Teams, Google Meet, etc all seem to fall apart on large calls with participants who have questionable hardware and/or wifi. Zoom works with those same people.
This is based on my experience early in the pandemic, so it's possible the landscape has changed since then. We tried a bunch of different options at my company, because we explicitly didn't want to use Zoom, but Zoom worked like nothing else did.
"Upon arriving in the US, Yuan joined WebEx, a web conferencing startup, where he was one of the first 20 hires. The company was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007, at which time he became vice president of engineering. In 2011, Yuan pitched a new smartphone-friendly video conferencing system to Cisco management. When the idea was rejected, Yuan left Cisco to establish his own company, Zoom Video Communications."
Agreed, Zoom does shitty things. But everything else is worse.
Do you really have a strong opinion about which one is the least bad choice?
> Do you really have a strong opinion about which one is the least bad choice?
I suspect that, if you're in the US or China already (which, just to say it explicitly, I recognize does not apply to everyone on HN), then you perceive a meaningful difference in whether any improper use of data will expose that data to the US, or to the Chinese, government. Even if your personal threat assessment finds no difference in those risks, then you probably at least have a strong opinion whether it's better to have your data improperly exposed to a government of whatever country, or to a private corporation.
Yes, the one without a desktop install is clearly the best solution.
Second, it drops you out of meetings sometimes while you are screen sharing, and gives you no way to know. It's sporadic on my machine whether the green highlight/frame shows up on screen sharing to indicate that the content is still being shared.
For me, it’s Teams. It’s worse in almost every way.
Search results that don't allow you to go to the specific part of long conversations. Wiki that doesn't even qualify as wiki. Integrated calendar that automatically tries to make you join meetings you have not yet responded to (with no way to configure not to happen). Inconsistent ability to quote reply to peoples messages. Hap-hazard method of starting meeting recordings (anyone can do it and with the latest update they become the owner instead of the meeting organiser). External guests can't access meeting recordings. Inserts non visible spaces into code you paste in and does not strip it properly when copying and pasting out. Emoji selection popup fails to load if you join a meeting with busy chat as loading new messages takes priority. Inconsistent loading of tabs when you join a meeting, so some people cant do Q/A or look at files (but can be loaded in a separate window even whilst the meeting is running. Bigger issues like high CPU usage (massively compared to Zoom) with lots of attendees and far more limited visible attendee screens (compared to Zoom).
At the moment obvious defects seem to be added faster than they are removed.
I'm exaggerating a bit, but for me Teams is a real turn-off.
We use Teams at work, and I think it's an absolute pile of crap. But whenever I have to attend meetings using other systems, the experience is pretty much never great either.
Zoom has a weird windowing system, stealing focus all the time, and shows notifications as actual windows (as opposed to using the notification system).
Google meet sometimes squeezes my webcam image for some reason. It also transforms my PC in a jet airplane.
Chime sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Usually, it won't detect my microphone. If I refresh the page enough times, it will end up working.
Webex mostly works, but it's sooo laggy. It also needs me to have the window focused if I connect too early to a meeting and am the first one there. If it's unfocused, it will not connect to the audio, so I'm left waiting around wondering why people are always late. And it insists on showing a bunch of useless crap around the main image. I know who's in the meeting, so if they're sharing their screen, I want to see that instead of their names taking up half the screen.
Of all the various meeting tools, Zoom is the best, but that's damning with faint praise.
As someone who is interviewing at the moment. I won't completely dismiss the company for using Teams (and expecting the interviewee to 'cope' with the crap experience) but it immediately puts that company in the "hmm, I'll do this interview for the practice and maybe they'll surprise me" camp ...
Slack used to be good - especially for just a background chat, but then they hid the "start a call" option away and pushed "huddles", which are far worse.
There's a solid rule of thumb that most software that is good becomes worse. Product managers have to push new features in to justify their job, if the software was 75% good before, there's a 3:1 chance that the change will make it objectively worse, and even higher chance that it will break your workflow and cause you to take cognitive load away from important things to learn how to deal with it in a new way.
"No, we're not changing that. Your changes don't meaningfully improve the product enough to offset the disruption."
Unfortunately I've noticed that "product owners" have become significantly less engaged with steering the product direction. I guess people either don't find it interesting, or they keep getting threatened by higher up and don't feel like they have enough power or own the product.
Oh man, that calendar is such a shitshow, and it's also not only on Teams, but also on Outlook.
It's able to detect some other conferencing software and add a "join" button, for example Webex.
But, for some reason, it systematically fails to recognize Teams links sent from a company we work with a lot. If I click the "join meeting" link inside the invitation, Teams will open and join said meeting, but it never shows the "join" button on the event in the calendar view.
You know where the priorities are.
This is so frustrating. How could anyone work on this feature and not realise how useless it is to see the message in question but not any of the surrounding discussion for context.
The calls aren't too bad at all.
I thought you were referring to the banking app for a second and was insanely confused.
We switched to zoom though because the performance was just better than anything (we tried a boat load of tools - but most of them were just shiny saas offerings on top of Chrome). Now I’m on an M1 it doesn’t matter as much, but zoom was the only thing that didn’t totally kill our machines before that.
Zoom UI is horrendous. But it’s also not quite as bad as teams, and everyone has learned to cope with it. So it’s the best of an absolute shitpile. Teams will remain a complete joke to me as long as I am forced to play the “try to map initials to names” game in order to figure out who is talking. I don’t know my coworkers by their initials, Microsoft. I don’t know why you can’t just show me actual names.
Meeting UI people: here is a list of questions that I find myself constantly asking myself: who is talking? Who just finished talking? Who is in this meeting? Who just joined? Who just left? If you waste an entire screen on nearly information-free user tiles and make me open a separate window to answer these types of questions (or they are impossible to answer), I hate you.
I’d say the expectation is that everyone sets their actual photo as their profile picture, that would probably solve your problem.
I'm almost willing to pay good money to someone who can explain how MS' user management works wrt belonging to multiple accounts/orgs/acive directories.
And regarding profile pictures, I’d say 10% of the people I interact with on zoom have them, and 0% of the people I interact with on teams. These platforms should get over themselves and realize people aren’t spending time customizing their profiles, because it’s just not important. You’re just a tool, zoom/teams. Try not to go wild with your fantasy of becoming a “virtual town square” that is integral to all aspects of life or whatever you are telling yourself internally. First goal is making meetings less of a pain in the ass.
Half the options that should be on a meeting-basis are buried deep into the user settings, only accessible from the web interface, and they have confusing names and meanings. I've used lots of softwares, Zoom might be one of the worst when it comes to UX.