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Why is anyone using zoom? After the encryption and Chinese key server debacle shouldn't zoom be on the permanent ban list of an company taking security and conf
by dathinab 3y ago
Why is anyone using zoom? After the encryption and Chinese key server debacle shouldn't zoom be on the permanent ban list of an company taking security and confidentially even the sightliest bit serious. I mean that was bad behavior, intentional not accidental, to a degree where I would say there is no way to ever regain the trust as long as you don't completely replace every person with influence in the company.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoI would love to use another product if one could even compete in the same league. Try using Teams, for instance, and you won’t wonder anymore why people use Zoom
- kyriakos 3y agoMeetings in teams are not bad it's the chat experience that's beyond bad.
- OriginalPenguin 3y agoWhat makes Zoom better than teams?
- barney54 3y agoZoom just works. Teams usually works, but there are random issues from time to time.
- mshron 3y agoNot OP but in my experience it’s more likely to Just Work with fewer glitches and at a higher video resolution. I’d like to get away from Zoom but with consulting work it’s the only thing I’ve found that typically works with clients on the first try and with the fewest artifacts.
- dathinab 3y agoIdk. in my experience Teams nearly always works, but sometimes glitchy. On the other hand with zoom I did had the experience of it just arbitrary not working at all for me.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoI have not had the same luck with the video calls as you. People have mentioned “new Teams” which is perhaps better and more stable. When I used Teams last year it was not at all comparable to Zoom
- resolutebat 3y agoTeams is uniquely terrible (well, WebEx is terrible-er). Google Meet, BlueJeans, GoToMeeting, even consumer Skype all work fine.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mattnewton 3y agoI use google meet and haven’t had any problems personally. People complain about it but it has always worked better than zoom for me personally and every team I’ve worked on.
- fphhotchips 3y agoJust one example: Google Meet's virtual background is terrible compared to Zoom.
- matsemann 3y agoGoogle Meet is a lag-party on various laptops. And bad video quality as well.
- solumunus 3y agoYou’ve only tried Teams, haven’t you?
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoNone of the other solutions mentioned in this thread (meet, jitsi, bluejeans) can even be described as barely functional in an area of poor connectivity. Zoom somehow still works when you’re on a cell phone with two bars driving through hills
- scruple 3y ago/rant But why are you on a (presumably) work call when you're driving over a hill with two bars? Put the work down for crying out loud. I'd love it if people like you were forced to just turn the god damn thing off when you can't actually attend a meeting instead of setting unrealistic expectations for the rest of us... It is just not that fucking important.
- jareklupinski 3y agoplot twist: op is a road surface engineer giving an in-the-field assessment "feels great, jim!"
- hedgehog 3y agoGoogle Meet used to be pretty bad a few years ago but it is totally fine now. I use it every day for work. I trust Chrome's hardening more than most other apps including Zoom. Edit: Ok actually some Meet complaints: Weird useless white space in the UI. Doesn't put people's faces at the top of the window closer to the camera (will push them to the bottom and put screen share above). Very annoying settings UI. Generally doesn't work well when the window is small. No floating window option. No option to rearrange participant tiles. Probably 100 more like that, but it's still tolerable.
- jwrallie 3y agoI had the opposite experience, I tried to attend a Google Meet recently by using my Linux PC and Firefox, and could not get it to work at all. So I changed quickly to my iPad and Safari, also no go. My friend using Chrome on Windows on the table just next of mine could attend just fine. Zoom just works on both of my devices.
- hedgehog 3y agoI treat it as Chrome-only (or Gmail app on mobile), just like Zoom effectively only works in the Zoom client. It seems like in typical navel-gazing fashion Google only tests in Chrome.
- scruple 3y agoTangential but it's not just Google. Firefox is my daily driver but I am routinely pushed into Chrome, especially for work-related things (janky ass third party sites, HR sites, etc.). Very frustrating experience!
- apocalyptic0n3 3y agoAh, the good ol' days of enterprise apps only working in IE6. We never left it apparently. (I say "ol'" but I was dealing with the IE6 thing as recently as 2011)
- 3y ago
- Roark66 3y agoI guess it depends on region. I've been using Google meet, zoom and teams and by a large margin teams provides the best conference experience(best audio quality, less interruptions etc). Shitty web app and lack of desktop app on Linux notwithstanding.
- belthesar 3y agoDid they discontinue the Linux app? In 2020, I was using a first party Zoom app on my Linux workstation, but I haven't regularly used Zoom since I left the company I was working for then.
- dathinab 3y agothey do have a Linux app, but it's basically a outdated (!) version of the web-app bundled with and outdated version of electron and some custom code which doesn't add anything the web-app already supports when used with chrome (and pipewire).
- XorNot 3y agoI am using Teams and I don't know what feature people are missing from the video call functionality? Like...all these products do video calls fine. They all seem to work. What's the killer feature that one has that the others don't?
- midoridensha 3y ago>Like...all these products do video calls fine. No, they don't. Teams does not work at all on MacOS with Intel silicon, just for starters.
- porker 3y agoAnd only works sometimes on Apple silicon.
- kyriakos 3y agoMy experience is with windows and browser, both work fine. I hate it's chat ux but calls work consistently well.
