10 ms·

Is Zoom here to stay or is video conferencing here to stay? Google Meets and MS Teams are pretty good and built into their respective Office suite products.

by llampx 5y ago

scarface74 5y ago
I mean Google doesn’t exactly have a track record of successful products when it comes to chat and video conferencing.
CoastalCoder 5y ago
For small meetings within established teams, strangely I kind of need to plug for gather.town.
KittenInABox 5y ago
I also prefer google meets, specifically because its live transcription imo beats out zoom's. This is useful/important for people that can have disabilities which involve speech processing. (eg. I know of people with ADHD or autism who would need to request something be repeated simply because the brain didn't process the sounds as speech the first time or something similar, when this isn't a problem when reading text.)
- QuercusMax 5y ago
  I find that the live captions also help me when I'm tired or distracted; and sometimes it does a better job that I do of decoding thick accents.
- mediaman 5y ago
  Interesting. I wonder if this is a problem for some people in-person, as well, or if the video specifically causes the speech to not get processed right the first time around. If it's a problem in both environments I could see remote work with closed captioning being a big benefit for people with certain types of neurodivergence.
  - Ancapistani 5y ago
    It’s definitely a problem in person. It’s a bit easier to resolve because there’s more context/body language available, but I still often ask people to repeat themselves. Sometimes overtly, sometimes by restating the portion of what they said that I understood and prodding them to elaborate so I can implicitly fill in the missing pieces.
ramesh31 5y ago
>Is Zoom here to stay or is video conferencing here to stay? I think Zoom is here to stay at the enterprise level. Video conferencing was always a niche product until the pandemic. It was a big business, but never quite large enough to experience network effects. Now that it's a mainstream part of most people's lives, that has all changed. Zoom was in the right place at the right time to capture that, and it's going to be very hard moving forward for someone to unseat them at this point.
- llampx 5y ago
  In Europe I haven't come across a business using Zoom instead of Google Meets or MS Teams, or even gathertown as someone else mentioned. Mostly because they already have licenses for Office or G-Suite. Is it a US thing?
  - ramesh31 5y ago
    >Is it a US thing? Must be. It's become pretty standard across companies I've dealt with. Maybe a 9/10 split with MS/Google.
    - xxpor 5y ago
      Personally, I've never been on a Teams call. I'd say it's been about 50% zoom, 50% webex, surprisingly. Fortunately with webex, the invites include a generic SIP address that we can use with our video conferencing equipment.
      - cr1895 5y ago
        It’s interesting how this differs so much! I think I’ve never been on a work-related Zoom call, and only extremely rarely something like webex. Almost always Teams.
  - captainbland 5y ago
    Same. One place that was otherwise quite lenient and tended to let people use whatever (allowed both Teams and Slack) explicitly barred Zoom completely, considering it a security risk.
muh_gradle 5y ago
Fair, we'll see. Zoom's screen share and participant control features are superior from what I've seen. It's also demonstrated scale with webinar and is the de facto choice there. Integration for Zoom into calendar events and just sharing abilities are pretty seamless. I don't like that I have to use a Google account to join Meet.
davidhyde 5y ago
Low friction web rtc based tools like streamyard and jitsi meet will probably become more popular than “native” apps like zoom and teams which tend to get slower and just generally worse as they are updated especially with large corporates driving the feature bloat.
- tomrod 5y ago
  Haven't heard about stream yard. Thanks for the reference!
  - davidhyde 5y ago
    I had to collaborate with something the other day and was not looking forward to signing up to yet another service. However, I was pleasantly surprised that this worked so well and with no sign in.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  Web-based tools are stuck on whatever the currently supported standards are and depend on all browsers implementing them the same. It's much easier for a company to simply ship their own code on their own apps and control the entire stack, which is why Zoom was so much better than every other alternative when it came out. I think people forget just how crappy teleconferencing was before Zoom. I used to work for a competitor, and we didn't like using our own product!
- scarface74 5y ago
  All of the video conferencing apps have web interfaces. I work with a lot of different companies and end up using whatever conferencing system they use. I refuse to install any of them on my computer.
