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 from home while the kids are in class. There are many low-income and/or ESL families. Even the teachers aren't tech experts.
In my son's kindergarten class, everyone got school-supplied Chromebooks. They all have Google accounts for Google Classroom. That probably means they could switch to Google Hangouts Meet, but it wouldn't be smooth. They'd at least miss a day, and subsequent days would be rocky. The teacher has invested a lot of effort just in teaching the kids how to mute and unmute themselves without waiting for their grown-up to help, and they'd have to go through that again with a different UI.
This would be a large inconvenience and a disruption, but that doesn't justify one private company being considered critical infrastructure.
This view is generally antithetical to innovation. Even if everyone already knows how to use Microsoft Office, it can and should be replaced if better software comes along.
> This would be a large inconvenience and a disruption, but that doesn't justify one private company being considered critical infrastructure.
Is "critical infrastructure" some sort of official US Government designation? What automatically happens in response to this designation?
Note that:
* I only said teachers sometimes can't teach when it's down—a claim of fact, not any suggestion of how it should be handled.
* The article's only extension of that is "Organizations that rely on video conferencing—and today, that’s most organizations—would be well served to put backup plans in place to minimize the disruption from future Zoom outages."
> This view is generally antithetical to innovation. Even if everyone already knows how to use Microsoft Office, it can and should be replaced if better software comes along.
I think you're suggesting calling Zoom "critical infrastructure" means it can't be replaced if a clearly superior video conferencing product is available? I disagree. In fact, it'd be reasonable to say this means it _should_ be replaced if Zoom can't give rock-solid reliability SLOs.
You made a very compelling case about why it would be difficult for everyone to switch between software like the root comment describes.
But the article goes a step further and says that Zoom specifically is of critical importance. I don't think this is true. Zoom is a brand, not a unique technology. If they suddenly made everyone pay $50/day, the world would switch to alternatives very quickly.
I think it's a question of timescales, disruption, and definition. If Zoom were totally unreliable or became expensive, within a quarter almost no one would use it. In that sense I agree with you. But the next week would be a disaster, and that may be enough to call it "critical infrastructure", whatever that means.
I think that's not true until Office365 kicks in. If Microsoft "goes down" today, just gets wiped out by some futures FX swap gone wrong, then all the Hedge funds, the doctors notes, the airplane checklists, they will pootle along fine for years.
It's only when a central single point of failure is introduced does critical infrastructure become ticking time bomb.
An open source peer to peer zoom would reduce such risk - and any sensible government would find that - cries of private business be damned
I think there are other cases. An auto-update that goes wrong could still cause wide ranging issues for non-365 Excel users.
And if updates are disabled (or MS goes away), we can add yet-to-be-discovered security flaws to the mix.
Neither of these would impact all (or maybe even most) users, but I think it'd impact enough to make a dent. In contrast, Office 365 is probably less susceptible to such flaws, trading them for others.
Perhaps I should add that, this past spring, I had a day where Blackboard failed on me, and where I lacked the presence of mind to think of a good Plan B on the spot. To my embarrassment, I ended up cancelling the lecture. That experience is why I thought to plan ahead this time.
When Zoom goes down, certainly we should expect some disruptions. As you say, some will be more serious than what I dealt with. But "critical infrastructure" still strikes me as a bit much.
My kid is 6, just a few days ago when zoom failed, the whole class went to hangouts/meet during the first class and the rest of the day went without much disruption on that platform.
The main enabler for this is that apparently the school considered something like this happening and actually trained the teachers for such event.
Then that would be part of essential learning experience (not being locked in to arbitrary applications) —- as important as reading and math.
If Zoom goes down, so long as there’s some other service, the teacher can send out URLs to the class via emails, and people should be able to get setup quite easily, and help each other out. There will be some corner cases which will involves a bit more of a struggle, but it should be relatively smooth (easier than the first time around).
> Then that would be part of essential learning experience (not being locked in to arbitrary applications) —- as important as reading and math.
I'm already sad about the time my son is spending learning about video chat etiquette instead of in-person etiquette or reading and math. Even as an ex-SRE who likes to be n+1 on many things, I can't get excited about kindergarteners spending extra time learning _another_ app. Packaging it as an essential learning experience about vendor lock-in isn't going to change that.
