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I don't buy it. The same factors that made Zoom easy to adopt, make it equally easy to switch to something else. And "when Zoom goes down, teachers can’t teach

I don't buy it. The same factors that made Zoom easy to adopt, make it equally easy to switch to something else. And "when Zoom goes down, teachers can’t teach"? Come on. I am a college professor. In my class this fall I met my students on Blackboard on Day 1 and Zoom on Day 2. If one of them goes down for the day, we'll switch to the other.

paulpauper 6y ago
Thinktanks are always putting out hype/FUD reports like this. That is how they try to stay relevant and get media coverage. Remote learning and video existed well over a decade before zoomn. It is like saying that is Nike were to go out of business, people would not be able to find shoes.
- hirako2000 6y ago
  You are nice to compare Zoom to Nike.
MattGaiser 6y ago
You are used to a flexible organization. How about one where IT has locked down the computers mindlessly?
- tspike 6y ago
  Something tells me an outage will make them think about it
- notahacker 6y ago
  Most of them probably have their IT team's preferred enterprise vendor's teleconferencing system set up as the exclusive videoconferencing tool long before Zoom became flavour of the month... Also, their employees probably have smartphones.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    A six-year-old student is not an employee.
    - notahacker 6y ago
      A six year old student also isn't someone who's at risk of losing a business deal because they can't get their IT team to let them install one of the client's suggested alternative webconferencing systems to do the demo at a particular point in time. Of the many potential problems six year olds accessing education primarily through webconferencing may face, I'm not sure inability to choose their own preferred videoconferencing service is high up the list, and I doubt Zoom servers have more outages than their home internet and wifi...
      - tingletech 6y ago
        I think the discussion is "what happens when zoom goes down?" -- and the college professor said "use blackboard". A first grader with a locked down computer set up for zoom won't be able to install blackboard.
        sukilot 6y ago
        Install? It's a website.
        kiwijamo 6y ago
        Been years since I used it, but it doesn't have video conferencing functions does it? (Honest question).
        notahacker 6y ago
        How many kids are missing how many minutes of education from their parents and teachers being unable to find any digital devices with the ability to access webconferencing services other than Zoom? Periodically losing connectivity is an occupational hazard of doing things with webconferencing made worse if the people at each end aren't particularly computer literate. But I'm not sure Zoom lockin ranks high on the list of threats to kids' education right now.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  Surely no company that cares about security enough to lockdown machines like that would choose zoom?
  - Proziam 6y ago
    The company cares about security, the mindless manager wants to use whatever they like the most.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Or they need to use whatever a partner or customer is using. I don't use Zoom much (and it isn't one of our standard tools). But one organization I have standing meetings with and others I interact with now and then do use Zoom. It's often not about what mindless managers (or engineers) "want" to use.
      - rorykoehler 6y ago
        You can use zoom in the browser. They make it hard to find but it’s possible.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    "Cares about security" can easily be just mindless procedure following.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    We're not talking about companies. We're talking about schools. Totally different thought process.
  - protomyth 6y ago
    You assume the IT people got to pick.
- kiwijamo 6y ago
  This is an excellent point. I am a teacher and my students have school-issued iPads which they are not able to just add their own apps. Even I can't control what apps they have loaded, I have to go through the school's processes to get apps loaded. This rules out switching to a different platform for the day just because e.g. Zoom is not working today.
varikin 6y ago
That works when the teacher is technically minded. My wife is staff for an art department at a community college and many of the professors don't even know how to create spreadsheets. Having them switch from D2L to Zoom to Hangouts from day to day is not an option. In the long view, the younger teachers are more able to learn the new technologies and switch new technologies. But we have to support the professors that are 5 years from retirement now.
scottlamb 6y ago
> And "when Zoom goes down, teachers can’t teach"? Come on. I am a college professor. In my class this fall I met my students on Blackboard on Day 1 and Zoom on Day 2. If one of them goes down for the day, we'll switch to the other. I think it's for real. Think about elementary school instead. The kids are just learning to use computers. Their parents may be also, and if not they may be trying to do their own work from home while the kids are in class. There are many low-income and/or ESL families. Even the teachers aren't tech experts. In my son's kindergarten class, everyone got school-supplied Chromebooks. They all have Google accounts for Google Classroom. That probably means they could switch to Google Hangouts Meet, but it wouldn't be smooth. They'd at least miss a day, and subsequent days would be rocky. The teacher has invested a lot of effort just in teaching the kids how to mute and unmute themselves without waiting for their grown-up to help, and they'd have to go through that again with a different UI.
- hooande 6y ago
  This would be a large inconvenience and a disruption, but that doesn't justify one private company being considered critical infrastructure. This view is generally antithetical to innovation. Even if everyone already knows how to use Microsoft Office, it can and should be replaced if better software comes along.
  - maest 6y ago
    To be fair, Excel is pretty much critical infrastructure at this point.
    - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
