17 ms·

What Comes After Zoom?

158 points by 1cvmask 6y ago

neltnerb 6y ago
Certainly I can see Microsoft simply integrating video chat into the Office suite. I'm kind of shocked they haven't yet really solved real-time collaboration given that they own Skype and Office.
- edoceo 6y ago
  BigCo often cant see the answer in front of them - can't iterate either when every HiPPO needs to put their mark on a product.
- jojobas 6y ago
  Teams is already rather integrated with Office and Sharepoint.
- wenc 6y ago
  It's called Microsoft Teams, and in its current iteration, it's surprisingly good. I actually prefer it to Slack. It is highly integrated with Office 365 (supports live collaboration etc.). The HD video quality is surprisingly solid -- comparable to Zoom, far surpasses Webex and Google Hangouts -- and uses a different protocol, codec(s) and network than Skype for Business, which I have always found spotty. MS Teams is the slated successor to Skype for Business (good riddance). https://www.djeek.com/2018/01/microsoft-teams-and-the-protocols-it-uses-opus-and-mnp24/ https://www.djeek.com/2018/01/microsoft-teams-and-the-protoc... It can handle up to 250 participants for group video chat (similar to Zoom), and there's an MS Teams Live Events edition that can handle 10k participants. (20k during COVID) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live-events/plan-for-teams-live-events https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live-e... It actually does a few things better than Zoom -- its virtual background feature is able to better detect and eliminate complex backgrounds. It recently introduced on-the-fly automatic closed captioning (through speech recognition). Later this year, it will have a larger video grid (currently the limit is 3x3) and AI-based noise cancellation on mic input -- previously the domain of offerings like krisp.ai. On iOS devices, it even lets you do live screen-sharing on mobile (using Apple's Screen Recorder mechanism), which makes it easy to demo mobile apps on a video call. EDIT: --I don't think Zoom let you do this (yet?)-- not a true statement, but leaving this here with strikethrough.
  - knrz 6y ago
    Zoom lets you do screen sharing on iOS like you’ve mentioned... and it has for at least the past 2 months.
    - wenc 6y ago
      I stand corrected then.
  - nemothekid 6y ago
    Zoom, does and always had, but apps like Hangouts and Slack don't. We used to use Slack calls a lot, but after quarantine I found myself saying lets move to Teams/Zoom so I can share my screen on my iPad.
  - meritt 6y ago
    My company tried MS Teams for about two days before canning it and switching back to Slack + Zoom. I've never encountered such a poorly designed product [1] other than the one it was supposed to replace, Skype for Business. Why the does chat need to take up so much space on the screen and why is everything presented in basically an old school SMS layout (I'm looking at you too, Signal). I tried a handful of their integrations nothing worked correctly. Trying to simply enable github commits/PRs/etc was a confusing nightmare of authenticating multiple parties and ultimately all it did was have a chatbot privately spam me, but couldn't have it reside in a channel. Screen sharing is a disaster for everything business oriented too (ms teams, zoom, slack, whatever google's thing is called this week). They're slow, laggy, frequently crash, and resolution is unreadable most of the time. If you need to have screen sharing where your voice chat happens at the same time as your video actions, Discord is the only thing that works flawlessly. It's superior on simple voice chat too, persistent voice chat rooms, etc. It's lovely software. [1] https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/02/teams-beta-windows-100708530-large.jpg https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/02/teams-bet...
    - wenc 6y ago
      Screen-sharing on Teams has been pretty solid -- after all, screen sharing is an enterprise's bread and butter. As someone who averages 10-15 meetings a week, most of them with screen shares, I think I have a pretty good sample size to come to that conclusion. I can't comment on aesthetics since that's fairly subjective. I can't comment on integrations either since I've only tried a few, but I find it integrates fairly effortlessly with Azure Devops (ie Microsoft's attempt at replicating Github in what was previously Team Foundation Server) [1]. Here's the thing about Microsoft stuff -- generally things work well if you remain in the Microsoft ecosystem. Otherwise, you'll likely have to do extra work. That said, Teams has improved drastically since 2017. Microsoft's philosophy these days seems to be move fast, ship crap and get better quickly. Not in every product line, but I've definitely seen this happen with Teams development and I've actually come to like what the Teams product has become today. I have to confess, Microsoft under Satya Nadella is a very different company from what it once was. [1] We're not allowed to use Github in my organization (bigcorp, IP etc.) but I've found Azure Devops to be quite a decent substitute. It plays well with a git pull-request workflow, has almost full feature parity with Github as far as I can tell, plus has a built-in kanban board. I like Github -- it's more tightly focused and simpler -- but I've been able to carve out a part of Azure Devops that is similar to Github and maintain my previous git workflow without much trouble. Azure Devops is not the dumpster fire I'd expected it to be -- it's actually fairly good in parts. (the only pain-in-the-neck with Azure Devops is licensing cost -- it's not free. In the enterprise, it has named-user licensing which can get costly. I wouldn't have used it if we didn't already have it and couldn't use private Github.)
Yhippa 6y ago
Very interesting post. One thing I'm thinking of is if an enterprise uses something like Slack then you could have persistent video rooms similar to the audio rooms in Discord. The last paragraph makes a good point though. As good as Slack is, there is something that still feels inefficient to me. When I'm trying to communicate with people it's almost like shouting out into the ether. Did they see my message? Why haven't they responded yet? I need this question answered now. It's strange. Email for the most part you were reasonably assured when you hit the send button that it was off into their inbox. It would be kind of cool to see what the Snap of business comms could look like.
- cjsawyer 6y ago
  I want slack but with a walkie talkie button.
- kwindla 6y ago
  Tandem has done a really nice job with persistent video/audio rooms for distributed teams: https://tandem.chat/ https://tandem.chat/
jojobas 6y ago
Why do we have RFC standardized and decentralized email but never could make standard chat/call protocol? XMPP and now Matrix made good progress in that direction but are mostly obscure to date.
- bsder 6y ago
  1) Because email predated everybody trying to become a monopoly and extract rents from the Internet. 2) NAT really screwed us all by breaking the end-to-end nature of the Internet.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    3) because electronic mail is fundamental and early attempts at walled gardens proved it could not be contained
  - Shared404 6y ago
    > 2) NAT really screwed us all by breaking the end-to-end nature of the Internet. Don't worry, we'll all be on IPV6 any day now.
  - zucker42 6y ago
