3 ms·

Aside from whatever the Zoom news story of the day is, it's completely unsurprising that they're eating WebEx's lunch. I just tried scheduling a meeting and it

Aside from whatever the Zoom news story of the day is, it's completely unsurprising that they're eating WebEx's lunch. I just tried scheduling a meeting and it was outrageously bad. The bright green "Start" and "Schedule Meeting" buttons just pop up an error. The correct button to progress is the dark grey (as if disabled) "Next" button. It prompts me to create a "personal conference number", whatever that is. This errors and tells that I need set a PIN in my preferences. I search for the preferences for a while and eventually find that I _do_ have a host PIN set... At this point I gave up. Gripes on the participant side: Why does it ask me to provide my name in the browser when joining a meeting before launching the app which already knows my name? Why do I have to manually press the refresh button to discover scheduled meetings? Cisco pulled a Boeing with the development of one of their crown jewels, and Zoom swooped in, even with shady practices, and snatched up significant market share.

duxup 6y ago
I think Cisco bought webex largely because Cisco's big expensive conferencing hardware / software were under threat and they wanted in on what would replace it. Cisco itself has time and again bought its way into things that aren't their core competency and they fumble around with them. They bought Flip video for 590 million years ago, despite the fact that every person in Cisco's office had a smart phone in their pocket that would render it relatively useless... I think video conferencing applications are often doomed to turn into behemoth messes for some reason that I can't figure out.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Since Zoom's first 41 employees were from Webex, somebody should compare the streams and files and see if there are similar markers.
SamBam 6y ago
Ugh. And Google Meet us even worse. My kids' schools use it, for supposed privacy reasons. Audio is absolutely terrible. Echoey as hell. UI is a disaster. You have to install a third party Chrome extension just to get grid view, which keeps breaking. My work uses Zoom, and it's night and day and smooth everything is.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  As a big ol' disclaimer, I work at Google. However, it's no longer necessary to install a 3rd party extension for grid view, it was added natively a few months ago. Also IMO there's been some drastic improvements to audio quality lately. My very noisy fan that triggers my mic in Discord is totally inaudible in Google Meet, even when I'm talking.

duxup 6y ago

I think Cisco bought webex largely because Cisco's big expensive conferencing hardware / software were under threat and they wanted in on what would replace it. Cisco itself has time and again bought its way into things that aren't their core competency and they fumble around with them. They bought Flip video for 590 million years ago, despite the fact that every person in Cisco's office had a smart phone in their pocket that would render it relatively useless... I think video conferencing applications are often doomed to turn into behemoth messes for some reason that I can't figure out.

redis_mlc 6y ago
Since Zoom's first 41 employees were from Webex, somebody should compare the streams and files and see if there are similar markers.

SamBam 6y ago

Ugh. And Google Meet us even worse. My kids' schools use it, for supposed privacy reasons. Audio is absolutely terrible. Echoey as hell. UI is a disaster. You have to install a third party Chrome extension just to get grid view, which keeps breaking. My work uses Zoom, and it's night and day and smooth everything is.

Rebelgecko 6y ago
As a big ol' disclaimer, I work at Google. However, it's no longer necessary to install a 3rd party extension for grid view, it was added natively a few months ago. Also IMO there's been some drastic improvements to audio quality lately. My very noisy fan that triggers my mic in Discord is totally inaudible in Google Meet, even when I'm talking.