4 ms·

Because it's frictionless. It's very easy to set up a Zoom meeting with anyone in the world. When I tried MS Teams, my impression was that it required a fair a

Because it's frictionless. It's very easy to set up a Zoom meeting with anyone in the world. When I tried MS Teams, my impression was that it required a fair amount of advance configuration. This is no problem if you're meeting the same people repeatedly and they work for the same employer as you. Indeed, as the name of the software suggests, it's good for "teams". But for me, anyway, this hasn't been my typical use case.

vultour 6y ago
It's the dropbox argument all over again. "I don't understand why people just won't use <much more complicated service>!" I've never used Teams, but my girlfriend was trying to walk her mum through getting it setup for work. It was a very long phone call. When I tried Zoom with my parents it took a grand total of about 2 minutes from the moment they get the link to being in the call, most of the time spent figuring out audio. Also, fuck Microsoft. From the complete destruction of Skype, the crappy Skype-rebranded Lync, to the shitshow that is their "Microsoft Store" and the whole xbox gaming ecosystem, if I ever have a choice between a Microsoft and non-Microsoft application that does the same thing, I'm never going with the Microsoft one.
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Zoom seems pretty high-friction vs jit.si . It forces (kinda, tricks I suppose) install of a client exe for example and IIRC requires registration. Jitsi you just follow the link, webrtc means no download.
- franga2000 6y ago
  The high friction with Jitsi is browser permissions. You need to interact with both the webpage and the browser's chrome to set up and switch media devices, which can get confusing even for someone with deep knowledge of the browser APIs, let alone for someone who couldn't tell a UAC prompt from a MsgBox(). That's why Zoom uses all these dark patterns to get native code running as soon as possible and as privileged as possible so it can do all the work for you. See also: Mac installer disaster.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    Browser just says "give permission to use mic and camera" and you click yes. If you click no, then I think you're going to struggle to intuit how to proceed; but it's no harder than navigating UAC dialogs to install software, much easier IMO. None of the olds in my family had a problem. YMMV I guess.
    - franga2000 6y ago
      Except that the permission popup is very difficult to spot and disappears if you touch anything other than it, after which it's pretty hard to find again. It also asks you to select an input device and if you pick wrong, you might have to track it down again to fix that. On a fast and stable machine and Internet connection this is much less of an issue, but in my experience at least, that is not the norm.
      - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
        Cool, thanks for expanding on that.

vultour 6y ago

It's the dropbox argument all over again. "I don't understand why people just won't use <much more complicated service>!" I've never used Teams, but my girlfriend was trying to walk her mum through getting it setup for work. It was a very long phone call. When I tried Zoom with my parents it took a grand total of about 2 minutes from the moment they get the link to being in the call, most of the time spent figuring out audio. Also, fuck Microsoft. From the complete destruction of Skype, the crappy Skype-rebranded Lync, to the shitshow that is their "Microsoft Store" and the whole xbox gaming ecosystem, if I ever have a choice between a Microsoft and non-Microsoft application that does the same thing, I'm never going with the Microsoft one.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago

Zoom seems pretty high-friction vs jit.si . It forces (kinda, tricks I suppose) install of a client exe for example and IIRC requires registration. Jitsi you just follow the link, webrtc means no download.

franga2000 6y ago
The high friction with Jitsi is browser permissions. You need to interact with both the webpage and the browser's chrome to set up and switch media devices, which can get confusing even for someone with deep knowledge of the browser APIs, let alone for someone who couldn't tell a UAC prompt from a MsgBox(). That's why Zoom uses all these dark patterns to get native code running as soon as possible and as privileged as possible so it can do all the work for you. See also: Mac installer disaster.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Browser just says "give permission to use mic and camera" and you click yes. If you click no, then I think you're going to struggle to intuit how to proceed; but it's no harder than navigating UAC dialogs to install software, much easier IMO. None of the olds in my family had a problem. YMMV I guess.
  - franga2000 6y ago
    Except that the permission popup is very difficult to spot and disappears if you touch anything other than it, after which it's pretty hard to find again. It also asks you to select an input device and if you pick wrong, you might have to track it down again to fix that. On a fast and stable machine and Internet connection this is much less of an issue, but in my experience at least, that is not the norm.
    - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      Cool, thanks for expanding on that.