[userbinator]

What I find irritating is this proliferation of meeting apps like these, all using their own proprietary variations of protocols and consuming huge amounts of system resources, when there has been a standard protocol for it that's been around since the late 90s, with a variety of different clients available: SIP. One could be sent a SIP URI for a meeting and it would work in any client.

Maybe it's like IRC vs all the other IM "solutions", except with an even larger difference in userbase.

Edit: looks like Zoom does use SIP too, but it's not that obvious how to use your own client: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201207626-Video-La...

[pfranz]

At a previous job there was no "blessed" app. We used Mac/Win/Linux and different apps seemed to work better depending on the situation (screen sharing, group chat, one-on-one video chat). Not only in resource usage, but if you had more than one open I'd see issues with sharing resources like video and audio.

[barbs]

Excuse my ignorance but is there a good implementation out there that uses this protocol? Jitsi perhaps?

[cassianoleal]

I have used Jitsi. Last week I did a few pairing sessions where the both of us were sharing our screens and still had our webcams on in the corner and it was awesome.

We tried to do a standup with (I think) 8 people and it was terrible - people would randomly not get any audio for stretches of time, video would get choppy or lost completely, it was not pleasant.

I will keep using it for pairing since I haven't found another tool that gives me that kind of flexibility and it was in fact very good. I believe the whole experience is limited by the connection quality of the worst participant.

[hjek]

I've been using Jitsi Meet a lot as well.

It has terrible Firefox support but works decent if all participants are using Chromium / Chrome[0]. Asking other people to install Chromium makes me feel dirty but I don't know any other login-free cross-platform open source easy-to-use video conferencing apps than Jitsi Meet.

[0]: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4

[cassianoleal]

That could have been the issue, I haven't asked to be honest.

It does tell you that Firefox is not supported when you log in though, so I'd have expected people to say something but hey ho...

[whoislewys]

Hopefully WebRTC becomes more thoroughly implemented cross-browser Chromium has waaaay better support since WebRTC is primarily maintained by a team at Google.

[madwhitehatter]

The question is, why doesn't Zoom use WebRTC in favor of the plug-in. WebRTC uses the SRTP Cryptosuite which is pretty secure and can be made very secure https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/DIMG/SRTP+Cryptosuite

Zoom is unencrypted by default? So you have to physically turn encryption on. Also, it is very unclear if your data is encrypted at rest. "End to end encryption" does not necessarily mean "end-to-end encryption" as has been shown many times before

[pfranz]

I haven't used Jitsi, but different apps and approaches work better in different situations. Are you screen sharing? Audio chat? video chat? Large meeting with multiple people? Mac/Win/Linux? Is your connection bad? High latency? Low throughput? No solution was very robust and if you're working internationally and people have their own equipment it can be a mess. People are also get really familiar with one piece of software and hate installing yet another.

The churn between companies like Google and Microsoft (each offering, and deprecating multiple solutions) doesn't help.

[whoislewys]

Jitsi Desktop uses SIP (never used it)

Jitsi Meet (browser client) uses WebRTC, and is really nice!

[tympan]

The problem with SIP was that without a central directory there was no easy way to find someone. Plus the client interfaces were, quite frankly, fugly, and management decision-makers dismissed them in favour of Skype etc.

[tmpz22]

Well the best product usually wins in this space. Usually this means well-managed vanity features like sleek design, animations, emote, but also occasionally more heavy weight performance improvements like video quality and sound quality. Ultimately if the standards and protocols you mentioned provided for that, they'd have won, but they didn't so here we are.

[Godel_unicode]

Standards are distinctly not products. Also, the thing that tends to win in this space is lock-in and network effects.

[ebiester]

There is no real difficulty switching. At work, we use multiple solutions, including Zoom. Zoom has been the most reliable. If one was more reliable or had a killer feature, we could switch in an instant.

Slack has chat history that makes it difficult to switch. What does Zoom have?

[Godel_unicode]

Sounds like you don't work in a large organization with lots of standing meetings and extremely non-technical users. That must be nice.

Many large companies have lots of extremely valuable non-technical users who can just barely figure out how to follow step-by-step instructions to setup calls with even the most point-and-click interface. The switching cost there is extremely high.

[tympan]

What really wins is if management thinks the interface is pretty.

[madwhitehatter]

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/uk-government-zoo...

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1585521/000119312519...

The top of page 21 in the first set of SEC documents:

Quote " Many governments have enacted laws requiring companies to provide notice of data security incidents involving certain types of personal data. In addition, some of our customers require us to notify them of data security breaches. Security compromises experienced by our competitors, by our customers or by us may lead to public disclosures, which may lead to widespread negative publicity. In addition, we have a high concentration of research and development personnel in China, which could expose us to market scrutiny regarding the integrity of our solution or data security features. Any security compromise in our industry, whether actual or perceived, could harm our reputation, erode confidence in the effectiveness of our security measures, negatively affect our ability to attract new customers and hosts, cause existing customers to elect not to renew their subscriptions or subject us to third-party lawsuits, regulatory fines or other action or liability, which could harm our business. "