7 ms·

You mean to imply that a business would just lie to customers? Come on, the market wouldn't permit that to happen! They'd lose all their customers! /s Edit:

You mean to imply that a business would just lie to customers? Come on, the market wouldn't permit that to happen! They'd lose all their customers! /s Edit: on a less sarcastic note, I'd be less critical of Zoom if their software were open source.

tw04 6y ago
What makes your comments even better is that Zoom's response from the get-go has basically been "Look at all these large companies that are using our service. Would they be using our service if we weren't secure?" Meanwhile the companies in question universally refuse to acknowledge THEY NEVER ACTUALLY VERIFIED ANY of the claims around encryption. It would be hilarious if it weren't so terrifying. And oh, by the way, all of those companies refuse to admit they messed up so they ALSO haven't switched to another service, so Zoom is literally still selling on "If we weren't secure, these big guys wouldn't be paying for our service". It's insanity.
- DelTaco 6y ago
  Feels like Theranos except the only difference is that Zoom has working software
  - skinnymuch 6y ago
    I don’t understand. That means it’s fine. Theranos big issue was not having anything. Otherwise they lied a ton. Not unlike many, many companies.
- zentiggr 6y ago
  Nope, this is human nature at it's most basic and obvious. Saving face by not admitting egregious mistakes and even lying about making or not making them even after the evidence is public and irrefutable is just the human ego defending itself. I'm starting to get past taht sort of childishness in my own life but having lived it for a long time I see it easily in others.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    People don't mind lies though. General public will forget about it after a week if you keep silent or show them lies. Admitting your mistake isn't always a good choice in the corporate environment.
- dec0dedab0de 6y ago
  Meanwhile the companies in question universally refuse to acknowledge THEY NEVER ACTUALLY VERIFIED ANY of the claims around encryption. In most companies I've observed, the people deciding what products to buy are not capable of reviewing any of the products claims. If they happen to have an employee that is capable, and that employee points out a problem, they are usually ignored. Especially if it would make someone in management look bad for spending money on something they shouldn't have, or even worse if it would make them lose their free lunches and golf trips with their vendor buddy.
- brandall10 6y ago
  I've been in the interview loop as of late, and there's been a crazy shift away from Zoom. Almost every video chat I had was using Zoom a couple months back, now everyone is using Google Chat or MS Team Meetings. Now these are small to medium-ish size companies (20-500 people), so maybe it's not a big deal to Zoom's marketing bottom line. But it's definitely a thing.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    It’s the business model. Scaling up Zoom or Webex is costly because it’s based on meeting hosts. Teams or Meet works fine (unlike the train wreck of Skype), have improved recently and are already paid for.
  - skinnymuch 6y ago
    Is any one choosing Teams for Teams alone and not because of already having a relation with Microsoft? That’s Microsoft’s playbook. People are doing 50-200 person video meetings with Google? Has Meet really improved that much since March/April? That’s not that long ago. Otherwise it seems more like cost is the reason. Not anything relating to quality.
    - bigiain 6y ago
      We're using Google Meet, but for the very Microsoftian reason of "it comes with our GSuite"... While we pay lip service to Zoom's super shitty security stance, we now run a video meeting service where it's trivially easy to click the "turn on captions" button, and see how good a job the world's biggest advertising agency is doing of transcribing all the audio in our most sensitive business WFH calls... :sigh: (I have my own Jitsi Meet instance running on AWS, but there's me and about four of my tinfoil headwear sporting friends who care enough to bother using it...)
- phs318u 6y ago
  The National Australia Bank (one of Australia’s “big 4”, and our biggest business bank), settled on Zoom for all internal video comms. It’s usability made such a material difference to daily ops that physical meetings were halved way before COVID. I believe the review of Zoom constituted a dot-point analysis of their marketing claims.
lukifer 6y ago
From a business model perspective, if Zoom embraced open-source, what would be their moat/value-add, compared to users downloading/forking from GitHub? Not being snarky: I'm genuinely curious what the "good citizen" (but still profitable) OS/FOSS model would look like, whether at equivalent revenue or reduced revenue.
- tejtm 6y ago
  It is not like no one ever came up with video chatting before and they are the only ones around so the moat is moot. The only reasons they exist in any meaningful way starts the "just works" thing and ends with the "vhs v.s betamax" thing. For the business model, it is the same as other OS, there are companies that want a tech insurance policy.
  - skinnymuch 6y ago
    No other company right now can get the reliability and “just works” like Zoom. If they open source everything, why wouldn’t all the competitors including the biggest companies in the world not start seeing how Zoom is doing things. We already see open source “borrowed” frequently. Amazon’s AWS being a regular.
    - inetknght 6y ago
      > No other company right now can get the reliability and “just works” like Zoom. I disagree. Plenty of video chat software has comparable reliability and "just works"-ity. Google Meet, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Discord... Hell, Apple has had "just works" and "reliability" in their walled garden since FaceTime was introduced -- if you're willing to look only in their walled garden.
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        I haven't tried discord, but all of the other tools that you mention are materially worse than Zoom, in my experience. Zoom is almost as good on a laptop as dedicated Cisco gear. I have been video conferencing mostly for work for almost a decade, and Zoom is the best solution for that that I've encountered. I recently changed roles, and the use of Zoom was a small reason to go with the company I did.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
philwelch 6y ago
> Come on, the market wouldn't permit that to happen! They'd lose all their customers! You scoff, but isn’t that exactly what we’re all doing to Zoom right now?
- ironmagma 6y ago
  All? So Zoom has basically no customers now, because their initial false claims triggered a boycott?
ngcc_hk 6y ago
With your personal info kind of closed sourced. The program is not the ultimate issue. And they can be changed without you knowing it. Do you have a Fingerprint that what you get is what they share?

tw04 6y ago

What makes your comments even better is that Zoom's response from the get-go has basically been "Look at all these large companies that are using our service. Would they be using our service if we weren't secure?" Meanwhile the companies in question universally refuse to acknowledge THEY NEVER ACTUALLY VERIFIED ANY of the claims around encryption. It would be hilarious if it weren't so terrifying. And oh, by the way, all of those companies refuse to admit they messed up so they ALSO haven't switched to another service, so Zoom is literally still selling on "If we weren't secure, these big guys wouldn't be paying for our service". It's insanity.

