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In what world is loom something no one asked for? I, and my team, use it everyday and have at my past two jobs as well. For engineers it’s a life saver being
by edgyquant 3y ago
In what world is loom something no one asked for? I, and my team, use it everyday and have at my past two jobs as well. For engineers it’s a life saver being able to share a quick video of some code and the bug youre getting (or asking what some piece of code does) and also forcing junior engineers to do this for a PR guarantees the feature works/is a form of QA.
- eptcyka 3y agoComing from a deep, shameful corner of ignorance, but what's special about recording a screen and sharing it via the comms tool of choice (IM, Slack, Signal, e-mail)? I do love the idea of sharing a screen recording of features though.
- swivelmaster 3y agoIt’s well-executed and convenient. That’s worth a lot.
- hannes0 3y agoThis discussion reminds me of when Dropbox was at ShowHN and someone was commenting on how this could be done with FTP. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- scott_w 3y agoTo be fair, the person asking the question genuinely is interested in the answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37858345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37858345
- eastbound 3y agoI still haven’t purchased Dropbox. When the choice came up, it seemed important for our backups not to be made in USA. So, indeed, a very cool replacement was SSH. I still don’t know anyone who didn’t leave Dropbox after they jacked up the prices. A USB key is much cheaper (and reliable, at the rate at which Dropbox nukes accounts that they deem not compliant with whatever policy).
- solardev 3y agoMost people I know just went with their cloud provider's sync solution once everyone added one (GDrive, iCloud, Amazon photos, OneDrive, Creative Cloud, etc.) Can't remember the last time I saw a USB key in use anymore. The cloud stuff is convenient, but it quickly became a commoditu Dropbox is still better in some small ways (like delta syncs) but it wasn't enough I guess.
- mikeyouse 3y agoIt's amusing to see "but it wasn't enough I guess" in relation to a profitable $10 billion company with 3,000 employees. That's a pretty good outcome!
- solardev 3y agoTrue! It's still a useful product, but the pressure to keep getting huge-r is always there I guess. I knew someone who worked there and they seemed pretty desperate for new initiatives (like the failed Paper). Most of their competitors have online storage as part of their product portfolio. I don't know of anything else major that Dropbox does...
- eastbound 3y agoWell, it’s relevant: Atlassian launched a paid issue tracker in 2003 when the open-source Mantis was all the rage. There is always room for a smooth paid service compared to the rough free one. Android and Linux vs twice-more-expensive Apple.
- ajkjk 3y ago> I still don’t know anyone who didn’t leave Dropbox after they jacked up the prices. Funny, I don't know anyone who did.
- antonjs 3y agoNo wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.[1] [1] https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026 https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026
- dmurray 3y agoSurely those are the qualities Atlassian will want to change as quickly as possible, though.
- cco 3y agoIt always destroys my laptop, MacBook Pro i5 from 2020. Desktop app, chrome extension, whatever, it absolutely chews up my CPU.
- CharlieDigital 3y agoThey're not necessarily buying it just for the tech; I have no doubt that Atlassian could build their own version of Loom. I'd guess that a big part of it is customer acquisition and then raising prices or ramping customers to other Atlassian products.
- eptcyka 3y agoNo, I mean, desktop and mobile screen recording, in my opinion, seems to be simple enough even for laymen. I could also be convinced otherwise :)
- CharlieDigital 3y agoAs others have pointed out, it's not the recording that's the hard part per se; more so the entire workflow from hitting firing up the recording tool to getting the final recording -- possibly edited -- into the cloud for sharing in some seamless flow. Lots of ancillary stuff involved. I know a team that went down this route and built a competing tool and the hardest part was working out the streaming upload and storage. Then you layer on things like permissions, lifecycle management, etc.
- politelemon 3y agoAlso recently Atlassian released a Whiteboard (read Miro/infinite canvas) feature in Confluence cloud, so this could become another tool in the set that they release to keep people collaborating on their platform and not heading elsewhere.
- groestl 3y agoI have a lot of doubt Atlassian can build anything in a reasonable timeframe. CLOUD-6999.
- mvdtnz 3y agoOh that's nothing. Check out CONFSERVER-5926. Create April 2006 and finally closed with resolution Duplicate(???) in 2019.