There is the cost of the other service, the districts/school have to have contracts with both. The teachers and students have to be trained on both. If webex does not work for the day our school is out. In our district although the teachers can work remote( most do) when the school site loses power or has fire evacuation orders instruction stops for all it's students.
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..
Singapore school kids switched effortlessly between google meets and Zoom. Give kids some credit, they are naturally curious and adapt to changes quite effortlessly. Same with masks in school.
the kids in elementary schools were born into the digital age. they're digital natives from the get, and are probably more comfortable using digital tools than we are
That seems pretty short-sighted. Sure my 1st grader knows his way around an iPad enough to play games and watch Netflix, that doesn't mean he's going to understand installing new software or what it means when Zoom isn't working and they have to switch to Hangouts. Yeah, he'll come ask me and I'll figure it out quickly, but I've interacted with enough other parents to know that being able to do so isn't commonplace. Heck even the teachers get confused just setting that stuff up.
I'm with you. The 4 yr old I am around most knows the computer password and how to jump ads in YouTube and find the videos she wants. It's their native world.
I think this belief in "digital native" supremacy is magical thinking:
* Most kindergarteners are illiterate and innumerate. That alone severely limits their ability to quickly navigate an unfamiliar, complex UI, much less the extensive number of relevant abstract concepts and references they've yet to learn about.
* I've never bought into the "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" mentality, especially when simultaneously discarding the value of transferable experience. My senior-citizen parents know how to use iPads just fine, thank you. My dad started programming in the punch card days and has at least used computers almost every day since; don't you think there's some relevance to more modern computers?
They also expect everything to "just work" with a nice interface and preferably without any pesky settings or menus to mess with. I mainly deal with grad students and some of the things I need to walk faculty and students through (anything beyond clicking/tapping an icon in Windows or MacOS) can be a bit shocking.
It's not all of them, and it may not even be most of them...but it's enough that I spend a decent amount of time handling it. Of course that's part of why I get paid so I'm not really complaining--more just surprised at times.
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.
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.
That's great for college. Not every educational experience is in a college with a big fat IT department to support it.
Think elementary and secondary schools. According to the newspapers this week, the school district where I live has 27,000 students unable to get computers to go online because there simply aren't affordable, or sometimes ANY, computers available for either the parents or the district to buy.
Another 20,000 have no internet access, so the school district rolls out hotspots on school buses each day to the worst-affected neighborhoods.
Do you really think tens of thousands of students will have no problem switching from one piece of software to another? Let alone the millions of ESL and low-literacy parents and students across the nation.
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.
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.
It's funny because I went back to school but worked as the printer guy within an IT dept for about 5 years before deciding to go back to school. Our dept kept going back and forth on what video conferencing we should use for our meetings for about 2 years, they just couldn't make up their minds. Not once was zoom ever mentioned. I was kinda shocked once schools (everyone almost actually) started universally using zoom because that's the first I've heard of it and I was aware of at least half dozen other options.
The UI is complicated, yes. But the actual video calling is better than I've experienced in any other product.
Google Hangouts/Meet invariably slows down my whole machine and causes the laptop fans to spin up. Zoom never does that. And the video streams in Zoom have higher quality to boot.
I think also the UI is complex because of all the different use cases Zoom can be used for. I work for a Deaf school where it is not uncommon for >50% (if not 100%) of participants in a meeting to use sign language. While Zoom is not perfect for this use case (it has many defaults which assume people want audio) it offers many features which makes it easier to manage meetings. The most complex meetings we have are when there is mixed-mode (e.g. some people speaking and some people signing) where we have someone speaking and the video spotlighed onto a interpreter OR video spotlighted on to a person signing but with audio coming from the interpreter voicing for the signing person. This is a specialised use case I accept, but one Zoom handles out of the box really well. As a result the Deaf community have taken on Zoom for pretty much everything--from professional meeting all the way through to using Zoom for home catch ups with friends/family. Hangouts for some reason doesn't really do this very well--and in addition to the poor video quality (making it hard to see people signing) the Deaf community have pretty much sidelined Hangouts and other products.