  - gundmc 5y ago
    I'm not sure if they've improved it, but in the past Zoom's web client was missing significant simple features like gallery view that made it basically unusable for social calls.
rolleiflex 5y ago
Zoom does have product merits of its own, for example, I have hearing loss and uniquely sensitive to voice quality — Zoom has by far the best sound quality across all apps I tried. It remains to be seen if these kinds of advantages will make it stick, because on the other end of the balance lies a giant security risk due to China ties.
ubermonkey 5y ago
I sure hope Zoom goes away; they way they've repeatedly lied about behavior and security just ASTONISHES me, especially since they've experienced zero backlash. They've got CIOs utterly snowed, which is honestly a huge indictment of CIOs, including and especially those in "government" roles.
- cr1895 5y ago
  Perhaps I'm misremembering, but wasn't there actually quite significant backlash towards their security flaws in the early days, causing them to rectify the problems?
  - orange3xchicken 5y ago
    Just last night I noticed that the zoom program on my mac has been suffering from this bug, which is ~4 months old. Both are up to date. https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Why-is-the-Zoom-app-listening-on-my-microphone-when-not-in-a/td-p/29019 https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Why-is-the-Zoom-app-l...
    - core-utility 5y ago
      I got Micro Snitch [1] as part of a bundle with Little Snitch years ago and have just had it running for cases like this. I'm fortunate to not have run into this issue, but I like the peace of mind of knowing exactly if I do. [1]: https://obdev.at/products/microsnitch/index.html https://obdev.at/products/microsnitch/index.html
- josephg 5y ago
  Me too; but for now zoom is simply the best product in the video chat space. Everyone else seems to be betting the farm on webrtc and web browsers. But video meetings in chrome or Firefox don’t look or sound as good as zoom does. And Google Meet and the rest are at the mercy of web standards. Its much easier for zoom to add features to their product because they’re in control of the entire stack. I hope the situation changes, but I think it’ll be several years before browsers are able to meaningfully catch up to where zoom is today.
davidw 5y ago
IDK, with Google seemingly doing their best to wreck their own video stuff, I think we're stuck with Zoom.
- blululu 5y ago
  Not sure what you’re talking about. My work has been using Google meets and I would strongly disagree here. Google hangouts has been relatively fast (by Google standards) at adapting to the market needs and improving its features. It also runs in the browser which is a lot nicer than zoom’s dark patterns to install dubious executables or deal with a crappy webrtc interface.
  - davidw 5y ago
    Google's video products used to be better, and better integrated. I used to use it to call my mom. Now I have to send her an email with a link to click instead of just initiating a video call. And they keep changing the names of all of it. The underlying video technology is perfectly fine, it's all the other stuff around it that's a complete train wreck.
  - alfalfasprout 5y ago
    The video quality is terrible. And many of us have symmetric gigabit internet so it's not like it's our connection. Zoom is actually crystal clear in most cases.
    - gundmc 5y ago
      I've found it defaults video quality to 480p but you can increase to 720p in settings and it looks much crisper.
RHSeeger 5y ago
Every time I see I have a meeting with MS Teams, I get annoyed. - Most of the time, people don't setup a dialin number, so I can't use my phone - There's no way to display both the attendees list and the chat at the same time Those are two examples of things that just cause it to be an "also ran" in my mind. It's just missing a lot of the "nice to have" features; much the way Zoom did when it was first release... it feels incomplete and unpolished. There's another one that I forget the name of that used to have the mute and hang up buttons right next to each other. I would constantly drop off calls because of it. Video and sound quality are important, but so is UX.
- pc86 5y ago
  This is completely personal preference and I would never enforce it, but I hate when people dial in to a video conference or other meeting. Even when the camera is off, having 10 people on a call but 15 attendees that include a bunch of random phone numbers, combined with not having any idea who is speaking if you don't know everyone's voice by heart, makes it a very suboptimal experience. If everyone had a nice camera, nice microphone, and nice headphones (I think all three of these should be provided by employers to remote workers), and just used the video conferencing software the way it was designed, a lot of the friction and annoyances would go away.
  - Teknoman117 5y ago
