it can handle the (insane) video all-hands we have every Wednesday (with 20+ people).
jwr 7y ago
I use Whereby every day and it's fantastic for small meetings. People don't have to install anything, just click a link and it works.
ksec 7y ago
I think whereby deserve to get more attention from the HN crowd, although the Founder did say they are working hard on the extreme interest for the past few days. So may be give them a few more days before a separate submission on HN.

floatingatoll 7y ago

Compared to the other ten or twenty videoconferencing solutions, it's the only one that has worked reliably and without accessibility issues for technical and non-technical people in my life. The automatic video and audio processing features make it so that a day-one user has as good an experience as a year-two user, and I haven't had to answer any technical support questions about it to my family. FaceTime is the only serious competitor I can think of that's able to deliver as quality of a call experience in a 1:1 setting with non-technical participants, but it's inaccessible on Windows/Android for starters, and lacks the presentation chops to be used in a business setting.

epanchin 7y ago

Not much different to Microsoft. Buy Windows, still get tracking and ads. I use it because it’s convenient. Hard to justify moving from zoom to ms teams when Microsoft have shown they don’t care about privacy either.

memco 7y ago

So many replies here have identified the value of Zoom: it is easy to use and has reasonably good quality. So the questions I have: can we add to this? Are there ways to use Zoom more privately? Personally I haven't seen many people offer up alternatives that are clear winners. They all have tradeoffs. Since there's tradeoffs I have a hard time moving people to some other direction. If I could says, "Oh Zoom is nice, but Schmooz is the best!" I know people who'd make the move. Even if it's paid.

collyw 7y ago

Having used a few of these lately, it seems to have the best quality of call. Skype is terrible some days. Google hangouts is OK. Cisco Webx is dead in the water every time I have tried to use it. Maybe I just haven't used Zoom enough as the other two do have good days and bad days.

loudmax 7y ago

If your concern is privacy, why are you using Skype and MS Teams? If you don't want a third party getting your contact information, then use a private solution that's actually private. Jitsi and Matrix are open source solutions that both support video conferencing.

jamaicahest 7y ago
Because Teams actually has a decent privacy policy: "As a customer of Office 365, you own and control your data. Microsoft does not use your data for anything other than providing you with the service that you have subscribed to. As a service provider, we do not scan your email, documents, or teams for advertising or for purposes that are not service-related. Microsoft doesn’t have access to uploaded content. Like OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, customer data stays within the tenant. You can check out more about our trust and security related information at the Microsoft Trust Center. Teams follows the same guidance and principles as the Microsoft Trust Center" https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/security-compliance-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/security-com...

chaz 7y ago

> Give them money, while the company is apparently still going to worry about milking advertising dollars out of me? Does Zoom have ads? I haven't seen any. I believe all of the ad tracking is for the reverse: Zoom wants to see if their own advertising is effective. For example, if they buy an ad on Facebook that you saw and then you install the app, they can attribute the install to that ad and measure ROI.

notreallyauser 7y ago
They can track that from the clickthroughs. The adtech economy is far richer that just showing ads and tracking ads -- the suggestion is that they're feeding data from your use of Zoom to enrich your advertising id(s) to help others provide you the most relevant possible advertising experience / track the living daylights out of you. Delete according to world-view.

pergadad 7y ago

Alternatives might be Jitsi and the 8x8 supported by Jitsi tech.

gray_-_wolf 7y ago

> Because “it just works” seems to be the summary I am using it in chromium on linux, and I can tell you it does not just work. The audio is really really shit (constant crackling). I'm basically unable to attend meetings on zoom. Luckily most of them are in google meet which works fine in a browser.

Dunedan 7y ago
You could just install their native app which is available for Linux as well and just works. It's also a real native app and not the usual Electron-based crapware.
- dmitrygr 7y ago
  RTFA? native app collects a LOT of data and sends it off god knows where and what for
- saagarjha 7y ago
  It looks pretty non-native to me; kinda Qt-ish.