      I think that's not true until Office365 kicks in. If Microsoft "goes down" today, just gets wiped out by some futures FX swap gone wrong, then all the Hedge funds, the doctors notes, the airplane checklists, they will pootle along fine for years. It's only when a central single point of failure is introduced does critical infrastructure become ticking time bomb. An open source peer to peer zoom would reduce such risk - and any sensible government would find that - cries of private business be damned
reaperducer 6y ago
I am a college professor. In my class this fall I met my students on Blackboard on Day 1 and Zoom on Day 2. If one of them goes down for the day, we'll switch to the other. That's great for college. Not every educational experience is in a college with a big fat IT department to support it. Think elementary and secondary schools. According to the newspapers this week, the school district where I live has 27,000 students unable to get computers to go online because there simply aren't affordable, or sometimes ANY, computers available for either the parents or the district to buy. Another 20,000 have no internet access, so the school district rolls out hotspots on school buses each day to the worst-affected neighborhoods. Do you really think tens of thousands of students will have no problem switching from one piece of software to another? Let alone the millions of ESL and low-literacy parents and students across the nation.
- Spivak 6y ago
  I think the difficulty in onboarding students and parents with anything the first time is going to be the hardest and most painful. But once you're there lock-in is pretty minimal because joining a class is just "click the link the teacher sent out this morning."
fsflover 6y ago
> The same factors that made Zoom easy to adopt, make it equally easy to switch to something else. Did you hear about network effect?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Anthony-G 6y ago
  Earlier this year, the network (critical mass of users) adopted Zoom quite quickly. If Zoom were to fail, I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that networks or groups of users could start using some other video conference system in a similarly short time-frame. I'm not inclined to share the same level of concern as the original article.
- toast0 6y ago
  What network effect does Zoom have other than word of mouth? I've seen people enter meetings with links or meeting ids, not from a friends list. Some of the conference tools need/want a client or a specific browser, so there's some amount of benefit from already having used it, so you don't need to install it, but not a whole lot.
m11a 6y ago
I am still confused how Zoom ended up being used this much, especially by less technical people. The UI is not intuitive at all, the options are a mess, and the product doesn't even know what audience it's trying to cater for. Every other Zoom call I've been in someone is having a technical error or confusion (even technically-inclined people). That considered, at least in principle, it shouldn't be that hard for a competitor.
- bredren 6y ago
  I think the branding and reasonable reliability worked. I think it helped that it wasn’t a bundled service of Google or someone else. It helped also that there were native apps and fwiw the web conf quality is good. But ya the ux is terrible. I think they are holding up a release of the web sdk that lets you configure ui to give product time to catch up.
- beagle3 6y ago
  Everything else was (and most still is) much, much worse. It somehow disappeared from communal memory, but before Zoom, it was common for the first 10 minutes on any group skype/hangout/webex/gotomeeting call to be all about making sure everyone is heard and seen. And with Zoom, it went down to an acceptable 1-2 minutes or so. Others have slightly improved their game since, but not much -- I still occasionally get Meet/Hangout invites for work and there's often problems, mostly related to authorization/authentication and occasionally video/audio feed. Zoom is bad. But all the competition is still worse (and used to be much worse just a few months ago). This does NOT come without cost - e.g. their MacOS "just works" setup was incredibly broken from a security perspective, to the point that apple pushed an OS update to block it. But people don't care - convenience consistently trumps security in any mass market system.
  - cat199 6y ago
    also call quality seems to be better or hold up better
- cmroanirgo 6y ago
  Jitsi meet is open source and self hostable, or use their server.
cmroanirgo 6y ago
Not having used zoom, what does it do that the open source, self hostable jitsi meet does not? I feel that jitsi for some unbeknownst reason is ignored in favour of zoom, but don't understand why.
- barbs 6y ago
  I'm a big fan of jitsi, but I think it's a bit less efficient on resources, particularly with meetings with a lot of participants, although I haven't tried this personally. Also, Zoom's network effect. A lot of people simply aren't aware of jitsi.
- scottlamb 6y ago
  Short answer: bandwidth. Longer answer, a set of questions: * Do most teachers and/or students have sufficient upload capacity to send n-1 copies of their video stream in an n-person chat? (A 20-person chat might be typical for a K12 classroom.) * Is it possible to do multicast across the Internet? I assert the answer to both questions is "no", so all the video streams need to go through a server/reflector. You're suggesting that self-hosting; a follow-up question: * Does your average school district have the bandwidth for simultaneous duplex video streams for every student and teacher? * Would they be able to acquire this bandwidth quickly? Also no. I've never used jitsi and don't know if there are other problems, but this one's a dealbreaker anyway.
pixelrevision 6y ago
Our NYC school tried to make a quick switch from zoom to google meet when zoom was having issues with people porn bombing meetings. It was not a smooth transition and took over a week before we saw all the teachers and kids on it. The kids and teachers were already using google classroom for all other communication so I can only imagine how the transition would have been if they had to setup new accounts.

paulpauper 6y ago

Thinktanks are always putting out hype/FUD reports like this. That is how they try to stay relevant and get media coverage. Remote learning and video existed well over a decade before zoomn. It is like saying that is Nike were to go out of business, people would not be able to find shoes.

hirako2000 6y ago
You are nice to compare Zoom to Nike.

