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Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

brookings.edu

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

#151

Post by m11a »

impendia wrote: post #71

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 am still confused how Zoom ended up being used this much, especially by less technical people. The UI is not intuitive at all, the options are a mess, and the product doesn't even know what audience it's trying to cater for. Every other Zoom call I've been in someone is having a technical error or confusion (even technically-inclined people).

That considered, at least in principle, it shouldn't be that hard for a competitor.

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

#152

Post by klyrs »

renewiltord wrote: post #44

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.

When it's mandatory to use zoom to attend a court hearing, than I'd argue that it's being employed as critical infrastructure.

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

#153

Post by bredren »

m11a wrote: post #151
impendia wrote: post #71

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 am still confused how Zoom ended up being used this much, especially by less technical people. The UI is not intuitive at all, the options are a mess, and the product doesn't even know what audience it's trying to cater for. Every other Zoom call I've been in someone is having a technical error or confusion (even technically-inclined people). That considered, at least in principle, it shouldn't be that hard for a c…

I think the branding and reasonable reliability worked. I think it helped that it wasn’t a bundled service of Google or someone else.

It helped also that there were native apps and fwiw the web conf quality is good.

But ya the ux is terrible. I think they are holding up a release of the web sdk that lets you configure ui to give product time to catch up.

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

#154

Post by notahacker »

tingletech wrote: post #150
notahacker wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many kids are missing how many minutes of education from their parents and teachers being unable to find any digital devices with the ability to access webconferencing services other than Zoom? Periodically losing connectivity is an occupational hazard of doing things with webconferencing made worse if the people at each end aren't particularly computer literate. But I'm not sure Zoom lockin ranks high on the lis…

idk, but isn't that the article was about, zoom going down like it did for lots of schools last week?

Sure, but the article has somehow turned that into us being more dependent on Zoom than mobile networks and banks.

And the reality is Zoom is much easier to switch away from if and when its outages are more than temporary inconveniences.

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

#155

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

Robotbeat wrote: post #92
AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With COVID my grandfather has been doing telepresence visits with his doctors, for COVID among other reasons. Mostly they were using a 3rd party solution like webx/zoom/etc but one doctor (automated in an online form) noticed his number was tied to iMessage and offered to just FaceTime him at his appointment time. Super easy for him (at 94) to self-manage vs any other solution where we (my mother or myself) need to b…

It’s a shame there isn’t seamless ability to Facetime with Android users like there is to make a voice call or text with them. We (read: tech community and/or society) should fix this. It’d be in society’s interest if a video call between android and Apple was as easy as a voice call is. (and I do think Facetime between Apple users is this easy... I sometimes use Facetime purely because my WiFi is a little better tha…

Google's built-in app (Duo) is made available on iOS, but Facetime isn't made available on Android.

Apple could easily open up Facetime and iMessage, and they've evaluated doing exactly this, but they ultimately determined that keeping these pieces of communication software exclusive to Apple devices is a big part of why the devices themselves are so sticky.

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

#156

Post by [deleted] »

fsflover wrote: post #146
impendia wrote: post #71

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.

> The same factors that made Zoom easy to adopt, make it equally easy to switch to something else. Did you hear about network effect?

[deleted]

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

#157

Post by beagle3 »

m11a wrote: post #151
impendia wrote: post #71

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 am still confused how Zoom ended up being used this much, especially by less technical people. The UI is not intuitive at all, the options are a mess, and the product doesn't even know what audience it's trying to cater for. Every other Zoom call I've been in someone is having a technical error or confusion (even technically-inclined people). That considered, at least in principle, it shouldn't be that hard for a c…

Everything else was (and most still is) much, much worse.

It somehow disappeared from communal memory, but before Zoom, it was common for the first 10 minutes on any group skype/hangout/webex/gotomeeting call to be all about making sure everyone is heard and seen.

And with Zoom, it went down to an acceptable 1-2 minutes or so. Others have slightly improved their game since, but not much -- I still occasionally get Meet/Hangout invites for work and there's often problems, mostly related to authorization/authentication and occasionally video/audio feed.

Zoom is bad. But all the competition is still worse (and used to be much worse just a few months ago).

This does NOT come without cost - e.g. their MacOS "just works" setup was incredibly broken from a security perspective, to the point that apple pushed an OS update to block it. But people don't care - convenience consistently trumps security in any mass market system.

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

#158

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

scottlamb wrote: post #91
impendia wrote: post #71

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.

> 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 think it's for real. Think about elementary school instead. The kids are just learning to use computers. Their parents may be also, and if not they may be trying to do their own work fr…

The issue may not necessarily a technical one or be an issue that faces the teacher directly, but rather a coordination issue.

I don't have kids, but my coworkers do and the ensuing aftermath was not pretty. Beyond the obvious, sometimes just making a parent to move to another platform that they just mastered ( because it is not just kids ) can be challenging. Heavens know if it happened to me, I would question move from say Zoom to FB messenger/duo/we..

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

#159

Post by cmroanirgo »

impendia wrote: post #71

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.

Not having used zoom, what does it do that the open source, self hostable jitsi meet does not?

I feel that jitsi for some unbeknownst reason is ignored in favour of zoom, but don't understand why.

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