8 ms·
Cut em some slack, they've been holding the world together with sticky tape for about 9 months now.
by gonzo41 6y ago
Cut em some slack, they've been holding the world together with sticky tape for about 9 months now.
- jcims 6y agoI really hope that when the dust settles and they have time to do so, they share lessons learned in the past year.
- rvz 6y agoWell now this would get all the infrastructure guys enraged when they hear that they (Zoom) proudly rely on Oracle's infrastructure, to scale to millions of users [0] Let's wait until the first person asks if they use 'Kubernetes' yet. [0] https://www.oracle.com/customers/zoom.html https://www.oracle.com/customers/zoom.html
- InternalRun 6y agoThey use multiple services including AWS, Oracle, Azure, and their own data center. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/most-zoom-runs-aws-not-oracle-says-aws/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/most-zoom-runs-aw...
- ethbro 6y agoNot to (surprisingly) knock Oracle, but at this point halo cloud customers are "Which provider is willing to cut their own throat on pricing to be able to say they host us?"
- j45 6y agoIf you think it's wise to just rely on one cloud technology as supreme, it is only a matter of time before that lesson teaches itself.
- tyingq 6y ago"Already, Zoom is transferring upwards of seven petabytes...through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure servers" Guessing egress discounts are what drives Zoom's picks for infrastructure.
- user5994461 6y agoThey use Oracle as in Oracle Cloud. Not Oracle database. They talked about it before, must have got a great deal from Oracle trying to push their cloud aggressively against AWS. Zoom is global and multi cloud so it makes sense to get a few more datacenters if they're served on a plate.
- TempLogsForOne 6y agoUnfortunately, the same incentives that keep us from both developing or government requiring/legislating that the underlying capabilities, i.e., video/audio conferencing, be interoperable (i.e., you can call people on GoToMeeting/Teams from Zoom, or vice versa); will also likely prevent them from putting out any good information on these events. Video conferencing is yet another example of a monopolist trying to take the whole market. I realize that the old internet of distributed services and actual competition is likely something those who grew up in the facebook world will not even have a conceptual understanding of, but all of the monopolistic type centralization of services (everyone on Zoom, everyone buying from Amazon, everyone using Uber, everyone getting information through Google, etc.) is immensely dangerous, to a degree that simply cannot be overstated. Its digital, literal monoculture, where one event can have devastating cascading impacts. In many ways the current virus situation is precisely that, a devastating impact due to a monoculture created and pursued by globalism, where diversity is destroyed and everyone is an equal and controlled human entity. The very crowd that is always demanding "diversity", is also the crowd destroying actual diversity by destroying differences and trying to turn us all into the same, equal thing.
- mixedCase 6y agoCould it be that Zoom is just better, in the existing diversity of meeting tools, that makes more people use it? It offers good support for large rooms, is intuitive to use and all in all, "it just works".
- FooHentai 6y agoImagine having that same perspective on telephone or cellular networks - a world where you could only call other people on the same provider network, or tackle some obscure proprietary bridging system if you wanted badly to call beyond that horizon. Nobody would accept that. Yet for video calling we’ve gone down a path where it’s normalised. Yet the underlying technologies are not so different to those used for traditional audio calling, video codecs and audio codecs and transports for them can mostly be treated the same. I dunno, I realise this is somewhat of a tangent to your point but I think about it a lot and it bugs me to imagine how it could have been if we went the other way. Feels a bit like how large infrastructure project don’t seem to be possible like they were 40 years ago... something makes it that much less likely that a common good will come into being.
- hashkb 6y agoNot because they have the best quality, most secure, or most reliable product, though. So rather than cut them some slack and wait, this is a good opportunity to explore alternatives.
- jayp1418 6y agoJitsi too
- YinglingLight 6y agoChinese sticky tape
- Scoundreller 6y agoTotally understand. I had to use WebEx for a vendor last week... I don’t know how they never managed to improve their product.
- zymhan 6y agoOne word: Enterprise
- rurp 6y agoI've had to use WebEx regularly for a few years now and somehow it's gotten even worse over that time.
- chefandy 6y agoI don't know if this is the case with WebEx, but in my experience working in enterprise software, a handful of huge corporate clients that generate an outsize percentage of revenue pretty much dictate what gets attention. They're generally more worried about interoperability with their environments and minimizing their own internal training/support expenses than having an optimal product. For them, something mediocre but gaplessly sufficient is preferable to something being mostly excellent with a few big caveats.