We tried to go with some other services, but the number of groups we deal with that use zoom forced us to switch to zoom. It is good enough to work got non-technical people. The only real bug has been the microphone but turning off the auto adjust seems to fix that.
I have a 100/20 connection and Zoom is the only one which manages to stream 25 people in gallery view with very good quality without dropping a frame. It is so good if anyone has glitchy video, everyone knows it's a problem on their end and nothing to do with Zoom. The only other platform I've had extenstive experience with is Google Hangouts which has hugely pixelated video which stutters really badly and/or just gives up streaming video in meetings of <5 people. Any more and it just gets worse to the point video is literally like watching a really badly pixelated stop motion film. I work inside two different organisations--one using Zoom and the other using Hangouts. The Zoom-using organisation has people right throughout singing Zoom's praises. The other org using Google Hangouts complain bitterly about it and wishes they were using Zoom instead. YMMV of course.
That works when the teacher is technically minded. My wife is staff for an art department at a community college and many of the professors don't even know how to create spreadsheets. Having them switch from D2L to Zoom to Hangouts from day to day is not an option.
In the long view, the younger teachers are more able to learn the new technologies and switch new technologies. But we have to support the professors that are 5 years from retirement now.
Or they need to use whatever a partner or customer is using. I don't use Zoom much (and it isn't one of our standard tools). But one organization I have standing meetings with and others I interact with now and then do use Zoom. It's often not about what mindless managers (or engineers) "want" to use.
This is an excellent point. I am a teacher and my students have school-issued iPads which they are not able to just add their own apps. Even I can't control what apps they have loaded, I have to go through the school's processes to get apps loaded. This rules out switching to a different platform for the day just because e.g. Zoom is not working today.
Most of them probably have their IT team's preferred enterprise vendor's teleconferencing system set up as the exclusive videoconferencing tool long before Zoom became flavour of the month...
A six year old student also isn't someone who's at risk of losing a business deal because they can't get their IT team to let them install one of the client's suggested alternative webconferencing systems to do the demo at a particular point in time.
Of the many potential problems six year olds accessing education primarily through webconferencing may face, I'm not sure inability to choose their own preferred videoconferencing service is high up the list, and I doubt Zoom servers have more outages than their home internet and wifi...
I think the discussion is "what happens when zoom goes down?" -- and the college professor said "use blackboard". A first grader with a locked down computer set up for zoom won't be able to install blackboard.
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 list of threats to kids' education right now.
Our NYC school tried to make a quick switch from zoom to google meet when zoom was having issues with people porn bombing meetings. It was not a smooth transition and took over a week before we saw all the teachers and kids on it. The kids and teachers were already using google classroom for all other communication so I can only imagine how the transition would have been if they had to setup new accounts.
Short answer: bandwidth. Longer answer, a set of questions:
* Do most teachers and/or students have sufficient upload capacity to send n-1 copies of their video stream in an n-person chat? (A 20-person chat might be typical for a K12 classroom.)
* Is it possible to do multicast across the Internet?
I assert the answer to both questions is "no", so all the video streams need to go through a server/reflector. You're suggesting that self-hosting; a follow-up question:
* Does your average school district have the bandwidth for simultaneous duplex video streams for every student and teacher?
* Would they be able to acquire this bandwidth quickly?
Also no.
I've never used jitsi and don't know if there are other problems, but this one's a dealbreaker anyway.
I'm a big fan of jitsi, but I think it's a bit less efficient on resources, particularly with meetings with a lot of participants, although I haven't tried this personally.
Also, Zoom's network effect. A lot of people simply aren't aware of jitsi.
Earlier this year, the network (critical mass of users) adopted Zoom quite quickly. If Zoom were to fail, I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that networks or groups of users could start using some other video conference system in a similarly short time-frame. I'm not inclined to share the same level of concern as the original article.
What network effect does Zoom have other than word of mouth? I've seen people enter meetings with links or meeting ids, not from a friends list.
Some of the conference tools need/want a client or a specific browser, so there's some amount of benefit from already having used it, so you don't need to install it, but not a whole lot.
> 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.