DelTaco 6y ago
Feels like Theranos except the only difference is that Zoom has working software
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  I don’t understand. That means it’s fine. Theranos big issue was not having anything. Otherwise they lied a ton. Not unlike many, many companies.
zentiggr 6y ago
Nope, this is human nature at it's most basic and obvious. Saving face by not admitting egregious mistakes and even lying about making or not making them even after the evidence is public and irrefutable is just the human ego defending itself. I'm starting to get past taht sort of childishness in my own life but having lived it for a long time I see it easily in others.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  People don't mind lies though. General public will forget about it after a week if you keep silent or show them lies. Admitting your mistake isn't always a good choice in the corporate environment.
dec0dedab0de 6y ago
Meanwhile the companies in question universally refuse to acknowledge THEY NEVER ACTUALLY VERIFIED ANY of the claims around encryption. In most companies I've observed, the people deciding what products to buy are not capable of reviewing any of the products claims. If they happen to have an employee that is capable, and that employee points out a problem, they are usually ignored. Especially if it would make someone in management look bad for spending money on something they shouldn't have, or even worse if it would make them lose their free lunches and golf trips with their vendor buddy.
brandall10 6y ago
I've been in the interview loop as of late, and there's been a crazy shift away from Zoom. Almost every video chat I had was using Zoom a couple months back, now everyone is using Google Chat or MS Team Meetings. Now these are small to medium-ish size companies (20-500 people), so maybe it's not a big deal to Zoom's marketing bottom line. But it's definitely a thing.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  It’s the business model. Scaling up Zoom or Webex is costly because it’s based on meeting hosts. Teams or Meet works fine (unlike the train wreck of Skype), have improved recently and are already paid for.
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  Is any one choosing Teams for Teams alone and not because of already having a relation with Microsoft? That’s Microsoft’s playbook. People are doing 50-200 person video meetings with Google? Has Meet really improved that much since March/April? That’s not that long ago. Otherwise it seems more like cost is the reason. Not anything relating to quality.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    We're using Google Meet, but for the very Microsoftian reason of "it comes with our GSuite"... While we pay lip service to Zoom's super shitty security stance, we now run a video meeting service where it's trivially easy to click the "turn on captions" button, and see how good a job the world's biggest advertising agency is doing of transcribing all the audio in our most sensitive business WFH calls... :sigh: (I have my own Jitsi Meet instance running on AWS, but there's me and about four of my tinfoil headwear sporting friends who care enough to bother using it...)
phs318u 6y ago
The National Australia Bank (one of Australia’s “big 4”, and our biggest business bank), settled on Zoom for all internal video comms. It’s usability made such a material difference to daily ops that physical meetings were halved way before COVID. I believe the review of Zoom constituted a dot-point analysis of their marketing claims.

lukifer 6y ago

From a business model perspective, if Zoom embraced open-source, what would be their moat/value-add, compared to users downloading/forking from GitHub? Not being snarky: I'm genuinely curious what the "good citizen" (but still profitable) OS/FOSS model would look like, whether at equivalent revenue or reduced revenue.

tejtm 6y ago
It is not like no one ever came up with video chatting before and they are the only ones around so the moat is moot. The only reasons they exist in any meaningful way starts the "just works" thing and ends with the "vhs v.s betamax" thing. For the business model, it is the same as other OS, there are companies that want a tech insurance policy.
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  No other company right now can get the reliability and “just works” like Zoom. If they open source everything, why wouldn’t all the competitors including the biggest companies in the world not start seeing how Zoom is doing things. We already see open source “borrowed” frequently. Amazon’s AWS being a regular.
  - inetknght 6y ago
    > No other company right now can get the reliability and “just works” like Zoom. I disagree. Plenty of video chat software has comparable reliability and "just works"-ity. Google Meet, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Discord... Hell, Apple has had "just works" and "reliability" in their walled garden since FaceTime was introduced -- if you're willing to look only in their walled garden.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      I haven't tried discord, but all of the other tools that you mention are materially worse than Zoom, in my experience. Zoom is almost as good on a laptop as dedicated Cisco gear. I have been video conferencing mostly for work for almost a decade, and Zoom is the best solution for that that I've encountered. I recently changed roles, and the use of Zoom was a small reason to go with the company I did.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

philwelch 6y ago

> Come on, the market wouldn't permit that to happen! They'd lose all their customers! You scoff, but isn’t that exactly what we’re all doing to Zoom right now?

ironmagma 6y ago
All? So Zoom has basically no customers now, because their initial false claims triggered a boycott?

ngcc_hk 6y ago

With your personal info kind of closed sourced. The program is not the ultimate issue. And they can be changed without you knowing it. Do you have a Fingerprint that what you get is what they share?