- throwanem 3y agoLoom makes it very easy to voice over and annotate a recording, with both individually editable in a way raw screen recordings don't support, and to share the result via a link. It's not (yet?) heavily used among engs where I am, but we love it anyway for massively shortening the feedback loop with designers who can drop a 30-second demo of some prototype UI at the head of a Slack thread and asynchronously receive the kind of nuanced feedback that'd usually need to start off with a (necessarily synchronous) huddle.
- eptcyka 3y agoCool, this is the answer I was looking for. Thank you so much!
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y agoTheir video summarization and speed-ups are killer features.
- jzelinskie 3y agoI think lots of people haven't realized that video clips like Loom are actually built into Slack. The button that looks like a video camera below the input text box does it. It's not a full replacement, but it's the one you already have.
- gumby 3y agoI had never even noticed that button before. thanks.
- BossingAround 3y agoSlack's huddle feature is actually so nice. We use it more often than the dedicated MS Teams our org pays for (sadly).
- killingtime74 3y agoWe used it for a bit then stopped after discovering the screen share resolution is super low
- duped 3y agoI've been using Peek for this for years and never thought it was a billion dollar feature
- yieldcrv 3y agoCommand+shift+5 is built into OSX I find the loom extension redundant and glitch prone
- chenster 3y agoLoom gives a much better UX and easy to use and more important ability to share. They probably have a huge user base that other businesses interested in acquire.
- tshaddox 3y agoOn MacOS Loom is extremely buggy and, even when it works, is way worse than MacOS’ built-in screen recording.
- paiute 3y agoLoom is gold on windows.
- jmuguy 3y agoThey seem to be glossing over the fact that Loom doesn't just record the screen - it immediately gives you a link to that recording.
- JCharante 3y agoSo ShareX?
- smaddock 3y agoShareX uploads videos in a pipeline: record, optimize, then upload. Loom does this while the video is being recorded to give you the link as fast as possible.
- seanhunter 3y agoAnd that's worth a billion dollars?
- flashgordon 3y agoActually the bigger q is where is Loom's moat? I've used loom too and I agree that being able take a video and do "mini editing" is useful but I guess I wouldn't pay for it given cmd-optiom-5 on osx. But still the real thing is where is the moat? I ask this because until recently I hadn't given much thought to "having paid users who will feel stupid to move off" was not a big deal but clearly it is? To play devil's advocate though from a numbers point I think loom has about 20m users so this is $5 per user. But if acq is for a billion then I'd assume their actual revenue is something like 100m. So $5 /user/year. I guess in that sense once a user has paid that low price they are not thinking of moving off for a year so it is plenty of upsell opportunities for atlassian. Ofcourse depending on usage just the video hosting could cost them more than $5/user/ year? Interesting stuff!
- sb8244 3y agoMaybe going outside of engineering? I use both loom and cmd opt 5, but my CS and sales team would not be able to effectively use cmd5 (editing, hosting, comments, etc.) The moat for us is that it just works and is cheap enough that moving off is literally not worth my time.
- foobarian 3y agoSadly these days it seems that having good taste and not having embarked on the enshittification train itself is a pretty great moat.
- flashgordon 3y agoThis is fair. I think I was giving less credit to looms packaging of a "complete" feature. Almost like their work is "done".
- solardev 3y agoIf I remember correctly, they also host the edited videos and the recipient gets a link to their hosted version. That's the reason I didn't sign up (I wanted to send the video over Slack directly), but it does functionally add a moat where all your videos are on their servers, like YouTube.
- doctorpangloss 3y agoI understand that stuff like Loom exists and people use it. But people are saying it makes no sense, not that it doesn't happen. > also forcing junior engineers to do this for a PR guarantees the feature works/is a form of QA... life saver being able to share a quick video of some code and the bug youre getting Developers who don't know if what they write works or who can't express a bug in words... they're in trouble. You don't need experience for that. Non-developers / non-pros doing QA is symptomatic of greater problems. > life saver being able to share a quick video Who is supposed to be watching these videos? In your honest, no-BS assessment, when you're staring at these Zooms you might be doing professionally with like 9 people and only 1 of them is an engineer, and he's offshore: like isn't that the problem?
- rmbyrro 3y agoThis is news to me I don't recall having the need to use video to express anything that comes to code. Perhaps user interface stuff, yes. But code? Can't remember...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- unixhero 3y agoPeople really don't like Atlassian around these parts
- krooj 3y agoI guarantee you the snark originates from a hatred of JIRA.