    Could you explain how NAT is relevant to the growth of walled gardens to someone was born after the development of the World Wide Web?
    - jodrellblank 6y ago
      If nothing else, NAT makes it harder to leave a walled garden for a small chat program between you and your friends/family/interest group. Without it, you could potentially all run the program and talk. With it, someone has to be technical enough to do port forwarding, someone has to be on a connectin without carrier-grade NAT so that port forwarding is an option, and/or someone has to pay with money/time to setup and run a server on a dedicated IP or upgrade their connection to a static IP. The most easily accessible alternative is another company's closed system. I suspect NAT wasn't involved in that developing as much as money was - IRC, email, Newsgroups were hard to profit from. Having a distinctive service which is different from your competitors so customers can be attracted, and which is closed so customers want to bring their friends and family in to talk to them and then can't leave without the whole group leaving, is bound to be more profitable for the winners than taking part in a federated system where only one user can join and talk to their contacts with relays to other servers.
bsder 6y ago
Everything has voice ... that nobody wants. Customer service is now so terrible that I don't want to talk to you and I damn sure don't want you to talk to me. At this point, I've kinda bought into the whole Millennial "If I can't do it online without interacting with a human, go die in a fire cause you aren't making a sale." Quit hiding the price--you simply lost the sale. Don't ask for a quote-you simply lost the sale. Don't make me sign up before paying--you simply lost the sale. If I can't do a return solely through online interaction--you simply lost any further sales. I see Zoom and its ilk the same way. Ubiquitous video chat--that nobody really wants.
- usui 6y ago
  I don't understand. Can you explain the connection between desire of online convenience (this part is understandable) and Zoom?
  - bsder 6y ago
    The fundamental question is: "Do people actually want video?" Audio and, especially, video are very synchronous. Normally, the last thing I want in my schedule is another synchronous event. Do I need some video? Maybe. Perhaps my one-on-one with my manager. Do we need video for a weekly group meeting? Do we even need that weekly group meeting? Sure, it was convenient when everybody was in the office. How convenient is it now that everybody is at home?
Joeri 6y ago
I feel video conferencing is a sidetrack. It is an approximation of a physical meeting that never captures the spirit of the real thing and prevents us from moving on to something better. The real power of digital communication is that it is searchable, remixable and that you don’t need to be at a specific place at a specific time to take part, and yet we now all have slots in our calendar requiring us to be in something that has none of those benefits. This is an anti-pattern. Group communication needs to be async, written and structured for easy access. The linux kernel mailing list is a much closer approximation of how it should be than any video conference, but it too is a high friction system. No tool so far has cracked this, although some like discourse and basecamp are trying. Google tried to once upon a time with wave, but they’ve given up and joined the physical meeting proxy club.
- aantix 6y ago
  Yac Chat. Async audio messages, optional desktop record with high quality transcription to make knowledge searchable.
- zucker42 6y ago
  I fundamentally disagree. The reason synchronous video communication continues to dominate is because it's more information dense than text in many situations, and more interactive than asynchronous alternatives. Asynchronous communication has its place, and it's amazing what has been accomplished over the LKML and similar. Software projects tend to make this sort of communication ideal, since they are amenable to individualized contributions. But the prescription that efficient digital communication must be asynchronous and textual is incorrect.
  - n3storm 6y ago
    I disagree. The reason is that some people is not educated in async or just lazy. It takes just one person that refuses to go async to make everybody use video. I heard it thousand of times: "let me call you cause I explain better by phone" No, you don't. You just use many resources to keep conversation going until you find terms and produce proper phrases. You could perfectly have elaborated this by your own and wrote it down in an email or chat group. Sorry this was deep inside me and had to come out :D
war1025 6y ago
I haven't used Zoom, but I have attempted to use Google Meet for video chat and it was an abysmal tire fire. My mom wanted to do a family video chat over Easter and I thought, "Hey, we use Google Meet at work. I bet it will be great for this." It was a completely unusable experience of frozen videos and dropped audio. I was ready to just completely throw in the towel on the entire idea. My mom said, "Well, me and my sisters have been using Skype for years and it works just fine." So I begrudgingly downloaded Skype and created an account. It just works. It's amazing. We've been doing video chats every Sunday evening with my mom and my brother's family for a couple months now. I thought I hated video chat. It turned out I just hated Google's idea of video chat. My wife uses Facebook video chat with her mom and it works pretty acceptably too. I think Skype is still better, but Google Meet is absolute bottom of the barrel in video chat technology. Which is a shame because Google Meet works great for audio with screen sharing. Maybe Zoom works comparably well to Skype. I hope so.
- KMnO4 6y ago
  I’m my experience, Google Meet has very steep minimum bandwidth requirements by default. You can (and probably should) set the send/receive quality to 360p video, but it’s miles behind the adaptive bandwidth scaling that Zoom and Skype use. If you force your network adapter to be 1 Mbps mid-call, Zoom will quickly butcher the quality to keep up. Google will drop out.
- eitally 6y ago
  Duo is a much better choice for family video chat than Meet/Hangouts
  - war1025 6y ago
    I've never heard of it before you mentioning it. That does look to be more in line with what I'd want. A bit confused why they wouldn't leverage the same technology in Meet since that seems to be the product that gets more press.
axegon_ 6y ago
IMO, Zoom has the worst user experience of all video conferencing tools by a long shot, at least on Linux, regardless of whether you are a paying user or not. And while Skype was doing a terrible job for years, these days it's light years ahead of Zoom. Google Meet is also doing an incredible job and lately I've been using it a lot. I seriously don't understand how a horrible product such as Zoom made it so big... So whatever comes after Zoom, I hope it will do a better job.
- njovin 6y ago
  Care to elaborate? I’ve had the opposite experience. Zoom is far from ideal but Aside from a twice-daily freeze (that I suspect has something to do with my audio driver) Zoom works wonderfully. Google meet, on the other hand, has been miserable. I’ve had cases where the group could hear me but I couldn’t hear them, even when the “test audio” button in the browser client produced sound. Even after calling in using a mobile phone I could then hear the group but then they couldn’t hear me. It feels like an alpha product as far as reliability goes.
  - axegon_ 6y ago
