[jariel]

The real issue is how such a fundamentally important thing - video communications - isn't rock solid and a commodity by now such that any of FAANG, Verizon/AT&T and a host of others don't provide it as easy as anything else.

Imagine if you thought CCP were reading your emails? Would your company/school/government use that service? I don't think so.

Having supply chain problems for ASICS is one thing.

But 'video conferencing' ... my gosh we should be embarrassed as an industry that this wasn't nailed down a decade ago.

[rixed]

At this stage "nailing it down" means creating a good protocol that can be standardised upon. This is what the tech world cannot do any longer since it became driven by market forces. Market is not the right process for building good standards, the closest it can grow is monopoles. Committees are admittedly not the panacea either. Unfortunately we can't go back to the scale of the small tribe where it's easier for the good solutions to meet consensus.

[jariel]

An industry standard is not needed for any single entity to do it well.

[spoonjim]

First of all, video conferencing is one of the most challenging software products to deliver, at the latencies that people expect and the price they're typically willing to pay. It's not a CRUD app.

Second, F, A, A, G, and M do provide rock solid video conferencing. Apple being the most rock solid of all of them, but limited to Apple devices.

[fma]

> video conferencing is one of the most challenging software products to deliver

The smartest software engineers are in FAAGM, or so I've been told?

> Second, F, A, A, G, and M do provide rock solid video conferencing.

If they have solid products, then how did a no name company beat them?

FWIW I'll have to disagree with you on 'solid products'. My wife runs a learning center that went virtual. I evaluated very product that came up on Google search. It was a tight choice between Zoom and Skype, but chose Skype because I felt a big name would have better service. Microsoft kept locking our accounts and doing other shenanigans. Bit the bullet, paid for Zoom and no problems.

[spoonjim]

A no name company beat them because they provide video conferencing to support their other businesses (except M). Apple hands out free FaceTime to move Apple devices, they don’t care about the video conferencing market itself.

Also, the Microsoft competitor isn’t Skype, it’s Teams.

[webmaven]

> Also, the Microsoft competitor isn’t Skype, it’s Teams.

How so?

[kube-system]

> Microsoft kept locking our accounts and doing other shenanigans.

And Zoom had a few headlines about incidents where they probably should have locked some accounts but didn't.

Security is a tradeoff with usability. Zoom slid the slider all the way to the right at first.

[jariel]

If there were great alternatives by the big players, then Zoom would not 'be a thing' and would not have taken off during the pandemic.

Why would teachers etc. be turning to Zoom if Hangouts etc. was at their fingertips and worked well.

We moved to Zoom before the pandemic because Skype (Microsoft) was unreliable to the point of useless whereas Zoom was solid.

People use Zoom because it's better, and there's really no excuse for Hangouts, Skype etc. to be of inferior quality. Those companies have the best Engineers and all the money in the world. It's a lack of product focus.

[verst]

Most school districts either use GSuite or Office 365 from what I can tell. As part of those you'd have Google Meet or Microsoft Teams.

Why do you use (presumably the consumer version of) Skype when the Microsoft product that superseded Skype for Business is Teams?

[vatueil]

Most of the "FAANG" companies do already have video conferencing apps. Netflix being the notable exception, but they're only included in the group for the sake of an edgy acronym anyway.

[allarm]

FB uses BlueJeans as per my knowledge.