SnowflakeOnIce 7y ago

Many music teachers are doing online lessons now, mostly via Zoom. It seems that Zoom is the only popular videoconferencing software these days that allows you to disable all the postprocessing on the audio signal (echo cancellation, noise reduction, etc) through advanced settings. This postprocessing is very useful for /conversation/ meetings among many people with bad audio setups, but for two musicians and music signals, the postprocessing is highly detrimental, causing strange audio artifacts and causing instruments to drop out sporadically. (It seems like there would be a market for videoconferencing software optimized for musicians, where the audio signal is sent at higher quality, given higher priority, and not postprocessed in detrimental ways. And without all the privacy concerns.)

eitally 7y ago
This is an interesting use case. I know these features exist for what would be considered "enterprise" VC platforms. Having administered both Vidyo & Bluejeans previously, at least, I know the admin has pretty discrete control over the codec behavior.

gowld 7y ago

I don't get it. I get that you don't like the adalytics-based business model, you don't use the product. But I don't see a rational basis for making that conditional on cash price, which is an independent concern. It only makes sense if you value the product at somewhere between the cash price and (the cash price - the adalytics cost), and $0 cost is exceedingly unlikely to be the exact boundary. It only makes sense if you make the unsupported leap in logic that says that the cash price is itself promise to not use analytics. But you are willing to accept $0 adalytics-supported products, and FOSS exists and some has adalytics and some doesnt, showing that $0 is not any kind of meaningful boundary.

u801e 7y ago

> So for now Skype and MS Teams works fine, or at least fine enough that I don't bother with Zoom. Which brings me to a side question: what is the value proposition for Zoom? What does their product do so much better than the others that I'd put up with this shit? For me, it's one of the few video chat clients that works well in Linux. Skype may or may not work depending on the version and whether or not Microsoft supports the Linux client. And I have no idea whether MS teams works at all in Linux.

StreamBright 7y ago

>> what is the value proposition for Zoom? Energy consumption. Half hour hangouts drains 30% of battery 3 hours zoom is roughly 5-10%. UX and performance the two major factors why we chose Zoom.

bchociej 7y ago

I'm with you. I have no idea what people like about it that isn't already done better in e.g. Google Meet. Having to download a program is also really crappy IMO. Plenty of other video chat applications work in my browser.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> Having to download a program is also really crappy IMO. Plenty of other video chat applications work in my browser. You know, even two hours ago I'd have agreed with you, but my thinking is evolving. It's pretty clear from responses in this thread that there is a quality difference between Zoom and Hangouts/Slack/Teams/etc, at least under certain circumstances. In addition, anecdotal reports are that if you do insist on joining Zoom via a web browser (even though their user flow really pushes you not to), Zoom's quality goes down a lot. So perhaps the reason Zoom is superior is because of its native app. Whereas Slack and Teams's apps are just Electron clients that use WebRTC, Zoom is doing something truly custom. It seems to be paying dividends. Not everything has to run in a web browser.
- curlypaul924 7y ago
  > Not everything has to run in a web browser. Very true, and not everything should run in a web browser. But if something is going to run outside the browser, I would like some explanation of why.
holidaygoose 7y ago
You might not using it that much I'm guessing. It's meant for power users like teachers, academics, government agencies, people who are doing video conference more than once every day and just need to get things done reliably. Everyone I know has switched to Zoom. It's a clear improvement in a technical sense than all the existing options out there. We're trying to do our jobs, not make a statement and end up embarrassing ourselves professionally. So no Zoom does not have to clean up its privacy act. Other companies need to improve their software on a technical level to be more reliable and be more optimized. It's ridiculous that companies who supposedly have amazing developers like Google, Slack, Microsoft, Facebook, can't even do teleconferencing well. PS: You don't have to download a program -- it has an online version.