    Sure, I'll elaborate: video and audio quality is identical to that of Yahoo! messenger from the late 90's. As soon as I open zoom, it eats up about 80% of my CPU (without being in a call or anything). Controls work 60% of the time at best (turning off/on my webcam takes a dozen clicks), No matter what I do it won't let me remove the passwords from my rooms. It is a horrible experience. Meet has been rock solid and my team switched over to it about two weeks ago - 0 issues so far.
- dnautics 6y ago
  You haven't tried Cisco WebEx,have you? For a good chunk of time Skype was dead while MS was busy figuring out how to assimilate it. Google was out because companies didn't want google to spy on you, so your options were WebEx or zoom (which we didn't know was a spying dumpster fire yet). We eventually also had to give up on WebEx because it simply did not work consistently on our Linux Dev's laptops. So our option was "or zoom"
nharada 6y ago
I feel part of Zoom's initial foothold in the market was that inside of a conference room it "just worked". Or at least more so than other options I'd tried, especially a couple of years ago. Even earlier this year I had issues getting Google Meet to work in our office's conference rooms. Minimizing or removing the "fiddling with the AV software" phase of meetings is huge.
skybrian 6y ago
If you want to play in hard mode, figure out how to get video calls working for someone calling their grandma in a nursing home, when she doesn't have a laptop or smartphone. It would have to be a device that's as simple to use as a phone. Not a cell phone, a regular phone that sits on a desk, the old-fashioned kind. I bet a whole lot of people wish that they had something like that working during the pandemic.
- Larrikin 6y ago
  I believe there are multiple solutions from the various big tech companies. Most of them I would never trust, like Facebook's solution, but they all seem to fulfill what you're asking for.
- mjevans 6y ago
  If everyone had a Peer to Peer optimized ISP and there was a national ID registry, it would be very easy to lookup someone via their national ID signature updated DNS entry. This could also carry other data.
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    I think you're distinctly overlooking the many problems that come with 'easy to look up someone'. There are already massive harassment and stalking issues for some people with decentralized platforms like Facebook, let alone a central government registry.
- ponker 6y ago
  It exists, it's called a Facebook Portal. It's an outstanding piece of hardware and has been an absolute blessing for our elderly relatives in this pandemic. Of course, you are letting Facebook into your living room, which does give me the willies but not as many willies as the thought of our kids and their grandparents going 3 months without seeing each other.
- zodiakzz 6y ago
  Didn't Skype used to sell such devices? Can't remember if they had video.
ISL 6y ago
At its end, the article suggests a wonderful question. What is Zoom's Yo?
- nexuist 6y ago
  Video voice mail? TikTok for enterprise?
  - ISL 6y ago
    I feel like those might convey too much content? Perhaps a link to a three-second "Never gonna give you up..." Rick-roll video? Yo was one-bit Twitter. I don't know what one-bit video looks like?
    - nexuist 6y ago
      Instagram with a 1kb upload limit
SubiculumCode 6y ago
Well after I just got to experience the Oculus Quest, I'm going to say, after a few more VR generations, Zoom with VR avatars
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ipiz0618 6y ago
With my experience Microsoft Teams is actually a better choice than Zoom. You don't even need to install the program and it works on the web, unlike the fake "web interface" of Zoom that just loads infinitely and forces you to install their suspicious client.
ponker 6y ago
What I think is interesting is how much worse the conversation experience is today vs. during the days of circuit-switched landline phones. There was no perceptible difference between a live conversation and one by phone between New York and Washington DC. Today the conversations seem so stilted because there's 50+ milliseconds of latency at a MINIMUM that makes interrupting and a back-and-forth conversational flow absolutely impossible. Also lost completely are the little "ahs" and "ums" that add color to a conversation.
Blackstone4 6y ago
Virtual reality meetings? Ideally to truly replicate the in-person experience since I feel like the body language/phyiscal presense ocmponent is important.
- aurbano 6y ago
  This could be it, but current headsets are not that comfy after too much use, and if you don't have AC at home (tons of EU homes won't have them) they can be a nightmare in the summer...
mrkramer 6y ago
The biggest opportunity in video was YouTube hence Google acquired it. Zoom is only for business users: institutions, companies etc. Personal users use WhatsApp, Skype, Viber or whatever they prefer. "we are waiting for the Snap, Clubhouse and Yo." If products like this emerge they will be niche like Twitch is for gaming video live streaming.
- diegoperini 6y ago
  Wow, does Yo still exist? What have they been doing lately?
monkin 6y ago
Zoom out?
kyberias 6y ago
Why do they write about Zoom as if it invented video conferencing? Who is blind here?
- tompagenet2 6y ago
  I think the author is noting that, as with Dropbox, video conferencing isn't new (Skype has it), it's just then when the chips were down and millions of people needed it Zoom seems to have worked better for more people than more established entries, and part of this is probably that some fiddly things are done well in Zoom. I'm making no comment personally about Zoom or its ethics, just trying to clarify how I see the post.
jpalomaki 6y ago
I believe integrated groupware is the future. No separate tools for chat, discussions, calls, screensharing, collaborative editing, email and filesharing. For example somebody pulls up document in a call. For team work it would make sense if it was editable by everyone right there in the conference tool.
- zhte415 6y ago
  This was Google Wave. A bit ahead of it's time.
  - auiya 6y ago
    Wave was an awesome product too. It's really a shame it succumbed to the fickle and careless whims of Google's upper management. They've had so many solid products that didn't get a properly good push, and instead pushed products which were destined for failure, all to the same result.
- nicornk 6y ago
  That‘s basically MS Teams.
peq 6y ago
An underappreciatd feature of Zoom is the 40 minute restriction in the free version. Meetings are more productive with an enforced time limit.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
Crop.
DebtDeflation 6y ago
My company uses WebEx not Zoom, but I have found meetings far more tolerable since I started disabling inbound video. I've always turned off my own video, but turning off everyone else's has been a game changer. The important parts of a remote meeting are the audio and screenshare; video is a net-negative. I get no value from watching people type, fidget around with a phone, have random family members and pets walk by, etc. and actually find it quite distracting.
- roland35 6y ago
  I find the opposite is true, meetings where I have video enabled are more focused and enjoyable to me (as an introvert too!). I think people pay more attention on video calls in general, and it seems like conversations flow better with fewer of those "you go... No you go!" type moments. Overall it does require people to take work from home seriously though! Back in the days when we worked in offices video calls did have less pets and random people or kids walk in! If people are able to have a dedicated office this works better but obviously not everyone was prepared for a forced work from home experience. It does require a solid internet connection which has been strained lately.
