[cupcake-unicorn]

The mass adoption of Zoom in areas where it really shouldn't have been used and the lack of support to users has been shocking to me. It really felt like this just happened to be the company that took off because of the pandemic but a scrappy startup could have done this 1000x better.

[avrionov]

Genuinely curious: which are these areas where Zoom shouldn't be used?

[cupcake-unicorn]

I just felt like the Zoom calls that I participated in telehealth wise were really sloppily managed - I wasn't clear as a patient with smaller providers if they were using a HIPPA compliant provider account or just a personal Zoom account.

In a group therapy Zoom I encountered one of the members being inflammatory/disruptive, and there are no controls for me to block that user's video/text on my end. Before briefly thinking of ways to programmatically block out the screen using Greasemonkey/macros I just quit the group.

In addition I was on a local city government summit call that was just a nightmare. They were trying to be accessible to people who needed interpretation but what it ended up looking like was that every time someone said something, it was repeated back by interpreters in 3 different languages, making everything 3 times longer. Some of this stuff was worked out at the end, but the solution was just basically to stop people from expressing themselves. Maybe there's a better solution to this both then and now but if there was they didn't seem to be aware of it. It does seem like a no brainer to be able to opt in to translator channels and not have all the translations going at once.

In all these cases I saw that people were changing their meeting styles and habits around the limitations of Zoom, which led to worse outcomes, worse creativity, and more stress, rather than Zoom being particular proactive in adding new features that could address these valid roadblocks people were running into. That's where I feel like a startup with an eat your own dogfood approach could have addressed real issues like this rather than just profiting from being the only company around and not really meaningfully expanding features in any way since it's been widely adapted.

I don't use Zoom THAT much and these are my personal experiences, but it feels like a junky product - maybe to people who are used to Office 365 it's fine, but as someone who used Slack and other startup friendly tools/services Zoom and Office just seem like they are so stuck technology wise.

[avrionov]

Thank you for the detailed answer. These are really interesting use cases, which I didn't think about.

For the local government sessions, it seems that a webinar product is a better option.