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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.
> 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.
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.
I'm not concerned about Zoom monopoly at all.
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.
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...
They have accessibility and access and all these baked into the design AFAIK. I don't understand why American govs have such a hard time on this. Some are larger than the UK and have problems!
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.
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.
You are used to a flexible organization. How about one where IT has locked down the computers mindlessly?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It goes in many combinations. Where I work now, it's Teams internally and Webex externally, with Zoom being explicitly banned, with at least two strongly worded e-mails reminding us to make it double plus sure we don't have the Zoom client installed. At the same time, outside of work, I was videocalling people on Skype, and my wife had classes delivered via Zoom.
Not sure what' worse, Zoom or Teams. Seems like "pick your poison". A coworker once looked at Teams console. I had logged over 700 errors. Often we cannot hear people, although their tech is completely fine. It's just Teams being bug ridden and excluding people.
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.
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.
Zoom is only going to stay widely adopted until an easy, viable alternative comes along and gets in the good graces of people in charge. There are some alternatives now, like Facebook's group calls on WhatsApp but that one's fallen out of favour for obvious reasons.
Thinking about it another way, consider the poor usability and experience of WebEx/Lync and juxtapose that to Zoom -- Zoom just works without any friction. A future Zoom-killer app would need to provide that much better service.
In Webex I can either send someone the link to my personal room or I can schedule a meeting via Outlook (with a Webex plugin)or the Webex app.
With Zoom I can either start a meeting with my personal meeting ID or I can schedule a meeting via Outlook (with a Zoom plugin) or the Zoom app.
Inside both there are buttons to turn on/off mic, camera, change settings of those things, share the screen, and if I am the host, I can assign various privileges or revoke them.
I haven't used Lync in years so I have no idea what that's like, but from what I've seen, Webex and Zoom are basically in a back and forth to add the handful of minor features they're missing compared to the other. Zoom has been improving security options and defaults. Webex added virtual backgrounds and is about to add breakout rooms.
I understand that there are bigger differences in enterprise license options and backend, but for users they seem like similar-looking fraternal twins.