    I had already built a nice audio setup pre-pandemic because I play games with friends every other evening for the most part. 4K webcam (Logitech BRIO), Blue Yeti for the microphone + a pop filter and a shock mount, and my noise cancelling headphones. All together they cost a fraction of what my work laptop does. No one complains about my audio. Except when teams decides to randomly switch back to the built-in laptop mic which is hideous as it's right next to the cooling fans...
    - ghaff 5y ago
      I have the BRIO's predecessor, the 920 (which I think is still sold). For my purposes, it's good enough and is super easy to use. I experimented for a while using my Canon EOS but it's just so much more of a hassle that it really isn't worth it. (In part this is because it's an older model that doesn't have continuous autofocus.)
dijit 5y ago
> [..] and MS Teams are pretty good [..] I will never work for any company that uses Teams as their internal communication tool again. I'm done talking about "admins who set up groups wrong", or indicators that I'm holding it wrong... I feel very strongly that Teams is a consequence of a company that doesn't care what it inflicts on workers, regardless of price. The way teams shoves itself down my throat (we do not use teams at my current company and it was one of the reasons I moved here) is astonishing too[0]. So, no, Teams is not "pretty good". [0]: https://blog.dijit.sh/teams-microsoft-monopoly https://blog.dijit.sh/teams-microsoft-monopoly
- lostlogin 5y ago
  I have to edit a lot of documents. Word appears to be an app, a web app and a thing in teams. None of them work the same and all have strange behaviour. Try make a header or footer and edit it in one of the other apps MS offers. Try edit or move an image. Try work out how much text fits on a page. It’s incredible how much market share teams has achieved with such poor functionality for basic tasks.
- whymauri 5y ago
  I will also never work at a company that uses Teams as its primary form of communication. The whole ecosystem, along with SharePoint, is absolutely broken, end-to-end. Perhaps the worst user-facing software I've had the displeasure of using on a daily basis. I'm not kidding when I say that it a played a factor in me quitting. Not a single time did we have a meeting on Teams that worked properly. Not once.
  - lelandfe 5y ago
    That’s a pretty crazy statement - I was typically on 4-5 meetings a day on Teams and it generally was pretty smooth for everyone. Including all hands with a lot of folks on. I thought their meeting software was easily the best part of an otherwise rickety app. Guess that’s not everyone’s experience?
    - entropea 5y ago
KingOfCoders 5y ago
As a CTO coach I use Meets, Zoom and MS Teams. MS Teams is the worst of the bunch by far, mainly because it's not a video conferencing tool but wants to be everything. So it's hard to just schedule a call with someone in another organisation. Works fine with Zoom and Meets, doesn't work with Teams (also the HTML link in invites does not work in my calendar solution, why not just have a simple text link?) Zoom is the easiest and has the best video and sound quality and is my prefered tool (also support raw audio which is excellent when working with my speech coach). (I invest in my setup, Sony ZV1/Elgato HDMI, Bose QC, Rode Podcaster, 500mbit fiber and I don't like it when the software tool reduces this to 90s video internet for no reason).
- simon1ltd 5y ago
  That's also been my experience. Teams is absolutely awful. It looks like it's a sharepoint messaging client (you can store files in it, make group pages), which is.. insane. I dread seeing a Teams meeting put together, because almost always, at least 1/2 of the people on it will struggle with sound, video, random crashes, and inability to share. Zoom, for the same people, on the same equipment, doesn't have any issues. It's night and day.
  - jakub_g 5y ago
    Teams tries to be Slack, Zoom and more and it's been terribly confusing and bad a few times I had to use it. However when people in suits take decisions then "why pay for N products instead of one?" becomes compelling for many. I saw a tweet last week saying Teams have 10x user count of Slack apparently. I guess some upselling from MS who already has Office does wonders. I didn't use Teams more than 1h at once so maybe long term it's not that bad when you learn to use it? But Zoom and Slack seem aay better products for me.
  - ryantgtg 5y ago
    I work at a Teams co with about 60k people and vid/chat/share/etc works without issue. Issues, in my group, are extremely rare.
- reidjs 5y ago
988747 5y ago
In addition to that some companies and institutions are banning Zoom on the grounds of it being a spyware.
HWR_14 5y ago
I'm surprised that you (and the giant chain responding to you) haven't mentioned Discord. It's not taken over the corporate space, but it seems to have made a lot of inroads to one-degree away events: industry meetups for instance.