My wife sees doctors at four different clinics. Each has chosen a different remote meeting solution. It's non-negotiable - to see your doctor remotely, you need to use their software. And that's just in one field.
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 be around to set things up for him.
Not sure how they are doing this exactly, if this is something Apple specifically enabled for healthcare or whatever, but its a fantastic experience.
Whatever solution they were using did have an "no I have an android and a 'use my computer' option" not sure what path they led down.
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 than my cell signal).
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.
There are countless ways of making it happen by installing apps. And the user experience and integration has improved. But I mean out-of-the-box, universal functionality. So your 94 year old great grandparent can use it without anything.
Duo integrates into the latest Android like FaceTime integrates into iOS, it would be nice if Apple made FaceTime / iMessage available on Android (lol, never gonna happen) or allowed Duo to integrate into iOS like 3rd party apps can in Android (like WhatsApp video calling does). Probably the biggest feature I miss from Android since moving to iOS.
Apple is probably doing more harm than good at this point for themselves by keeping iMessage/FaceTime so locked down to their hardware since their revenue stream is trending more towards services and less weighted in hardware.
I'm not sure if Apple ever explained why they didn't open up FaceTime? I seem to remember that when they presented it they said it would become an open standard?
If they were texting the doctors messages would be blue if recipient had iMessage and green if normal SMS. Most likely how he found out he had an iPhone he could FaceTime.
I think this was your point but yea, I'd be more concerned that access to your doctor is contingent upon installing a specific proprietary software and accepting that software's terms of use. That's like a doctor saying you can only visit them if you drive there in a Chevrolet.
I can call my doctor using any phone I like, and E-mail her using any E-mail client I like. It is beyond unreasonable to require a patient to install specific client software in order to access care.
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.
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.
Not just that - in general, Zoom is just a videochat; Teams is an office productivity tool. It's pretty good at its function (I'm using it at work and I don't really have much to complain about, except the weird handling of code blocks in chat).
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?
Most people in companies are not IT people or IT security people. The ones raising concerns are often only heard, when it is too late.
How often have I heard silly arguments against safer tech like: "The people are not IT people, they want something simple!"
This is possibly so Zoom can show other Zoom meetings you have been invited to. This is a useful feature as it means I can directly join a Zoom meeting without having to go through the Calendar.
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.
Is it every time you paste something, or every time you leave the program and focus on another to copy something?
If the latter, and you're using X, it should be possible to write a program that takes the selection buffer and provides a different response to each SelectionRequest in turn, letting you walk through a script pasting a command at a time without having to leave the current window. I don't know whether such a thing already exists.
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?
Was it with a self-hosted version or the meet.jit.si public instance?
Around 20 we had the same problem on the public instances but I wonder how much is server side or limitation on the client side.
It also definitely worked better in Chrome, it seems that the Firefox situation is much better now though.
On Safari echo cancellation was just not working.
Would you say the same if the user was compiling software or rendering video?if your computer fan is interfering with audio, that's an audio setup problem not a software problem.
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.
The industrial revolution and all of its consequences may not have been exclusively a disaster for the human race, and I personally don’t share Bill Joy’s fears of mass extinction https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/, but proprietary software can cause serious problems for members of the human race and they should have a right to choose not to “use” it. Doesn’t the US Constitution support the Amish’s right to abstain from the power grid, etc.?
The Federal Source Code Policy should revert from requiring 20% of software written with forcibly extracted public money to be free to 100% as it was when open for public comment.
Any software that the public is forced to use, fund, or through network effects promote, the public should be able to audit and control. Windows is explicitly banned from the ISS. The lowly common people down here deserve a fraction of that privilege.
> The industrial revolution and all of its consequences may not have been exclusively a disaster for the human race
for those unaware, this is based from the first line from Ted Kaczynski's "Unabomber Manifesto", which starts with "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race".
Oh, wow. Starts off fairly innocent then comes in with this craziness -
"Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent (homosexuals) or otherwise inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with their problems. (We do not mean to suggest that women, Indians, etc. ARE inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology.)"
The government is the only organization "allowed" to use physical violence against anyone it wants to.
The author raises many valid points, but I think the logical conclusion of his points condemns the US legal system more than it does zoom.
