271–280 of 450 posts
Hangouts is not that bad
God please don't make me use a non-zoom video conferencing tool! I have used about a dozen over the years in my role as a consultant, and Zoom has been by far the most reliable. I’m hopeful lots of good can come from the scrutiny, but please Zoom get your act together so I don’t have to use some other buggy thing that doesn’t actually work.
It's fascinating to see people's experiences. I've been using WebEx in enterprise/corporate environment for couple of years intensively, and it "just works". I can download desktop client, but I can also just run it on browser. Zoom always wants to install weird clients that violate policies and cause my corporate laptops to refuse or bork. I recognize my experience may be a minority one, but I'm surprised, genuinely…
I also have a B2B micro-ISV, and chose Webex for that too, largely because it just works, but also because it's almost expected in corporate circles.
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The browser version of Zoom seems to require a free account be created, and it was audio only in Chromium, I could not get it to use my camera. Zoom refused to work in Firefox. Jitsi and Google Meet seem to work in both browsers, without requiring me to log in.
You can join Zoom meetings on your browser without creating an account. It's a bit off the beaten path: 1. Go to zoom.com 2. Click "Join a meeting" 3. Enter meeting id and click Join 4. Ignore the automatic app download 5. Go back 6. Click "Join a meeting" again 7. Enter meeting id and click Join again 8. Ignore the app download again 9. Click at "If nothing prompts, click here" 10. Click "Join from your browser" 11.…
Seems to work for them, and gets around that whole song and dance you described.
"Employees who have been using Zoom to stay in touch with family and friends can continue to do so through a web browser or via mobile." (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
I mean, Google bans MS Office from employees' computers as well (with special-case exceptions), so they use Docs instead. Since Google has Meet (Hangouts), this isn't really surprising. It mainly sucks for when an employee (especially in sales) has a call with a client that uses Zoom and can't use Meet, because then you're forced to dial in, which just puts you at a disadvantage when everyone can see everyone's face…
MS Office isn't "banned" from employees' computers at Google. If you need it (and some do) you must request it specifically, because it costs Google a nontrivial amount of money for every user. Same thing with any piece of commercial software: for example, I have Adobe Photoshop on my Google laptop, and I had to request it because it costs Google a few hundred bucks, and most people don't need it at all. Before Googl…
Google is the fourth biggest public company in the world as measured by market cap.
A Microsoft 365 "E3" license is $20/user/month. They can afford it.
This restriction is entirely about eating your own dogfood.
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It's fascinating to see people's experiences. I've been using WebEx in enterprise/corporate environment for couple of years intensively, and it "just works". I can download desktop client, but I can also just run it on browser. Zoom always wants to install weird clients that violate policies and cause my corporate laptops to refuse or bork. I recognize my experience may be a minority one, but I'm surprised, genuinely…
The Zoom client works really well, Webex works okay for me most of the time but not all the time and has a lot of little problems I find annoying. - Overall webex UI is very slow/laggy, subjective - yes, but I think it'd be obvious to any regular person. - It makes my self-view a tiny floating box (this drives me crazy, I want it to be the same size as the others). - Gallery view doesn't work well, sometimes the spea…
Also, when I was evaluating conferencing systems for my micro-ISV, I tried several - the screen sharing on Zoom was laggy as hell, moreso than I saw with anything else. It was 1-2 years ago, so things might have changed since then.
I don't like zoom either, but what exactly made them the HN punching bag of the month? Ad/surveillance giants like Google or FB are typically spoken of with notes of reverence and awe on here. Zoom gets lit-up for sending data to FB, but FB gets a pass? I don't know I just can't get into the mood. extinguishes torch in moat .
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this is explicitly not what I asked, and not what the person I was replying to said. besides, zoom already owned this mistake. https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/03/response-to-resear...
Zoom said that their meeting data is no longer routed through China's servers. That's not what citizenlab's complaint was, and also not what the original poster stated. >There is the thing that all Zoom keys are kept and maintained in China Their complaint was about zoom's encryption key generation and distribution practices. The post you linked has nothing about the key distribution scheme zoom needs to implement so…
OP: all Zoom keys are kept and maintained in China
me: got a source for that claim?
you: quote citizen lab, sometimes zoom keys are sent to china
me: i didn't ask if keys were sometimes sent to china and that's not what OP said
you: not what the original poster stated.
this is where you lost me
> But with true end-to-end encryption, it doesn't matter
i never said it mattered. i don't care if zoom is e2e encrypted or not, which is why i didn't bring it up.
> Not to mention that for a sufficiently interested actor, they don't need to access zoom's network
people get away with this internet boogeyman argument because its technically true, but what percentage of internet traffic inside the continental US is actually being monitored and exfiltrated to APTs? compromises happen internally. i cant remember any stories of a data breach occurring with data in transit, as opposed to data at rest.
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MS Office isn't "banned" from employees' computers at Google. If you need it (and some do) you must request it specifically, because it costs Google a nontrivial amount of money for every user. Same thing with any piece of commercial software: for example, I have Adobe Photoshop on my Google laptop, and I had to request it because it costs Google a few hundred bucks, and most people don't need it at all. Before Googl…
> because it costs Google a nontrivial amount of money for every user. Google is the fourth biggest public company in the world as measured by market cap. A Microsoft 365 "E3" license is $20/user/month. They can afford it. This restriction is entirely about eating your own dogfood.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because it has a better UI or makes their life very slightly more convenient in some way. I think you've missed the point completely. It's not a question of convenient UI. It's the reliability of the video call. I've tried numerous video conferencing tools, and the differentiating factor is literally just whether or not the video quality is consistently good, whether the call is dropped or not, and whether the audi…
WebRTC is much better at having "consistently good video quality" as this benchmark convincingly shows: https://jitsi.org/news/a-simple-congestion-test-for-zoom/