- machinehermit 6y ago
  How do you show how nice your house is that way though?
- vecio 6y ago
  I agree with this and have made an audio only conferencing service https://www.producthunt.com/posts/mornin https://www.producthunt.com/posts/mornin
- ben509 6y ago
  Yup. The worst on Zoom and Google Meet is: a. the person with feedback or background noise causing the video to flip to them b. someone displaying their lunch for everyone to see c. Zoom specialty: obnoxious video backgrounds Zoom helps you block trolls, but does nothing for the pain of having to listen to someone's feedback during an hour long meeting. And you often don't want to interrupt the meeting to pester people about their microphone. It's a similar problem to Slack. We have some people who overuse @here and various similar sins, and Slack's answer is there's no reason to block, just fix your company.[1] What this misses is there's a broad range of behavior between pleasant and malicious. There are also a broad range of social remedies we normally use to deal with this behavior. Most of those social remedies don't work well online. It's surprisingly hard to craft a written correction that doesn't come across as an attack, especially if you're senior and don't want to unintentionally throw that rank around. [1]: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481 https://twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481
aurbano 6y ago
Is there a way to have good async group video chat? I haven't given this much thought but maybe this is an interesting direction to explore?
- nlitened 6y ago
  Telegram has short video-messages in chats and group chats. They have their use.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- drewp 6y ago
  Check out https://www.marcopolo.me/ https://www.marcopolo.me/ It will even stream an in-progress video message to you as it's being recorded if you happen to be looking at the app then.
MichaelAO 6y ago
As an educator, Zoom is clunky and not designed for the use case. We built an interactive live streaming platform during COVID-19 that we've found powerful. A few keys features have been moderated chat, the ability to invite students to join via video, embedded quizzes, and various screen sharing layouts. Check out a stream today to see it in action: https://dexter.live/ https://dexter.live/
bullen 6y ago
The action MMO is the final medium, in VR or not, I suspect in 3rd person! Positional 3D audio is the last frontier. But I'm not sure you will want it for public gatherings, it should be a friends only thing in a sea of chat bubbles above the characters heads. The chat feed is not interesting because the context is lost and trolling is too easy.
- foxbarrington 6y ago
  2d positional audio works really well too. Check out https://rambly.app https://rambly.app for a 16-bit rpg feel. Works great for virtual happy hours / groups of 5+.
pornel 6y ago
I think Facebook is ultimately right, just too early, betting on VR being the next thing. Spatial presence is incredibly important: you can face towards the person you're speaking to. You can whisper to the person next to you. Crowded rooms naturally organize in cliques/groups. In a video chat all of this is broken or awkward. VR today is way too bulky and annoying. It's in the "luggable microcomputers" stage before laptops and phones, but it shows a glimpse of the future. For example, standalone Oculus is less of a hassle than thethered headsets. Camera-based hand tracking demos show how people can freely gesticulate in the VR space. Imagine that extended to full-body tracking and in-headset sensors that capture facial expressions and "deepfake" you in VR.
- codethief 6y ago
  I agree 100%. Speaking of spatial presence, I recently came across tonari[0] through a post[1] here on HN and thought it looked really cool. In case any of the tonari developers happen to hang out around here: I would love to try this out sometime! :) (Side note: The blog post linked in the HN discussion below does a much better job at explaining what it is that they're doing – at least to me as a techie.) [0] https://tonari.no https://tonari.no [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23540586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23540586
- ponker 6y ago
  It’s not too early for Facebook, it’s too early for startups. Facebook can burn half a billion a year for 10 years and then when the market is ready, be in the leading position and be able to buy up all the promising startups in the space.
fortran77 6y ago
Why don't you ask Bernadette? https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0946288/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0946288/
zitterbewegung 6y ago
The thing that comes after Zoom is another app that makes the experience of teleconferencing easier. If I were to guess maybe some kind of Mixed Reality system. Having Audio, Video with Video sharing is good. For some niche industries like CAD / CAM and also VR /AR / Video game design if you had some kind of Mixed reality system that could allow people to collaborate with 3D data you could actually have an interesting product.
rm445 6y ago
What on earth happened to Skype? Over a decade of head start, why wasn't it completely untouchable when COVID-19 came along? Another thought. Last year at the peak of Fortnite hype, when top DJs were hosting parties live in game etc, there was talk that the next big thing in communications might be everyone hanging out in games, Fortnite or whatever came next. I do think that lots of young people are meeting friends in games, but it hasn't had the enormous breakthrough in culture that Zoom has. We can probably retire our expectations of some kind of Metaverse for a few more years.
- stevewodil 6y ago
  >What on earth happened to Skype? Microsoft happened
  - umeshunni 6y ago
    eBay happened, then Microsoft happened.
- buboard 6y ago
  Second life has been hosting virtual concerts for 15 years. They have apparently seen a huge spike in signups during covid , that they ran out of virtual land to sell
- cryptoz 6y ago
  Skype did a lot wrong, for sure. But something worth mentioning, In 2004-2006 my ISP in Canada illegally "intentionally degraded the quality and reliability of Skype calls" to convince customers that Skype sucked and that we should buy/use their video/call software. It worked, in one sense. I have hated Skype ever since because it was absolutely the worst, and never trusted it to work. I do know that wasn't their fault but still won't use them. They also seem to have super bad security, IMO.
- remir 6y ago
  Microsoft, weirdly, didn't know what to do with Skype. For a company focused on productivity, that's a little strange.
shmerl 6y ago
I don't get why Zoom got such attention. I've never even heard about it before the pandemic. But I've heard of other video conferencing tools.
- buboard 6y ago
  even before the pandemic, it was known as the most reliable chat for largish meetings. Nothing else worked so well, and it still doesn.t
buboard 6y ago
Has someone repackaged the decades-old phone hotlines as an app and named it Clubhouse?
dancemethis 6y ago
We have Jitsi, which is Free Software. Zoom shouldn't even be considered for anything in the first place.