Author: Having to agree to a contract with a private company in order to access public services is immediately objectionable.
Me: I agree! But unlike the US Government, Zoom doesn't make threats of violence against people that don't want to use it's services.
Author: Second, for the state to require use of Zoom is for it to promote and subsidize that company.
Me: I agree! The but the state wouldn't even BE ABLE to subsidize Zoom if it didn't first threaten me with violence in order to take a large fraction of my money.
State Courts are too reliant on Zoom and using its breakout rooms for very sensitive communications. This IS infrastructure and should be very concerning. Its an area DHS needs to take a close look at.
What I find most bizarre is why zoom is on top, this is probably a lesson in how powerful marketing and timing can be for some types of products... But as a counter example: everyone at my company has ended up using google meets, just because through trial and error it fails the least and is the easiest for everyone to get into.
The last time I tried zoom for an external meeting and it was a nightmare, it felt like I had to jump through 10 hoops just to get into the frickin meeting, and even then 4/5 people couldn't get it to pick up their microphone through the browser API.
> BS, people use what works, it's just video calls.
It's not "just video calls". It's nonfree software belonging to a large for-profit company with huge power of developers over users. It will not end well. It's not the first time it happens. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...
I think what he meant was that most users of zoom just see it as reasonably easy way to get into a video call with multiple people that just works (for the most part).
If jitsi scaled just as well as zoom and used the same amount of client-side resources, nearly everyone would use that instead. There's nothing to install so people would barely even know hey were using a platform
Marketing and Timing? Zoom was founded 9 years ago, from a team that built Webex for 13 years prior. They've been making videoconferencing software for 22 years.
Juggling my work with my kids' schools, I've been monitoring bandwidth, and Zoom is a small fraction of the bandwidth of Google Meet, with better performance to boot.
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.
Honestly, this one is so strange to me. UK government services somehow generally tend to be total rubbish but one of them is actually top-tier: gov.uk
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!
The UK is a deeply centralized place. There are only a few layers of devolved government, that you may or may not be subject to. There is an ability to set and enforce standards centrally.
The US is not. A federalized system means that various components work mostly separately from one another. A county court has sharply limited resources, and no ability to ask the federal government to send it a cadre of web developers. The state it's in may not provide a ton of resources for such things at the county level either.
The actual question here that may wind up a big deal is if a Zoom hearing is the equivalent of a physical one. If it is, failing to show up means forfeiting the right to be heard. Whether it's Jitsi instead might not be a substantive difference.
I mean are you upset that landlords get a default judgement when tenants fail to be physically present because they don't have a car, good access to public transportation, time to take off work?
In terms of access to the legal system, being able to phone it in at home or get to any public library is actually doing a lot better than the status quo where you have to take off work to appear downtown.
Yup, this article misses the difference between a mission critical category of tools vs a single mission critical piece of infrastructure. If your organization has a backup solution like Meet (which is easy to do) Zoom stops being mission critical.
I think at work we have three IT-approved solutions: Zoom, Meet, and Slack calls (which are admittedly much more limited).
> organizations aren’t going to want to pay for licenses to non-Zoom videoconferencing platforms that they may rarely or never need.
Yeah..so what does this have to do with Zoom? If my organization refuses to pay for anything but Meet we have the exact same issue.
I agree. I thought there would be evidence in the article but I couldn't find any. The Internet (with net neutrality) is critical infrastructure. But some tech company's product definitely isn't.
In the short term, it is critical infrastructure. Take Zoom offline permanently, tomorrow, and let us see how the world will handle it. It would find alternatives, and competitors would fill the void, but it would undeniably cause massive disruptions to industries and education. There isn't much of a failover right now for video calling - people have put their eggs in one proprietary basket with no backup plan.
> When Zoom goes down...business meetings, conferences, and webinars grind to a halt.
I mean that's a bit of stretch. I work for a company that uses primarily Cisco Jabber (absolutely god awful, atrocious piece of software), but we also interact with folks using Microsoft Teams, Webex, Slack, Skype, join.me, etc. There are no shortage of video conferencing platforms.
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.