imagiko 7y ago

I just Ctrl+F'd Google Meet and no one seems to be really talking about it. We've been using it for our meetings for a long time and it works really well. I'm wondering why it doesn't have widespread adoption. You can call-in via phone, can log the minutes of the meeting and seems to "just work" too

detaro 7y ago
My impression is that to use it you'd need to sign up the organization for G Suite. Whereas Zoom you can just start for free and then if they want individual users can upgrade their accounts to paid ones. That helps with grass-roots adoption in companies. It's also a clear "we pay for video conferencing", not "we pay for video conferencing and all this other stuff we don't want to use because we already have solutions for it"
squeaky-clean 7y ago
Requires a G Suite enterprise account. It also doesn't help that Google Hangouts Meet and Google Hangouts are two similarly named and looking but incompatible products. https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/7317473 https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/7317473
- chinathrow 7y ago
  No, it requires G Suite Basic or better.

tmpz22 7y ago

I said this at the beginning of the crisis and first major rush to Zoom by many companies: their start-up friendly business model is going to bite them hard when they have to blitzscale services and there will be growing pains while they find the right non-vc-subsidized pricing model for long-term customers. I think we can cut them some slack for now as they are under more pressure then many other tech companies. They managed to make a great product - so presumably they'll be able to build the right processes for the company itself soon too.

imhoguy 7y ago

It also just works on Linux - video, screen sharing, window sharing, remote control, whiteboard. Moreover: recording, simple way to mute anyone as host, host less rooms. 1-100 peers? no problem. No need to create account for guests to participatie.

gregkerzhner 7y ago

I am also confused about why zoom is the de-facto conference tool now. I have been working remotely for 6 years and haven't really noticed it being significantly better than other tools like Lifesize or Bluejeans. Also, the inability to draw on the presenter's screen is a big negative in my opinion. Trying to pair lately over Zoom always ends in a bunch of stammering like "erase that dot over there.. no... over there... no, up left..."

sytse 7y ago

Zoom decided to remove the Facebook SDK in their iOS client https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/03/27/zoom-use-of-facebook-sdk-in-ios-client/ https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/03/27/zoom-use-of-facebo... fixing this issue.

saagarjha 7y ago
There’s still a number of creepy things that Zoom does.

matheusmoreira 7y ago

> the company is apparently still going to worry about milking advertising dollars out of me They will never not do that. Paying customer or not, no business is ever going to say "let's give up a huge amount of revenue so we can avoid invading people's privacy and annoying them with ads they don't want to see". To do so would be to miss an opportunity to make even more money. The fact you're a paying customer also implies you have disposable income and you're willing to spend it. Ironically, paying money to avoid advertising makes your attention even more valuable to advertisers. The only way they'll stop advertising is if it's not profitable. The only solution is to block all ads and reduce their return on investment as much as possible.

drdrey 7y ago
The other way they'll stop is regulations
jamaicahest 7y ago
Wrong. Read Microsoft's policy https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/security-compliance-overview https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/security-com... "As a customer of Office 365, you own and control your data. Microsoft does not use your data for anything other than providing you with the service that you have subscribed to. As a service provider, we do not scan your email, documents, or teams for advertising or for purposes that are not service-related. Microsoft doesn’t have access to uploaded content. Like OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, customer data stays within the tenant. You can check out more about our trust and security related information at the Microsoft Trust Center. Teams follows the same guidance and principles as the Microsoft Trust Center."
saagarjha 7y ago
> Paying customer or not, no business is ever going to say "let's give up a huge amount of revenue so we can avoid invading people's privacy and annoying them with ads they don't want to see". Some companies do this and capitalize on it by advertising it.

TheKarateKid 7y ago

> But if you're selling me out to advertisers after I've given you money, then you're one of "those" companies that I avoid if at all possible. Sadly, this happens everywhere. Verizon and ATT? Selling your location and data usage patterns for years. Bank accounts and credit cards? Selling your purchase patterns for decades.