Is Zoom here to stay or is video conferencing here to stay? Google Meets and MS Teams are pretty good and built into their respective Office suite products.

by llampx 5y ago

Is Zoom here to stay or is video conferencing here to stay? Google Meets and MS Teams are pretty good and built into their respective Office suite products.

scarface74 5y ago

I mean Google doesn’t exactly have a track record of successful products when it comes to chat and video conferencing.

CoastalCoder 5y ago

For small meetings within established teams, strangely I kind of need to plug for gather.town.

KittenInABox 5y ago

I also prefer google meets, specifically because its live transcription imo beats out zoom's. This is useful/important for people that can have disabilities which involve speech processing. (eg. I know of people with ADHD or autism who would need to request something be repeated simply because the brain didn't process the sounds as speech the first time or something similar, when this isn't a problem when reading text.)

QuercusMax 5y ago
I find that the live captions also help me when I'm tired or distracted; and sometimes it does a better job that I do of decoding thick accents.
mediaman 5y ago
Interesting. I wonder if this is a problem for some people in-person, as well, or if the video specifically causes the speech to not get processed right the first time around. If it's a problem in both environments I could see remote work with closed captioning being a big benefit for people with certain types of neurodivergence.
- Ancapistani 5y ago
  It’s definitely a problem in person. It’s a bit easier to resolve because there’s more context/body language available, but I still often ask people to repeat themselves. Sometimes overtly, sometimes by restating the portion of what they said that I understood and prodding them to elaborate so I can implicitly fill in the missing pieces.

ramesh31 5y ago

>Is Zoom here to stay or is video conferencing here to stay? I think Zoom is here to stay at the enterprise level. Video conferencing was always a niche product until the pandemic. It was a big business, but never quite large enough to experience network effects. Now that it's a mainstream part of most people's lives, that has all changed. Zoom was in the right place at the right time to capture that, and it's going to be very hard moving forward for someone to unseat them at this point.

llampx 5y ago
In Europe I haven't come across a business using Zoom instead of Google Meets or MS Teams, or even gathertown as someone else mentioned. Mostly because they already have licenses for Office or G-Suite. Is it a US thing?
- ramesh31 5y ago
  >Is it a US thing? Must be. It's become pretty standard across companies I've dealt with. Maybe a 9/10 split with MS/Google.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    Personally, I've never been on a Teams call. I'd say it's been about 50% zoom, 50% webex, surprisingly. Fortunately with webex, the invites include a generic SIP address that we can use with our video conferencing equipment.
    - cr1895 5y ago
      It’s interesting how this differs so much! I think I’ve never been on a work-related Zoom call, and only extremely rarely something like webex. Almost always Teams.
- captainbland 5y ago
  Same. One place that was otherwise quite lenient and tended to let people use whatever (allowed both Teams and Slack) explicitly barred Zoom completely, considering it a security risk.

muh_gradle 5y ago

Fair, we'll see. Zoom's screen share and participant control features are superior from what I've seen. It's also demonstrated scale with webinar and is the de facto choice there. Integration for Zoom into calendar events and just sharing abilities are pretty seamless. I don't like that I have to use a Google account to join Meet.

davidhyde 5y ago

Low friction web rtc based tools like streamyard and jitsi meet will probably become more popular than “native” apps like zoom and teams which tend to get slower and just generally worse as they are updated especially with large corporates driving the feature bloat.

tomrod 5y ago
Haven't heard about stream yard. Thanks for the reference!
- davidhyde 5y ago
  I had to collaborate with something the other day and was not looking forward to signing up to yet another service. However, I was pleasantly surprised that this worked so well and with no sign in.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
Web-based tools are stuck on whatever the currently supported standards are and depend on all browsers implementing them the same. It's much easier for a company to simply ship their own code on their own apps and control the entire stack, which is why Zoom was so much better than every other alternative when it came out. I think people forget just how crappy teleconferencing was before Zoom. I used to work for a competitor, and we didn't like using our own product!
scarface74 5y ago
All of the video conferencing apps have web interfaces. I work with a lot of different companies and end up using whatever conferencing system they use. I refuse to install any of them on my computer.
- gundmc 5y ago
  I'm not sure if they've improved it, but in the past Zoom's web client was missing significant simple features like gallery view that made it basically unusable for social calls.