The less funny part is that to the HN users who together made https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23555226 my current most upvoted comment on HN, Zoom is known for “a history of shadiness (MacOS hidden server to prevent uninstallation), outright lies (E2EE), and attacking the pillars of democracy (censoring Chinese Americans discussing Tienanmen Square).”
Not that MS isn’t shady, dishonest, or even a deep state tool of oppression (in light of the Snowden leaks, and at least in some people’s view Github’s ICE contract).
I think Zoom has become critical infrastructure, but not from a technological perspective. As @nicoburns points out in another comment, there are many companies that can do the job (MSFT, Google, Cisco, etc. have perfectly comparable alternatives here), and if you're willing to look outside of the biggest companies explicitly targeting business meetings, you have other companies with working technical infrastructure targeted at a different market (i.e. FB, Appl) and a batch-ful of YC startups trying to provide the same functionality to the same market.
What I think the article is pointing out is that when Zoom goes down, schools can't teach. And that's true. I think this is indicative of a usability / coordination / culture problem of missing fallbacks. For example, when Zoom goes down a teacher (at least to my knowledge) can't/won't quickly email out a "Hey class, Zoom is down so here is the Google meet link for today".
However, this is true of many technologies (if gmail is down I'm not getting email, if slack is down I'm not reading messages, and if Github is down I'm not pushing code). I think the larger problem is HOW MANY institutions it's a critical point of failure for. If Zoom goes down, our courts largely pause, our education largely pauses, our economy largely pauses, etc. The same is not true of Github or Gmail. In this regard it's closer to a powergrid failure.
This should go away as verticalized solutions and fallbacks appear (leading to broader diversity, where not all courts use the same platform), but I think the key things to think about until then are:
1. Is there anything Zoom could do to create stronger network effects (https://ayushsood.com/zooms-missing-platform/) preventing new entrants from entering the market?
2. If they did those things, how could we respond to ensure Zoom's incumbent position didn't allow them to prevent new entrants? An old-internet answer would be to centralize the key nodes, effectively utilitize them, and then allow anyone to make a platform that connects to them (i.e. AT&T doesn't own telephony, DNS' don't own the internet, Gmail doesn't own email).
I'm not sure how likely this is given (1) we're moving towards centralization generally (2) the importance of performance in video streaming. Any abstraction creates overhead, and that might be a critical failure to open standards in the video streaming space.
I use like five different services every day that work about as well as each other. I do happen to think Zoom does the best job out of the set, but it is only a marginal lead. It would be nothing to use something else.
Likewise. I often use several different conference platforms a day.
This fixation on Zoom really mystifies me. A couple months ago trolls were wandering around in Zoom conferences, recording things and interfering, making headlines. I would have thought users would abandon this open wound immediately for any of a plethora of alternatives, but for some reason they're dogmatically faithful.
Somehow Zoom appears exempt from confidentiality or privacy concerns, even among corporate and government users. Have all the lawyers vanished with the appearance of COVID-19?
Zoom vs Hangouts is really like going from VHS to DVD. Hangouts' horribly pixelated video and frequent dropped frames and/or loss of video paints a huge contrast to Zoom's good video quality with very few glitches. Am surprised at people who think the two are comparable.
Not sure why there isn't more open source alternatives in this realm. Since I only run Linux, I was amazed the first time I used Zoom that it had an actual working linux client. I've always had hopes that webrtc would take over. There's been demo's of video conferencing done over webrtc 5+ years ago and I always hoped it would get more traction. The best I've found lately is "Unamed"[0] but it is the product of one author.
The reason is because it's a hard problem that requires a lot of work to solve.
Dynamically change video quality to fit in the bandwidth, work correctly with a hundred different types of webcam, do echo cancellation, and wrap the whole thing up with a simple UI. Echo cancellation by itself is a hard problem.
Zoom's lack of security focus has been a competitive advantage for them. It's clear that many users don't actually care that much about the confidentiality of their video meetings.
The low-friction nature of jumping on a Zoom call with a meeting code and PIN dominates security concerns. In fact, this phrase I've heard people use, "jump on a Zoom," indicates that the speaker expects it to be easy and fast to start the call.
Hopefully it's still possible to develop something that's both secure and convenient. But I fear there's no economic incentive to do it.