MattGaiser 6y ago

You are used to a flexible organization. How about one where IT has locked down the computers mindlessly?

tspike 6y ago
Something tells me an outage will make them think about it
notahacker 6y ago
Most of them probably have their IT team's preferred enterprise vendor's teleconferencing system set up as the exclusive videoconferencing tool long before Zoom became flavour of the month... Also, their employees probably have smartphones.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  A six-year-old student is not an employee.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    A six year old student also isn't someone who's at risk of losing a business deal because they can't get their IT team to let them install one of the client's suggested alternative webconferencing systems to do the demo at a particular point in time. Of the many potential problems six year olds accessing education primarily through webconferencing may face, I'm not sure inability to choose their own preferred videoconferencing service is high up the list, and I doubt Zoom servers have more outages than their home internet and wifi...
    - tingletech 6y ago
      I think the discussion is "what happens when zoom goes down?" -- and the college professor said "use blackboard". A first grader with a locked down computer set up for zoom won't be able to install blackboard.
      - sukilot 6y ago
        Install? It's a website.
        kiwijamo 6y ago
        Been years since I used it, but it doesn't have video conferencing functions does it? (Honest question).
      - notahacker 6y ago
        How many kids are missing how many minutes of education from their parents and teachers being unable to find any digital devices with the ability to access webconferencing services other than Zoom? Periodically losing connectivity is an occupational hazard of doing things with webconferencing made worse if the people at each end aren't particularly computer literate. But I'm not sure Zoom lockin ranks high on the list of threats to kids' education right now.
rorykoehler 6y ago
Surely no company that cares about security enough to lockdown machines like that would choose zoom?
- Proziam 6y ago
  The company cares about security, the mindless manager wants to use whatever they like the most.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Or they need to use whatever a partner or customer is using. I don't use Zoom much (and it isn't one of our standard tools). But one organization I have standing meetings with and others I interact with now and then do use Zoom. It's often not about what mindless managers (or engineers) "want" to use.
    - rorykoehler 6y ago
      You can use zoom in the browser. They make it hard to find but it’s possible.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  "Cares about security" can easily be just mindless procedure following.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- reaperducer 6y ago
  We're not talking about companies. We're talking about schools. Totally different thought process.
- protomyth 6y ago
  You assume the IT people got to pick.
kiwijamo 6y ago
This is an excellent point. I am a teacher and my students have school-issued iPads which they are not able to just add their own apps. Even I can't control what apps they have loaded, I have to go through the school's processes to get apps loaded. This rules out switching to a different platform for the day just because e.g. Zoom is not working today.

varikin 6y ago

That works when the teacher is technically minded. My wife is staff for an art department at a community college and many of the professors don't even know how to create spreadsheets. Having them switch from D2L to Zoom to Hangouts from day to day is not an option. In the long view, the younger teachers are more able to learn the new technologies and switch new technologies. But we have to support the professors that are 5 years from retirement now.

scottlamb 6y ago

> And "when Zoom goes down, teachers can’t teach"? Come on. I am a college professor. In my class this fall I met my students on Blackboard on Day 1 and Zoom on Day 2. If one of them goes down for the day, we'll switch to the other. I think it's for real. Think about elementary school instead. The kids are just learning to use computers. Their parents may be also, and if not they may be trying to do their own work from home while the kids are in class. There are many low-income and/or ESL families. Even the teachers aren't tech experts. In my son's kindergarten class, everyone got school-supplied Chromebooks. They all have Google accounts for Google Classroom. That probably means they could switch to Google Hangouts Meet, but it wouldn't be smooth. They'd at least miss a day, and subsequent days would be rocky. The teacher has invested a lot of effort just in teaching the kids how to mute and unmute themselves without waiting for their grown-up to help, and they'd have to go through that again with a different UI.