rolleiflex 5y ago

Zoom does have product merits of its own, for example, I have hearing loss and uniquely sensitive to voice quality — Zoom has by far the best sound quality across all apps I tried. It remains to be seen if these kinds of advantages will make it stick, because on the other end of the balance lies a giant security risk due to China ties.

ubermonkey 5y ago

I sure hope Zoom goes away; they way they've repeatedly lied about behavior and security just ASTONISHES me, especially since they've experienced zero backlash. They've got CIOs utterly snowed, which is honestly a huge indictment of CIOs, including and especially those in "government" roles.

cr1895 5y ago
Perhaps I'm misremembering, but wasn't there actually quite significant backlash towards their security flaws in the early days, causing them to rectify the problems?
- orange3xchicken 5y ago
  Just last night I noticed that the zoom program on my mac has been suffering from this bug, which is ~4 months old. Both are up to date. https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Why-is-the-Zoom-app-listening-on-my-microphone-when-not-in-a/td-p/29019 https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Why-is-the-Zoom-app-l...
  - core-utility 5y ago
    I got Micro Snitch [1] as part of a bundle with Little Snitch years ago and have just had it running for cases like this. I'm fortunate to not have run into this issue, but I like the peace of mind of knowing exactly if I do. [1]: https://obdev.at/products/microsnitch/index.html https://obdev.at/products/microsnitch/index.html
josephg 5y ago
Me too; but for now zoom is simply the best product in the video chat space. Everyone else seems to be betting the farm on webrtc and web browsers. But video meetings in chrome or Firefox don’t look or sound as good as zoom does. And Google Meet and the rest are at the mercy of web standards. Its much easier for zoom to add features to their product because they’re in control of the entire stack. I hope the situation changes, but I think it’ll be several years before browsers are able to meaningfully catch up to where zoom is today.

davidw 5y ago

IDK, with Google seemingly doing their best to wreck their own video stuff, I think we're stuck with Zoom.

blululu 5y ago
Not sure what you’re talking about. My work has been using Google meets and I would strongly disagree here. Google hangouts has been relatively fast (by Google standards) at adapting to the market needs and improving its features. It also runs in the browser which is a lot nicer than zoom’s dark patterns to install dubious executables or deal with a crappy webrtc interface.
- davidw 5y ago
  Google's video products used to be better, and better integrated. I used to use it to call my mom. Now I have to send her an email with a link to click instead of just initiating a video call. And they keep changing the names of all of it. The underlying video technology is perfectly fine, it's all the other stuff around it that's a complete train wreck.
- alfalfasprout 5y ago
  The video quality is terrible. And many of us have symmetric gigabit internet so it's not like it's our connection. Zoom is actually crystal clear in most cases.
  - gundmc 5y ago
    I've found it defaults video quality to 480p but you can increase to 720p in settings and it looks much crisper.

RHSeeger 5y ago

Every time I see I have a meeting with MS Teams, I get annoyed. - Most of the time, people don't setup a dialin number, so I can't use my phone - There's no way to display both the attendees list and the chat at the same time Those are two examples of things that just cause it to be an "also ran" in my mind. It's just missing a lot of the "nice to have" features; much the way Zoom did when it was first release... it feels incomplete and unpolished. There's another one that I forget the name of that used to have the mute and hang up buttons right next to each other. I would constantly drop off calls because of it. Video and sound quality are important, but so is UX.

pc86 5y ago
This is completely personal preference and I would never enforce it, but I hate when people dial in to a video conference or other meeting. Even when the camera is off, having 10 people on a call but 15 attendees that include a bunch of random phone numbers, combined with not having any idea who is speaking if you don't know everyone's voice by heart, makes it a very suboptimal experience. If everyone had a nice camera, nice microphone, and nice headphones (I think all three of these should be provided by employers to remote workers), and just used the video conferencing software the way it was designed, a lot of the friction and annoyances would go away.
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  I had already built a nice audio setup pre-pandemic because I play games with friends every other evening for the most part. 4K webcam (Logitech BRIO), Blue Yeti for the microphone + a pop filter and a shock mount, and my noise cancelling headphones. All together they cost a fraction of what my work laptop does. No one complains about my audio. Except when teams decides to randomly switch back to the built-in laptop mic which is hideous as it's right next to the cooling fans...
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I have the BRIO's predecessor, the 920 (which I think is still sold). For my purposes, it's good enough and is super easy to use. I experimented for a while using my Canon EOS but it's just so much more of a hassle that it really isn't worth it. (In part this is because it's an older model that doesn't have continuous autofocus.)