Zoom seem to have switched in recent times to using a Meeting ID and password. Most meeting links I get now are very long URLs which seem to hash the meeting ID and password. Hopefully this is a step in the right direction.
There are other options though. Things lit jitsi are growing in popularity. Its frustrating that a few "big companies" decided to use these tools so the rest of the world followed suit without doing their own research
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.
Yep, that's what I do, and work is easy to coordinate, but some other social events or organizations with inexperienced non-tech people don't have slack and don't think to check their email. It is easier for them to have a pre-specified backup option.
As others have pointed out, it's laughable to consider Zoom to be critical infrastructure when so many alternatives exist.
Moreover, I find it somewhat strange that he's referring to Zoom as "critical infrastructure" instead of the major cloud providers like AWS or Azure. If Zoom goes down, it's an inconvenience to many. If AWS or Azure goes down, many business just stop functioning. Heck, many government departments might stop functioning, given how government infrastructure has been moving to "the cloud".
> But in many of the verticals in these sectors—such as banking or mobile phone services—no single company dominates the market.
Gmail dominates e-mail in a similar matter.
And remember just a year ago barely anyone had even heard of Zoom -- there's still Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, FaceTime, Skype...
This piece feels like it's trying to stir up worry over nothing. Yes, critical business software tends to have outages once or twice a year. But no, Zoom doesn't appear to be any obviously better or worse than the competition.
I work from home for the last 20 years. My clients and my workforce/subcontractors are all over the world. I had to use Zoom only with one particular client as of their insistence. Other then that I do just fine with the Skype. Not sure what is so "critical" about Zoom in particular.
I feel like Zoom is the least concern. It is relatively replaceable, unlike providers with significant network effects - payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Stripe), social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit), ad networks (Google, Apple, Facebook) or dominant share (Google search).
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.
I'm curious as to how Zoom is that much different from Webex (at least from the user perspective). I've been using both working in a university setting with all remote classes and as far as the UI, Zoom is almost a copy of Webex with some minor differences.
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.
Small differences are huge though. I gave up on WebEx over two years ago when finding Zoom, so I cant speak to them adding copy-cat features and catching up feature-wise. However, I first switched to zoom from WebEx based on:
1. One click meeting starts w/ a simple URL
2. One click meeting joins w/ a simple URL
3. Standing reservation-less room with a URL to remove the hassle of booked by 15-minute segments that WebEx wanted
As for Lync, not sure where to start. There are times 3 or 4 years ago when you were lucky to be able to log in. Their auth was a mess and if -- God forbid -- you had a legacy Skype or legacy Microsoft account, there were strange auth/password reset loops where accessing your account was virtually impossible. You'll find plenty of discussion online about people who suddenly found themselves shut out of a decade-old Skype account because their Skype email was somehow mal-merged into a Microsoft account. I was similarly trapped in this endless loop of auth issues and gave up entirely on Lync.
Most of the internet that everyone in the world uses is constructed and maintained by companies that you don't give a single cent to, and who don't owe you anything if it goes down. This applies to a lot (maybe most?) things in the world. Say freight (trucks, trains, ships, etc) stops moving, for example. Within a month or two all the grocery stores would be empty. We'd have Mad Max-style convoys of cars driving around trying to find food and raid stores. It wasn't but a hundred or so years ago that most people survived on local food suppliers, and today almost none of our food is local.
When we have trouble connecting with zoom, we just go back to the old school conference call which is pretty smooth. It turns out, you really don't need to see closeups of peoples neck hair to have a functional remote meeting. There are also a dozen other similar popular video chat services that can be step up just as easily as zoom. Zoom isn't a utility, it's just one of the many redundant ways out there that you can use to communicate with people.
Zoom is fine, but like everything it will go down now and then. In that case there are alternatives. If it goes down, why not do just that one meeting in Google Meet?
Would it be crazy to suggest that the postal service be reabsorbed back into the government and also given the role of managing all government communication channels?
The pandemic has increased the load of data collection especially of students in classrooms. Four years ago we were appalled that china was putting cameras in classrooms. Now we are putitng cameras on every individual child with audio and absolutely no regulation or organizaiton structure.
