[spondyl]

From what I remember, when remote working during the pandemic first started due to lockdowns, Zoom blew up because it was quite literally one click and you're in a call.

The initial installer would do some funky stuff in the ground I believe to bypass a lot of the usual install friction. Once it was discovered, Zoom's installation process became a little bit slower.

Next, calls were being "broken into" because there was no security so they changed the default behaviour to generate a password randomly. As a user, this meant having to go through the normal install process and then enter all this stuff in so it seemingly went from near-instant (10 seconds top from no install to in a call) through to perhaps like 5 minutes once you fiddle with macOS's permission model (that was bypassed I presume) and all that.

Personally, I hate it nowadays and it's banned on our company devices anyway but I think for plenty of users, they bought into it when it was frictionless and have no reason to change.

I think there was an element of shadow IT going on like marketing people for example using it for calls without necessarily getting sign off or oversight from IT teams, given it was "free". That's purely anecdotal mind you.

[tkinom]

Wonder how it beat Google hangout/meet - That can be run all browsers without any install with one click also.

[jonathanstrange]

I can tell you that. At least when we tried it out in early 2020, Google meet was unable to display other participants to the person who shared his screen. Maybe that has changed by now (or we didn't figure out how to do it) but it was the decisive factor for us then.

Imagine talking to your own slides for 2 hours without any visual feedback from the audience...

[spondyl]

Ah yeah, one feature Zoom had was the multi-person grid view which Meet has nowadays but before, Meet would only show primarily the presented content or one speaker at a time

[_cs2017_]

> funky stuff in the ground to bypass a lot of the usual install friction. Once it was discovered, Zoom's installation process became a little bit slower.

Why couldn't they keep it even after it was discovered?

[spondyl]

I mean, they could have but it was in the press due to the installer operating as root to bypass the regular protections so it was damaging from a PR perspective

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3535789/weakness-in-zoom-f...

> Zoom uses the API to execute a bash script called runwithroot which is unpacked by the installer in a user-writable temporary directory. This means that any local application, including malware, could monitor the Zoom installation process, rewrite this script on the fly and add malicious code to it. This would allow it to take full control of the system.