158 points by 1cvmask 6y ago

Certainly I can see Microsoft simply integrating video chat into the Office suite. I'm kind of shocked they haven't yet really solved real-time collaboration given that they own Skype and Office.

edoceo 6y ago
BigCo often cant see the answer in front of them - can't iterate either when every HiPPO needs to put their mark on a product.
jojobas 6y ago
Teams is already rather integrated with Office and Sharepoint.
wenc 6y ago
It's called Microsoft Teams, and in its current iteration, it's surprisingly good. I actually prefer it to Slack. It is highly integrated with Office 365 (supports live collaboration etc.). The HD video quality is surprisingly solid -- comparable to Zoom, far surpasses Webex and Google Hangouts -- and uses a different protocol, codec(s) and network than Skype for Business, which I have always found spotty. MS Teams is the slated successor to Skype for Business (good riddance). https://www.djeek.com/2018/01/microsoft-teams-and-the-protocols-it-uses-opus-and-mnp24/ https://www.djeek.com/2018/01/microsoft-teams-and-the-protoc... It can handle up to 250 participants for group video chat (similar to Zoom), and there's an MS Teams Live Events edition that can handle 10k participants. (20k during COVID) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live-events/plan-for-teams-live-events https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live-e... It actually does a few things better than Zoom -- its virtual background feature is able to better detect and eliminate complex backgrounds. It recently introduced on-the-fly automatic closed captioning (through speech recognition). Later this year, it will have a larger video grid (currently the limit is 3x3) and AI-based noise cancellation on mic input -- previously the domain of offerings like krisp.ai. On iOS devices, it even lets you do live screen-sharing on mobile (using Apple's Screen Recorder mechanism), which makes it easy to demo mobile apps on a video call. EDIT: --I don't think Zoom let you do this (yet?)-- not a true statement, but leaving this here with strikethrough.
- knrz 6y ago
  Zoom lets you do screen sharing on iOS like you’ve mentioned... and it has for at least the past 2 months.
  - wenc 6y ago
    I stand corrected then.
- nemothekid 6y ago
  Zoom, does and always had, but apps like Hangouts and Slack don't. We used to use Slack calls a lot, but after quarantine I found myself saying lets move to Teams/Zoom so I can share my screen on my iPad.
- meritt 6y ago
  My company tried MS Teams for about two days before canning it and switching back to Slack + Zoom. I've never encountered such a poorly designed product [1] other than the one it was supposed to replace, Skype for Business. Why the does chat need to take up so much space on the screen and why is everything presented in basically an old school SMS layout (I'm looking at you too, Signal). I tried a handful of their integrations nothing worked correctly. Trying to simply enable github commits/PRs/etc was a confusing nightmare of authenticating multiple parties and ultimately all it did was have a chatbot privately spam me, but couldn't have it reside in a channel. Screen sharing is a disaster for everything business oriented too (ms teams, zoom, slack, whatever google's thing is called this week). They're slow, laggy, frequently crash, and resolution is unreadable most of the time. If you need to have screen sharing where your voice chat happens at the same time as your video actions, Discord is the only thing that works flawlessly. It's superior on simple voice chat too, persistent voice chat rooms, etc. It's lovely software. [1] https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/02/teams-beta-windows-100708530-large.jpg https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/02/teams-bet...
  - wenc 6y ago
    Screen-sharing on Teams has been pretty solid -- after all, screen sharing is an enterprise's bread and butter. As someone who averages 10-15 meetings a week, most of them with screen shares, I think I have a pretty good sample size to come to that conclusion. I can't comment on aesthetics since that's fairly subjective. I can't comment on integrations either since I've only tried a few, but I find it integrates fairly effortlessly with Azure Devops (ie Microsoft's attempt at replicating Github in what was previously Team Foundation Server) [1]. Here's the thing about Microsoft stuff -- generally things work well if you remain in the Microsoft ecosystem. Otherwise, you'll likely have to do extra work. That said, Teams has improved drastically since 2017. Microsoft's philosophy these days seems to be move fast, ship crap and get better quickly. Not in every product line, but I've definitely seen this happen with Teams development and I've actually come to like what the Teams product has become today. I have to confess, Microsoft under Satya Nadella is a very different company from what it once was. [1] We're not allowed to use Github in my organization (bigcorp, IP etc.) but I've found Azure Devops to be quite a decent substitute. It plays well with a git pull-request workflow, has almost full feature parity with Github as far as I can tell, plus has a built-in kanban board. I like Github -- it's more tightly focused and simpler -- but I've been able to carve out a part of Azure Devops that is similar to Github and maintain my previous git workflow without much trouble. Azure Devops is not the dumpster fire I'd expected it to be -- it's actually fairly good in parts. (the only pain-in-the-neck with Azure Devops is licensing cost -- it's not free. In the enterprise, it has named-user licensing which can get costly. I wouldn't have used it if we didn't already have it and couldn't use private Github.)

Yhippa 6y ago

Very interesting post. One thing I'm thinking of is if an enterprise uses something like Slack then you could have persistent video rooms similar to the audio rooms in Discord. The last paragraph makes a good point though. As good as Slack is, there is something that still feels inefficient to me. When I'm trying to communicate with people it's almost like shouting out into the ether. Did they see my message? Why haven't they responded yet? I need this question answered now. It's strange. Email for the most part you were reasonably assured when you hit the send button that it was off into their inbox. It would be kind of cool to see what the Snap of business comms could look like.

cjsawyer 6y ago
I want slack but with a walkie talkie button.
kwindla 6y ago
Tandem has done a really nice job with persistent video/audio rooms for distributed teams: https://tandem.chat/ https://tandem.chat/

jojobas 6y ago

Why do we have RFC standardized and decentralized email but never could make standard chat/call protocol? XMPP and now Matrix made good progress in that direction but are mostly obscure to date.