hooande 6y ago
This would be a large inconvenience and a disruption, but that doesn't justify one private company being considered critical infrastructure. This view is generally antithetical to innovation. Even if everyone already knows how to use Microsoft Office, it can and should be replaced if better software comes along.
- maest 6y ago
  To be fair, Excel is pretty much critical infrastructure at this point.
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    I think that's not true until Office365 kicks in. If Microsoft "goes down" today, just gets wiped out by some futures FX swap gone wrong, then all the Hedge funds, the doctors notes, the airplane checklists, they will pootle along fine for years. It's only when a central single point of failure is introduced does critical infrastructure become ticking time bomb. An open source peer to peer zoom would reduce such risk - and any sensible government would find that - cries of private business be damned

reaperducer 6y ago

I am a college professor. In my class this fall I met my students on Blackboard on Day 1 and Zoom on Day 2. If one of them goes down for the day, we'll switch to the other. That's great for college. Not every educational experience is in a college with a big fat IT department to support it. Think elementary and secondary schools. According to the newspapers this week, the school district where I live has 27,000 students unable to get computers to go online because there simply aren't affordable, or sometimes ANY, computers available for either the parents or the district to buy. Another 20,000 have no internet access, so the school district rolls out hotspots on school buses each day to the worst-affected neighborhoods. Do you really think tens of thousands of students will have no problem switching from one piece of software to another? Let alone the millions of ESL and low-literacy parents and students across the nation.

Spivak 6y ago
I think the difficulty in onboarding students and parents with anything the first time is going to be the hardest and most painful. But once you're there lock-in is pretty minimal because joining a class is just "click the link the teacher sent out this morning."

fsflover 6y ago

> The same factors that made Zoom easy to adopt, make it equally easy to switch to something else. Did you hear about network effect?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Anthony-G 6y ago
Earlier this year, the network (critical mass of users) adopted Zoom quite quickly. If Zoom were to fail, I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that networks or groups of users could start using some other video conference system in a similarly short time-frame. I'm not inclined to share the same level of concern as the original article.
toast0 6y ago
What network effect does Zoom have other than word of mouth? I've seen people enter meetings with links or meeting ids, not from a friends list. Some of the conference tools need/want a client or a specific browser, so there's some amount of benefit from already having used it, so you don't need to install it, but not a whole lot.

m11a 6y ago

I am still confused how Zoom ended up being used this much, especially by less technical people. The UI is not intuitive at all, the options are a mess, and the product doesn't even know what audience it's trying to cater for. Every other Zoom call I've been in someone is having a technical error or confusion (even technically-inclined people). That considered, at least in principle, it shouldn't be that hard for a competitor.

bredren 6y ago
I think the branding and reasonable reliability worked. I think it helped that it wasn’t a bundled service of Google or someone else. It helped also that there were native apps and fwiw the web conf quality is good. But ya the ux is terrible. I think they are holding up a release of the web sdk that lets you configure ui to give product time to catch up.
beagle3 6y ago
Everything else was (and most still is) much, much worse. It somehow disappeared from communal memory, but before Zoom, it was common for the first 10 minutes on any group skype/hangout/webex/gotomeeting call to be all about making sure everyone is heard and seen. And with Zoom, it went down to an acceptable 1-2 minutes or so. Others have slightly improved their game since, but not much -- I still occasionally get Meet/Hangout invites for work and there's often problems, mostly related to authorization/authentication and occasionally video/audio feed. Zoom is bad. But all the competition is still worse (and used to be much worse just a few months ago). This does NOT come without cost - e.g. their MacOS "just works" setup was incredibly broken from a security perspective, to the point that apple pushed an OS update to block it. But people don't care - convenience consistently trumps security in any mass market system.
- cat199 6y ago
  also call quality seems to be better or hold up better
cmroanirgo 6y ago
Jitsi meet is open source and self hostable, or use their server.

cmroanirgo 6y ago

Not having used zoom, what does it do that the open source, self hostable jitsi meet does not? I feel that jitsi for some unbeknownst reason is ignored in favour of zoom, but don't understand why.

barbs 6y ago
I'm a big fan of jitsi, but I think it's a bit less efficient on resources, particularly with meetings with a lot of participants, although I haven't tried this personally. Also, Zoom's network effect. A lot of people simply aren't aware of jitsi.
scottlamb 6y ago
Short answer: bandwidth. Longer answer, a set of questions: * Do most teachers and/or students have sufficient upload capacity to send n-1 copies of their video stream in an n-person chat? (A 20-person chat might be typical for a K12 classroom.) * Is it possible to do multicast across the Internet? I assert the answer to both questions is "no", so all the video streams need to go through a server/reflector. You're suggesting that self-hosting; a follow-up question: * Does your average school district have the bandwidth for simultaneous duplex video streams for every student and teacher? * Would they be able to acquire this bandwidth quickly? Also no. I've never used jitsi and don't know if there are other problems, but this one's a dealbreaker anyway.

pixelrevision 6y ago

Our NYC school tried to make a quick switch from zoom to google meet when zoom was having issues with people porn bombing meetings. It was not a smooth transition and took over a week before we saw all the teachers and kids on it. The kids and teachers were already using google classroom for all other communication so I can only imagine how the transition would have been if they had to setup new accounts.