dijit 5y ago

> [..] and MS Teams are pretty good [..] I will never work for any company that uses Teams as their internal communication tool again. I'm done talking about "admins who set up groups wrong", or indicators that I'm holding it wrong... I feel very strongly that Teams is a consequence of a company that doesn't care what it inflicts on workers, regardless of price. The way teams shoves itself down my throat (we do not use teams at my current company and it was one of the reasons I moved here) is astonishing too[0]. So, no, Teams is not "pretty good". [0]: https://blog.dijit.sh/teams-microsoft-monopoly https://blog.dijit.sh/teams-microsoft-monopoly

lostlogin 5y ago
I have to edit a lot of documents. Word appears to be an app, a web app and a thing in teams. None of them work the same and all have strange behaviour. Try make a header or footer and edit it in one of the other apps MS offers. Try edit or move an image. Try work out how much text fits on a page. It’s incredible how much market share teams has achieved with such poor functionality for basic tasks.
whymauri 5y ago
I will also never work at a company that uses Teams as its primary form of communication. The whole ecosystem, along with SharePoint, is absolutely broken, end-to-end. Perhaps the worst user-facing software I've had the displeasure of using on a daily basis. I'm not kidding when I say that it a played a factor in me quitting. Not a single time did we have a meeting on Teams that worked properly. Not once.
- lelandfe 5y ago
  That’s a pretty crazy statement - I was typically on 4-5 meetings a day on Teams and it generally was pretty smooth for everyone. Including all hands with a lot of folks on. I thought their meeting software was easily the best part of an otherwise rickety app. Guess that’s not everyone’s experience?
  - entropea 5y ago

KingOfCoders 5y ago

As a CTO coach I use Meets, Zoom and MS Teams. MS Teams is the worst of the bunch by far, mainly because it's not a video conferencing tool but wants to be everything. So it's hard to just schedule a call with someone in another organisation. Works fine with Zoom and Meets, doesn't work with Teams (also the HTML link in invites does not work in my calendar solution, why not just have a simple text link?) Zoom is the easiest and has the best video and sound quality and is my prefered tool (also support raw audio which is excellent when working with my speech coach). (I invest in my setup, Sony ZV1/Elgato HDMI, Bose QC, Rode Podcaster, 500mbit fiber and I don't like it when the software tool reduces this to 90s video internet for no reason).

simon1ltd 5y ago
That's also been my experience. Teams is absolutely awful. It looks like it's a sharepoint messaging client (you can store files in it, make group pages), which is.. insane. I dread seeing a Teams meeting put together, because almost always, at least 1/2 of the people on it will struggle with sound, video, random crashes, and inability to share. Zoom, for the same people, on the same equipment, doesn't have any issues. It's night and day.
- jakub_g 5y ago
  Teams tries to be Slack, Zoom and more and it's been terribly confusing and bad a few times I had to use it. However when people in suits take decisions then "why pay for N products instead of one?" becomes compelling for many. I saw a tweet last week saying Teams have 10x user count of Slack apparently. I guess some upselling from MS who already has Office does wonders. I didn't use Teams more than 1h at once so maybe long term it's not that bad when you learn to use it? But Zoom and Slack seem aay better products for me.
- ryantgtg 5y ago
  I work at a Teams co with about 60k people and vid/chat/share/etc works without issue. Issues, in my group, are extremely rare.
reidjs 5y ago

988747 5y ago

In addition to that some companies and institutions are banning Zoom on the grounds of it being a spyware.

HWR_14 5y ago

I'm surprised that you (and the giant chain responding to you) haven't mentioned Discord. It's not taken over the corporate space, but it seems to have made a lot of inroads to one-degree away events: industry meetups for instance.