bsder 6y ago
1) Because email predated everybody trying to become a monopoly and extract rents from the Internet. 2) NAT really screwed us all by breaking the end-to-end nature of the Internet.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  3) because electronic mail is fundamental and early attempts at walled gardens proved it could not be contained
- Shared404 6y ago
  > 2) NAT really screwed us all by breaking the end-to-end nature of the Internet. Don't worry, we'll all be on IPV6 any day now.
- zucker42 6y ago
  Could you explain how NAT is relevant to the growth of walled gardens to someone was born after the development of the World Wide Web?
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    If nothing else, NAT makes it harder to leave a walled garden for a small chat program between you and your friends/family/interest group. Without it, you could potentially all run the program and talk. With it, someone has to be technical enough to do port forwarding, someone has to be on a connectin without carrier-grade NAT so that port forwarding is an option, and/or someone has to pay with money/time to setup and run a server on a dedicated IP or upgrade their connection to a static IP. The most easily accessible alternative is another company's closed system. I suspect NAT wasn't involved in that developing as much as money was - IRC, email, Newsgroups were hard to profit from. Having a distinctive service which is different from your competitors so customers can be attracted, and which is closed so customers want to bring their friends and family in to talk to them and then can't leave without the whole group leaving, is bound to be more profitable for the winners than taking part in a federated system where only one user can join and talk to their contacts with relays to other servers.

bsder 6y ago

Everything has voice ... that nobody wants. Customer service is now so terrible that I don't want to talk to you and I damn sure don't want you to talk to me. At this point, I've kinda bought into the whole Millennial "If I can't do it online without interacting with a human, go die in a fire cause you aren't making a sale." Quit hiding the price--you simply lost the sale. Don't ask for a quote-you simply lost the sale. Don't make me sign up before paying--you simply lost the sale. If I can't do a return solely through online interaction--you simply lost any further sales. I see Zoom and its ilk the same way. Ubiquitous video chat--that nobody really wants.

usui 6y ago
I don't understand. Can you explain the connection between desire of online convenience (this part is understandable) and Zoom?
- bsder 6y ago
  The fundamental question is: "Do people actually want video?" Audio and, especially, video are very synchronous. Normally, the last thing I want in my schedule is another synchronous event. Do I need some video? Maybe. Perhaps my one-on-one with my manager. Do we need video for a weekly group meeting? Do we even need that weekly group meeting? Sure, it was convenient when everybody was in the office. How convenient is it now that everybody is at home?

Joeri 6y ago

I feel video conferencing is a sidetrack. It is an approximation of a physical meeting that never captures the spirit of the real thing and prevents us from moving on to something better. The real power of digital communication is that it is searchable, remixable and that you don’t need to be at a specific place at a specific time to take part, and yet we now all have slots in our calendar requiring us to be in something that has none of those benefits. This is an anti-pattern. Group communication needs to be async, written and structured for easy access. The linux kernel mailing list is a much closer approximation of how it should be than any video conference, but it too is a high friction system. No tool so far has cracked this, although some like discourse and basecamp are trying. Google tried to once upon a time with wave, but they’ve given up and joined the physical meeting proxy club.

aantix 6y ago
Yac Chat. Async audio messages, optional desktop record with high quality transcription to make knowledge searchable.
zucker42 6y ago
I fundamentally disagree. The reason synchronous video communication continues to dominate is because it's more information dense than text in many situations, and more interactive than asynchronous alternatives. Asynchronous communication has its place, and it's amazing what has been accomplished over the LKML and similar. Software projects tend to make this sort of communication ideal, since they are amenable to individualized contributions. But the prescription that efficient digital communication must be asynchronous and textual is incorrect.
- n3storm 6y ago
  I disagree. The reason is that some people is not educated in async or just lazy. It takes just one person that refuses to go async to make everybody use video. I heard it thousand of times: "let me call you cause I explain better by phone" No, you don't. You just use many resources to keep conversation going until you find terms and produce proper phrases. You could perfectly have elaborated this by your own and wrote it down in an email or chat group. Sorry this was deep inside me and had to come out :D

war1025 6y ago

I haven't used Zoom, but I have attempted to use Google Meet for video chat and it was an abysmal tire fire. My mom wanted to do a family video chat over Easter and I thought, "Hey, we use Google Meet at work. I bet it will be great for this." It was a completely unusable experience of frozen videos and dropped audio. I was ready to just completely throw in the towel on the entire idea. My mom said, "Well, me and my sisters have been using Skype for years and it works just fine." So I begrudgingly downloaded Skype and created an account. It just works. It's amazing. We've been doing video chats every Sunday evening with my mom and my brother's family for a couple months now. I thought I hated video chat. It turned out I just hated Google's idea of video chat. My wife uses Facebook video chat with her mom and it works pretty acceptably too. I think Skype is still better, but Google Meet is absolute bottom of the barrel in video chat technology. Which is a shame because Google Meet works great for audio with screen sharing. Maybe Zoom works comparably well to Skype. I hope so.

KMnO4 6y ago
I’m my experience, Google Meet has very steep minimum bandwidth requirements by default. You can (and probably should) set the send/receive quality to 360p video, but it’s miles behind the adaptive bandwidth scaling that Zoom and Skype use. If you force your network adapter to be 1 Mbps mid-call, Zoom will quickly butcher the quality to keep up. Google will drop out.
eitally 6y ago
Duo is a much better choice for family video chat than Meet/Hangouts
- war1025 6y ago
  I've never heard of it before you mentioning it. That does look to be more in line with what I'd want. A bit confused why they wouldn't leverage the same technology in Meet since that seems to be the product that gets more press.

axegon_ 6y ago

IMO, Zoom has the worst user experience of all video conferencing tools by a long shot, at least on Linux, regardless of whether you are a paying user or not. And while Skype was doing a terrible job for years, these days it's light years ahead of Zoom. Google Meet is also doing an incredible job and lately I've been using it a lot. I seriously don't understand how a horrible product such as Zoom made it so big... So whatever comes after Zoom, I hope it will do a better job.

