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