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Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

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Re: Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

#53
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even WebEx is still around and, ironically, works much better in a browser than Zoom.

New webex sucks for remote support. It forces me to re-request control every time I paste something. Yes I could manually type everything out but that is a pita when dealing with long Linux commands pulled from documentation.

Also the random hot keys webex picks up. All too often i'll mute myself instead of escape out of edit mode in vi.

Re: Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

#54
post #6

Is this a submarine written by Microsoft PR? Seems very likely it could be. Seems to boil down to: "Little upstart company can't be trusted with important business, better buy from an established player."

My company prohibited and even remote-force uninstalled zoom and mandated Skype or MS Teams right after the last rash of bad zoom PR.

I feel pretty certain there was coordination from our Microsoft account manager and Microsoft's PR team on this front.

The funny part is that Skype is famous for zero days while zoom is famous for people running pseudo public non-password protected conference calls that got invaded by teenagers.

Re: Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

#56
post #14
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those that haven't tried Jitsi - my friends and I catch up on it almost daily. It is awesome. The phone app is great too. You can setup a room that people can jump in and out of, which is pretty convenient. If you're looking for that office feel for your small team, then Jitsi might be worth a shot. And, I think you can host your own server if you'd like to!

We've tried Jitsi multiple times (as recently as a month ago) and the experience has been uniformly bad at anything beyond a handful of people. When we scaled to > 20 it was completely unusable (feedback / echos, delays, stuttering, dropouts, you name it).

Were you self-hosting, or using the free service? If self-hosting, I'm curious what resources you were devoting to your VPS, and which hosting provider?

Re: Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And unlike many other services, the network effect is quite low because I can easily install multiple video conferencing software or even run some in the browser. If someone organising a meeting asks to use something unusual, I'm normally not that bothered.

Working for a company that deals with security, I have definitely run into customers that would think I was crazy if I asked them to use anything other than Zoom or Webex. Some are even limited to webex only.

Really? If you want to one-click-add a Zoom meeting to your Google calendar, Zoom requires read history to your full Google Calendar (including all history!) That seems incredibly intrusive.

How do corporations even allow access for this particular features?

Re: Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

#58

> But in many of the verticals in these sectors—such as banking or mobile phone services—no single company dominates the market. I don't think that's true of video-conferencing either. Zoom is probably the most popular (and technically superior), but there is also: Microsoft Teams, Webex, Google Meet, Slack, and many others, including open source options like Jitsi. And they all pretty much do the job.

Microsoft Teams has improved quite a bit since the pandemic started also. They added things that were missing, like a tile view (max 9), raise your hand, and blurred or custom backgrounds.

Zoom is still better, but Teams now seems "good enough" to me.

Re: Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

#59

A bit tired of the "critical infrastructure" argument. People are very quick to put all sorts of things into the category. He mentions network effects as the only real moat in the article. If Zoom fails at being a product, people will move away.

> If Zoom fails at being a product, people will move away.

Literally. As in being evicted from their home: https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2020/spring/trial-by-proprietar...

Re: Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

#60

Like backing up data, having a contingency plan is important. Even if you like zoom because of certain features, having a backup service you can use in case of emergency is important. If everyone knows beforehand "which link to try if zoom is down today", then it is merely an inconvenience instead of an emergency.

Email still exists. Just create google or microsoft or webex meeting and send email to all participants.
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