njovin 6y ago
Care to elaborate? I’ve had the opposite experience. Zoom is far from ideal but Aside from a twice-daily freeze (that I suspect has something to do with my audio driver) Zoom works wonderfully. Google meet, on the other hand, has been miserable. I’ve had cases where the group could hear me but I couldn’t hear them, even when the “test audio” button in the browser client produced sound. Even after calling in using a mobile phone I could then hear the group but then they couldn’t hear me. It feels like an alpha product as far as reliability goes.
- axegon_ 6y ago
  Sure, I'll elaborate: video and audio quality is identical to that of Yahoo! messenger from the late 90's. As soon as I open zoom, it eats up about 80% of my CPU (without being in a call or anything). Controls work 60% of the time at best (turning off/on my webcam takes a dozen clicks), No matter what I do it won't let me remove the passwords from my rooms. It is a horrible experience. Meet has been rock solid and my team switched over to it about two weeks ago - 0 issues so far.
dnautics 6y ago
You haven't tried Cisco WebEx,have you? For a good chunk of time Skype was dead while MS was busy figuring out how to assimilate it. Google was out because companies didn't want google to spy on you, so your options were WebEx or zoom (which we didn't know was a spying dumpster fire yet). We eventually also had to give up on WebEx because it simply did not work consistently on our Linux Dev's laptops. So our option was "or zoom"

nharada 6y ago

I feel part of Zoom's initial foothold in the market was that inside of a conference room it "just worked". Or at least more so than other options I'd tried, especially a couple of years ago. Even earlier this year I had issues getting Google Meet to work in our office's conference rooms. Minimizing or removing the "fiddling with the AV software" phase of meetings is huge.

skybrian 6y ago

If you want to play in hard mode, figure out how to get video calls working for someone calling their grandma in a nursing home, when she doesn't have a laptop or smartphone. It would have to be a device that's as simple to use as a phone. Not a cell phone, a regular phone that sits on a desk, the old-fashioned kind. I bet a whole lot of people wish that they had something like that working during the pandemic.

Larrikin 6y ago
I believe there are multiple solutions from the various big tech companies. Most of them I would never trust, like Facebook's solution, but they all seem to fulfill what you're asking for.
mjevans 6y ago
If everyone had a Peer to Peer optimized ISP and there was a national ID registry, it would be very easy to lookup someone via their national ID signature updated DNS entry. This could also carry other data.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  I think you're distinctly overlooking the many problems that come with 'easy to look up someone'. There are already massive harassment and stalking issues for some people with decentralized platforms like Facebook, let alone a central government registry.
ponker 6y ago
It exists, it's called a Facebook Portal. It's an outstanding piece of hardware and has been an absolute blessing for our elderly relatives in this pandemic. Of course, you are letting Facebook into your living room, which does give me the willies but not as many willies as the thought of our kids and their grandparents going 3 months without seeing each other.
zodiakzz 6y ago
Didn't Skype used to sell such devices? Can't remember if they had video.

ISL 6y ago

At its end, the article suggests a wonderful question. What is Zoom's Yo?

nexuist 6y ago
Video voice mail? TikTok for enterprise?
- ISL 6y ago
  I feel like those might convey too much content? Perhaps a link to a three-second "Never gonna give you up..." Rick-roll video? Yo was one-bit Twitter. I don't know what one-bit video looks like?
  - nexuist 6y ago
    Instagram with a 1kb upload limit

SubiculumCode 6y ago

Well after I just got to experience the Oculus Quest, I'm going to say, after a few more VR generations, Zoom with VR avatars

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ipiz0618 6y ago

With my experience Microsoft Teams is actually a better choice than Zoom. You don't even need to install the program and it works on the web, unlike the fake "web interface" of Zoom that just loads infinitely and forces you to install their suspicious client.

ponker 6y ago

What I think is interesting is how much worse the conversation experience is today vs. during the days of circuit-switched landline phones. There was no perceptible difference between a live conversation and one by phone between New York and Washington DC. Today the conversations seem so stilted because there's 50+ milliseconds of latency at a MINIMUM that makes interrupting and a back-and-forth conversational flow absolutely impossible. Also lost completely are the little "ahs" and "ums" that add color to a conversation.

Blackstone4 6y ago

Virtual reality meetings? Ideally to truly replicate the in-person experience since I feel like the body language/phyiscal presense ocmponent is important.

aurbano 6y ago
This could be it, but current headsets are not that comfy after too much use, and if you don't have AC at home (tons of EU homes won't have them) they can be a nightmare in the summer...

mrkramer 6y ago

The biggest opportunity in video was YouTube hence Google acquired it. Zoom is only for business users: institutions, companies etc. Personal users use WhatsApp, Skype, Viber or whatever they prefer. "we are waiting for the Snap, Clubhouse and Yo." If products like this emerge they will be niche like Twitch is for gaming video live streaming.

diegoperini 6y ago
Wow, does Yo still exist? What have they been doing lately?

monkin 6y ago

Zoom out?

kyberias 6y ago

Why do they write about Zoom as if it invented video conferencing? Who is blind here?

tompagenet2 6y ago
I think the author is noting that, as with Dropbox, video conferencing isn't new (Skype has it), it's just then when the chips were down and millions of people needed it Zoom seems to have worked better for more people than more established entries, and part of this is probably that some fiddly things are done well in Zoom. I'm making no comment personally about Zoom or its ethics, just trying to clarify how I see the post.

jpalomaki 6y ago

I believe integrated groupware is the future. No separate tools for chat, discussions, calls, screensharing, collaborative editing, email and filesharing. For example somebody pulls up document in a call. For team work it would make sense if it was editable by everyone right there in the conference tool.

zhte415 6y ago
This was Google Wave. A bit ahead of it's time.
- auiya 6y ago
  Wave was an awesome product too. It's really a shame it succumbed to the fickle and careless whims of Google's upper management. They've had so many solid products that didn't get a properly good push, and instead pushed products which were destined for failure, all to the same result.
nicornk 6y ago
That‘s basically MS Teams.

peq 6y ago

An underappreciatd feature of Zoom is the 40 minute restriction in the free version. Meetings are more productive with an enforced time limit.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

BiteCode_dev 6y ago

Crop.