The pandemic has significantly increased an already high level of data collection. Does anyone think government should have a role in regulation?
I laughed out loud while reading this article. The author sees some things so correctly, while completely missing the forest for the trees.
Author: A single California-based company, Zoom, is now the foundation for education access from elementary school up through graduate school.
Me: Hah. The 'foundation' for education for the last 100 years has been the US Government, which exerts so much power over the entire system.
Author: Another challenge is that Zoom is a relatively young company (founded in 2011) that has experienced some security-related growing pains.
Me: The US Gov. has experienced security-related growing pains, but at least Zoom doesn't kill tens of thousands of people around the world every year.
Author: In March 2020, the company was widely criticized for a dubious claim that it supported end-to-end encryption for videoconferences.
Me: At least Zoom doesn't have a track record of spending billions of dollars to subvert encryption technology, wiretap hundreds of millions of people, and then lies about it.
Author: There are plenty of alternatives to Zoom, including Skype, Webex, and GoToMeeting. The challenge of course, is that Zoom has benefited from an enormous network effect.
Me: Oh how I wish there were a less-violent alternative to the US Government. At least Zoom cannot enforce it's monopoly of certain services with violence and billions of dollars of money
The US Government is representative of all voting American citizens, you cannot compare it to a private company that is run by people who are not elected.
The US Government is pretty impervious to change. For example, people still get arrested for smoking weed. Most o America supports decriminalizing weed.
Why is it still illegal? Shouldn't the government enact policies that most of America agrees with?
I mean... don't most of us agree that if a private company were doing any of this stuff, they would lose all their customers ASAP:
I was very careful to word my previous comment to say the US Government represents the voting population. In 2016 there were only 157M registered voters, and only 138M voted in the presidential election that year. The population of the US was 321M in 2016 making the US Government represent approximately 43% of the overall population at best, most elections have a far lower turnout.
I didn't say the system was fair, but it's still not a fair to compare a private company to how a government is supposed to function. Governments enforce laws and provide public services. You want things to change? vote for it.
Where I see effort needing to be spent is an easily setup/usable/configurable video-conferencing package of sorts. A good product would have two things: 1) easy to setup and scale video conferencing out of the box (like literally point at an aws account or k8s cluster and hit "go"), and 2) sdks for manipulating server-side rooms and client-side room/video appearance (but still the default rooms and default grids are in the box).
These two things as a common toolkit would accelerate offerings that could decentralize the marketplace. I've seen jitsi offerings (scalable setup isn't as straightforward last I checked which admittedly was a long time ago), twilio (still someone else's servers), etc. I'm sure these toolkits are being worked on (heck I'm working on one), it just takes a bit of time for the players to catch up in a market that exploded overnight.
Meh, my kids just used the Google Meet links the teachers sent out when Zoom was down. Meet is even better - no app needed. Schools already have Google Classroom. With Meet you just click the link and it works.
Is the quality sufficent for classroom teaching? I use both for work as a teacher and I find Zoom much better than Hangouts. Zoom (when it works) is nearly flawless. Hangouts on the other hand has poor video, limited faciliation functions, limited grid/gallery view (and none at all on the iPad which is what my students use), random problems popping up, etc. Zoom is just much better for educaitonal use.
But we still have choices: Microsoft Teams, Rocket.Chat, Google Meet, etc. As long as it's not the only viable option, I don't think there's a need to worry.
has anyone built something on top of twilio's video offering?
it looks relatively straightforward, and seems to me like most tech companies (and some university IT departments) could pretty easily build internal conferencing stuff on top of it if they cared to.
I deployed one of their demo repos [0] and had some medium usage of it in production. It didn’t get a lot of use (most use Zoom) and almost always had < 5 participants. It worked well enough. The cost seemed affordable too, though I never looked too closely. It didn’t make a dent on our overall Twilio bill.
It is critical infrastructure if you don't have a backup. I think that it would be easy to have a backup plan to replace Zoom, but this needs to exist.
The fact that people adapt to not having it does not mean that something isn't critical infrastructure. Everything considered critical infrastructure has, at one time or another, been something that humans were adapted to not having.
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.