- j45 6y agoNot a fan of WebEx.. but Enterprises often have very different requirements that are deal breakers.. For example, it has to run as a on-premise hosted service, or has to tie into an arcane security environment which hasn't been updated in a long time where bandwidth is already an issue. Imagine running that many copies of custom software in one environment, each with their ideal solution
- j45 6y agoFor many, Zoom has moved into the essential area of internet/cell service. Lots of people are using their paid zoom accounts more than their cell phone during the day and even for work. Downtime means work is down too - not just for classrooms.
- ghaff 6y agoPretty much the only time I've used my cellphone for work for months was when my power went out for a couple of days because of a storm. (We don't use Zoom--Meet and Bluejeans--but same idea.)
- j45 6y agoMake sense - working video solutions that we rely on more than our phones for meetings have become that indispensable.
- treeman79 6y agoGreat to see an attitude other then pitchforks and torches.
- Normal_gaussian 6y agoWhen they stop with their dark patterns I'll put away my torch.
- wtvanhest 6y agoWhat dark patterns?
- Normal_gaussian 6y agoThey go out of their way to get you to install the app, to the point of misrepresenting your options. (most recently you have to click download zoom in order to get a web zoom client link, and deal with cancelling the download). They lied about and continue to misrepresent their security. They keep adding and then removing personally invasive features (eg. the linkedin sharer). There are more: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+zoom&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com... I don't know why people are so willing to forgive them.
- ajross 6y agoWhen the rest of the whole technology industry, giant corporation after giant corporation, treated video chat as an opportunity for vendor lock-in, service up-sell and competetive wedge... Zoom just made a tool that could be used by everyone, everywhere, for free. And they saved us. Yeah, I think that's something to celebrate.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoI was impressed at how well they were able to scale up when the 'rona hit. I'd still like to know how Zoom specifically rose up so fast, given that it's one of a billion video conferencing tools. Was it because they offered many-to-many video chats of over whatever Skype offers for free? I don't even know what Zoom's business model is.
- hosh 6y agoIn the last startup I joined, back in ‘16, they had two things going for them: - It was very easy to get people to get on the same zoom call as everyone else - It had the best quality for video conferencing. At the time, Hangouts was unreliable. Slack had not had a video chat feature (and it was crappy when it first came out). Goto Meeting had poor quality video and was more difficult to get everyone together. We also thought that Zoom had encryption. (Turns out ...). There were very easy screen shares. The startup I joined is remote-first, though it did not start that way. After I joined from out of state, we just all started doing that. We used Zoom a lot. In short, I think Zoom got as big as they did because they addressed enough of the pain points in the end user experience.
- MR4D 6y agoI would also add that Skype blew it. This should have been their market. Today, I don’t even have skype installed anywhere.
- dhosek 6y agoMy wife used to use Skype a lot back in the '00s, particularly for international calls (she actually had setup a paid plan with a dial-in number in Mexico that connected to her and a dial-in number in the US that connected to her mother to make cross-border calls extra easy). I remember using the app on my iPhone to call home from Morocco as if I was making a regular call. Then they had an issue where their iPhone app would run in the background needlessly and such down battery life. Add in T-Mobile offering free international calls and roaming and I can't remember the last time I used Skype. It is still installed on my phone and hasn't been off-migrated so I must have clicked on the icon accidentally sometime in the past year or two.
- athenot 6y agoAs their largest competitor, I still hold that his is the right attitude. Everyone in this space had to do massive scaleups, and some bumps inevitably happen. We have identified the issue causing users to be unable to authenticate to the Zoom website (zoom.us) and unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars Even with a distributed architecture, auth/login flows are often some of the harder problems to horizontally scale without introducing inconsistencies of behavior. I wish 'em a speedy recovery!
- yomly 6y agoWho are their largest competitor? Is it Meet or Msft or...?
- bochoh 6y agoCisco Webex
- vondur 6y agoIn the Education market probably Google meet and MS Teams.
- unethical_ban 6y agoNot the answer, but if I were a bootstrap-y small company I would be using Discord instead of Slack/Zoom for the cost.
- yomly 6y agoDiscord I think raises privacy concerns and in the past, I have had team members complain that it wasn't user friendly BUT I love their tech. They achieve some really impressive stuff
- shadowtree 6y agoTeams, due to super aggressive bundling with O365. All momentum in the market is between Zoom and Teams. Cisco blew it. We're partnering with both, rest is also ran. Massive deals in F500 globally underway. Both also have accelerating roadmaps, visible in the last Zoom update that pre-empted 50% of mmhmm's offering. As a competitor, do not publish your roadmap, both Zoom and Teams have highly able and agile product teams running them. Super impressive people with a lot of resources.
- orblivion 6y agoI'm astounded that this is the first outage I heard about this year.