DebtDeflation 6y ago

My company uses WebEx not Zoom, but I have found meetings far more tolerable since I started disabling inbound video. I've always turned off my own video, but turning off everyone else's has been a game changer. The important parts of a remote meeting are the audio and screenshare; video is a net-negative. I get no value from watching people type, fidget around with a phone, have random family members and pets walk by, etc. and actually find it quite distracting.

roland35 6y ago
I find the opposite is true, meetings where I have video enabled are more focused and enjoyable to me (as an introvert too!). I think people pay more attention on video calls in general, and it seems like conversations flow better with fewer of those "you go... No you go!" type moments. Overall it does require people to take work from home seriously though! Back in the days when we worked in offices video calls did have less pets and random people or kids walk in! If people are able to have a dedicated office this works better but obviously not everyone was prepared for a forced work from home experience. It does require a solid internet connection which has been strained lately.
machinehermit 6y ago
How do you show how nice your house is that way though?
vecio 6y ago
I agree with this and have made an audio only conferencing service https://www.producthunt.com/posts/mornin https://www.producthunt.com/posts/mornin
ben509 6y ago
Yup. The worst on Zoom and Google Meet is: a. the person with feedback or background noise causing the video to flip to them b. someone displaying their lunch for everyone to see c. Zoom specialty: obnoxious video backgrounds Zoom helps you block trolls, but does nothing for the pain of having to listen to someone's feedback during an hour long meeting. And you often don't want to interrupt the meeting to pester people about their microphone. It's a similar problem to Slack. We have some people who overuse @here and various similar sins, and Slack's answer is there's no reason to block, just fix your company.[1] What this misses is there's a broad range of behavior between pleasant and malicious. There are also a broad range of social remedies we normally use to deal with this behavior. Most of those social remedies don't work well online. It's surprisingly hard to craft a written correction that doesn't come across as an attack, especially if you're senior and don't want to unintentionally throw that rank around. [1]: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481 https://twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481

aurbano 6y ago

Is there a way to have good async group video chat? I haven't given this much thought but maybe this is an interesting direction to explore?

nlitened 6y ago
Telegram has short video-messages in chats and group chats. They have their use.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
drewp 6y ago
Check out https://www.marcopolo.me/ https://www.marcopolo.me/ It will even stream an in-progress video message to you as it's being recorded if you happen to be looking at the app then.

MichaelAO 6y ago

As an educator, Zoom is clunky and not designed for the use case. We built an interactive live streaming platform during COVID-19 that we've found powerful. A few keys features have been moderated chat, the ability to invite students to join via video, embedded quizzes, and various screen sharing layouts. Check out a stream today to see it in action: https://dexter.live/ https://dexter.live/

bullen 6y ago

The action MMO is the final medium, in VR or not, I suspect in 3rd person! Positional 3D audio is the last frontier. But I'm not sure you will want it for public gatherings, it should be a friends only thing in a sea of chat bubbles above the characters heads. The chat feed is not interesting because the context is lost and trolling is too easy.

foxbarrington 6y ago
2d positional audio works really well too. Check out https://rambly.app https://rambly.app for a 16-bit rpg feel. Works great for virtual happy hours / groups of 5+.

pornel 6y ago

I think Facebook is ultimately right, just too early, betting on VR being the next thing. Spatial presence is incredibly important: you can face towards the person you're speaking to. You can whisper to the person next to you. Crowded rooms naturally organize in cliques/groups. In a video chat all of this is broken or awkward. VR today is way too bulky and annoying. It's in the "luggable microcomputers" stage before laptops and phones, but it shows a glimpse of the future. For example, standalone Oculus is less of a hassle than thethered headsets. Camera-based hand tracking demos show how people can freely gesticulate in the VR space. Imagine that extended to full-body tracking and in-headset sensors that capture facial expressions and "deepfake" you in VR.

codethief 6y ago
I agree 100%. Speaking of spatial presence, I recently came across tonari[0] through a post[1] here on HN and thought it looked really cool. In case any of the tonari developers happen to hang out around here: I would love to try this out sometime! :) (Side note: The blog post linked in the HN discussion below does a much better job at explaining what it is that they're doing – at least to me as a techie.) [0] https://tonari.no https://tonari.no [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23540586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23540586
ponker 6y ago
It’s not too early for Facebook, it’s too early for startups. Facebook can burn half a billion a year for 10 years and then when the market is ready, be in the leading position and be able to buy up all the promising startups in the space.

fortran77 6y ago

Why don't you ask Bernadette? https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0946288/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0946288/

zitterbewegung 6y ago

The thing that comes after Zoom is another app that makes the experience of teleconferencing easier. If I were to guess maybe some kind of Mixed Reality system. Having Audio, Video with Video sharing is good. For some niche industries like CAD / CAM and also VR /AR / Video game design if you had some kind of Mixed reality system that could allow people to collaborate with 3D data you could actually have an interesting product.

rm445 6y ago

What on earth happened to Skype? Over a decade of head start, why wasn't it completely untouchable when COVID-19 came along? Another thought. Last year at the peak of Fortnite hype, when top DJs were hosting parties live in game etc, there was talk that the next big thing in communications might be everyone hanging out in games, Fortnite or whatever came next. I do think that lots of young people are meeting friends in games, but it hasn't had the enormous breakthrough in culture that Zoom has. We can probably retire our expectations of some kind of Metaverse for a few more years.

stevewodil 6y ago
>What on earth happened to Skype? Microsoft happened
- umeshunni 6y ago
  eBay happened, then Microsoft happened.
buboard 6y ago
Second life has been hosting virtual concerts for 15 years. They have apparently seen a huge spike in signups during covid , that they ran out of virtual land to sell
cryptoz 6y ago
Skype did a lot wrong, for sure. But something worth mentioning, In 2004-2006 my ISP in Canada illegally "intentionally degraded the quality and reliability of Skype calls" to convince customers that Skype sucked and that we should buy/use their video/call software. It worked, in one sense. I have hated Skype ever since because it was absolutely the worst, and never trusted it to work. I do know that wasn't their fault but still won't use them. They also seem to have super bad security, IMO.
remir 6y ago
Microsoft, weirdly, didn't know what to do with Skype. For a company focused on productivity, that's a little strange.

shmerl 6y ago

I don't get why Zoom got such attention. I've never even heard about it before the pandemic. But I've heard of other video conferencing tools.

buboard 6y ago
even before the pandemic, it was known as the most reliable chat for largish meetings. Nothing else worked so well, and it still doesn.t

buboard 6y ago

Has someone repackaged the decades-old phone hotlines as an app and named it Clubhouse?

dancemethis 6y ago

We have Jitsi, which is Free Software. Zoom shouldn't even be considered for anything in the first place.