While videoconferencing does take some resources, the fact of the matter is both zoom and teams are poorly written web apps packaged into “desktop applications” and that’s where most of the utilization is coming from

I do wonder whether these apps are using any of the hardware acceleration available in our hardware. These days PCs are second class to mobile phones.

Poor coding criticisms apply to almost every massively popular software. At this point it almost seems like a requirement to make it not too fast as to reduce user frustration and mental share by proxy.

IMO a more likely story is that companies that take time to write programs well get beat by their shovelware competition.

But popular apps continue to be sluggish even after they had scaled. If faster apps made more, the first enhancement would be speed improvements.

Yeah, I wonder about this.

I don’t know Teams, but Zoom has to do some image processing (it has some face cleanup tech which is weird because everybody knows a programmer’s power-level is directly correlated to how disheveled and tired they look), and also some audio filtering (need to filter out keyboards).

But, I mean, Discord manages to do the latter for pretty cheap, and the former is stupid optional vanity stuff anyway.

The conclusion I come to is that Zoom is a badly written program that would never have seen the light of day if we weren’t suddenly launched into WFH around 2020. That program is like the third worst thing that happened that year.