Surely no company that cares about security enough to lockdown machines like that would choose zoom?

We're not talking about companies. We're talking about schools. Totally different thought process.

"Cares about security" can easily be just mindless procedure following.

The company cares about security, the mindless manager wants to use whatever they like the most.

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.

You can use zoom in the browser. They make it hard to find but it’s possible.

You assume the IT people got to pick.

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...

Also, their employees probably have smartphones.

A six-year-old student is not an employee.

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.

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.

Install? It's a website.

Been years since I used it, but it doesn't have video conferencing functions does it? (Honest question).

Zoom has definitely had more outages this year than most people's home wifi/Internet access.

If a business lets IT policy get in the way of it’s important business, it a terribly managed business.

Look elsewhere for work of this is your actual existence.

If this is just some off the cuff anecdote, meh. Stick to real problems not made up ones thanks to hands off clueless management edge cases

Something tells me an outage will make them think about it