Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

Try it at 12 people.

Try it when you want to control who is speaking and when.

Try it when you want to co-ordinate hundreds of participants and still want to track who has a question so you can hand the virtual mic / airtime to them.

Try it when you want breakout groups and to determine who is in which group, and after a set time for the groups to return to the main space.

What is good enough for 2 people facing each other, and appears to work perfectly well for a group of 5 or 6... doesn't quite scale to a company all-hands, or giving a lecture or seminar.

Tools fit a scale, and Zoom is excessive for the small and simple use-case but excels at the large and complex.

Which is a long way of saying that Zoom is one the few companies that has been around long enough to deal with all the edge cases. Throw a few devs in a room for a bit and you'll get a perfectly usable video chat for 1-1 or a small group, but you won't get Zoom.

I appreciate listing the areas in which Zoom beats competitors. It helps people understand where work should be done on alternatives.

My company has been remote-only for about 1.5 weeks now and we have 4 different conferencing systems that people are using. It's interesting that everyone has their preferences, but for small meetings nobody is using Zoom as far as I've seen.

> Try it when you want breakout groups and to determine who is in which group, and after a set time for the groups to return to the main space.

> or giving a ... seminar.

Zoom is good for large, hugely interactive, video conferencing and meeting.

I am unaffiliated, just a user who has used most of what is out there.

Try it at 600 people, with at least 50 unmuted. (Not a made up example. Zoom worked, last week, for us.)

Be aware that allowing everybody to continue following their preferences will result in the same proliferation that you see with text editors, email clients, and programming languages. Based on having only 4 different systems, I might predict that your company size is ~100-200 people (though that's a napkin estimate based on a single integer). There are at least 10 systems available, and certainly many more that are only accessible to technical people.

Wikipedia says Zoom was founded in 2011. Google Hangouts has been around for about the same amount of time, and Skype predates them by quite a bit.

I don't quite understand why Hangouts and Skype aren't more robust than they are. I'm sure this is indeed a hard problem, but the utility of getting it right is obvious, and these are massive companies.