- midoridensha 3y ago>My experience is with windows and browser, both work fine. That's not helpful when you're trying to chat with someone who for whatever reason is stuck with a MacBook. This is why Zoom is so great: you can actually count on it working with everyone's computer. With everything else, there always seems to be some combination of hardware+OS+browser that just doesn't work. That's completely unacceptable for a video chat platform that needs to be usable by everyone. If you're just chatting with one or two friends, one of the others might be fine since number of different platforms isn't very high and you can pick something that works for the 2 of you, but for something that needs to be usable by anyone at any time, it won't work.
- kyriakos 3y agoIn most corporate environments there is uniformity in platforms used so if windows is used which is the case with most corporations it's a non issue and especially because teams is included in the office 365 subscription those companies just use teams. Does the browser version work well on macos? I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work on chrome.
- thefz 3y agoI use Teams almost exclusively and have to say the "new" Teams works leagues better than the previous.
- woleium 3y ago..said about every Microsoft product ever...
- ozgung 3y agoWe use Around and I think it’s in the same league.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoI had not heard of this one, worth a shot to try!
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Try using Teams, for instance, and you won’t wonder anymore why people use Zoom IME, Teams is better than Zoom for meetings. Its worse than alternatives at everything else (at a text-centric asynchronous multimedia group communication tool, its far worse than Slack, for instance).
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y agoZoom noise cancelation set to high is really good: my children can scream and nobody hears them
- saulpw 3y agoI like whereby.com. Simple, clean, with fixed urls for rooms.
- nikanj 3y agoBecause ”it works” trumps ”it’s ideologically sound” for most users. Zoom is a really great product, they’ve really worked hard on the basic ”join a meeting” user experience. At least a few years back they provided every meeting with a custom installer(!) that deployed Zoom, then automatically whisked you into the right meeting. The competition has improved by leaps and bounds, but most products used to be either super enterprise-y, requiring seven MSI files and two reboots to get you to a meeting - or super open source, bleeding you to death via a thousand paper cuts
- eastbound 3y agoWhereby used to be no login no plugin, it was awesome. Nowadays it requires a login and tries to milk 12€ a month, which I pay because it’s still no-plugin. (And before you say “zOoM wOrKs iN tHe BrOwSeR tOo”, yes, but Zoom still asks _my_ partners to install the heavy client and uploads files to the Internet. That there’s a dark pattern that allows you to run in the browser is irrelevant).
- Propelloni 3y ago> Zoom is a really great product, they’ve really worked hard on the basic ”join a meeting” user experience. At least a few years back they provided every meeting with a custom installer(!) that deployed Zoom, then automatically whisked you into the right meeting. This is a horrible user experience -- and impossible to do in most enterprise IT environments today. Take a look at other platforms: get a link, click the link, join meeting in already installed browser. Done. Zoom on the other hand annoys you with user hostile shit to get you to install their client. I wonder why! Their only saving grace is that they are an equal opportunity annoyer, even Linux users are not safe. /s
- ARandomerDude 3y agoFirst I have to convince everyone else to stop using it. Until then I’m stuck with it.
- PeterStuer 3y agoBecause it works. I had to run and attend a lott of big online meetings involving people from dozens of different companies each time. Anytime someone tried to host a meeting with Teams, they were never able to get/keep everyone connected. After having tried to exhaustion, I just got a GoToMeeting subscription and used that. Skype used to work fine before Microsoft merged it into their Link abomination. Later there was Zoom that just worked. Yes, there was lots of MS sales collatoral and infomercials in the press around Zoom insecurity. That was until MS themselves were found lacking in that same department. Later they both cleaned up their act.
- hedora 3y agoHas Microsoft cleaned up their act? I thought windows still had mostly mandatory telemetry, and as far as I know, they haven’t walked back the thing where engineers can pull arbitrary files off your machine “for diagnostic purposes only”, which means they’re legally obligated to service all sorts of sketchy warrants against machines they don’t own.
- benterix 3y agoFrom their perspective, they practically own them. I realized this when I first noted a process started by Chrome called "software reporter" that wasn't started by me, I had no knowledge it started and if I knew, I wouldn't let it start. The web was full of tips on how to permanently disable the thing from running. So yes, from the point of view of these companies, they can do whatever they feel is reasonable, and we as users have no say in this.
- sofixa 3y agoOne bad marketing message and one security mistake that could have very well been accidental are enough to entirely ban list software for you? I'd love to hear what sort of software is in your allowed list, because I can't imagine it contains many "Enterprise" vendors.
- lloeki 3y agoThings (and their combinations) that come to mind: - latency+quality, even with > 10ppl - works in challenging network conditions - tons of tunables to make it fit one's use case - no-account meeting join - ability to dial in via phone - n:p webconf/webcast mode (with p vastly > n) - subroom breakouts - live closed captioning - recording (incl. chat replay + transcript) - non-GSM-quality audio (stereo, no echo cancellation, no passband filter, high bitrate encoding) - conference room mode with automatic presence (via ultrasound or something) and individual face extraction - many platforms and OSes support
- Paul-Craft 3y agoLet's not forget: - Noise cancelling that will mute the sound of a German Shepherd who's just spotted the mailman (though, granted, nobody will hear *you,* either, if it's your German Shepherd :) - Sensible defaults to the extent that if you get invited to a Zoom meeting and just download Zoom to open the meeting link, generally what you want to happen will happen (this being the other half of your "tons of tunables" point) - A pretty decent web client you can use if you don't *want* to download Zoom And more, I'm sure.