Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

> It works really well.

Does it?

Asking because I just left a zoom meeting with horrible sound quality and extremely bad video quality. Why would anyone prefer that to Teams is beyond me.

Edit: interesting this is _heavily_ downvoted. Can't a person have a bad experience and tell HN about it?

Zoom tells me I have no audio devices and need to reboot every time I launch it. I ignore the message and it magically works fine. Great piece of software /s

I have about a year of near daily anecdotal evidence to the contrary. So, in my experience, yes it works extremely well. I'm not saying it's better than Teams at all, I've never used that, and it looks pretty awesome from their marketing page. Microsoft has really stepped up their software quality game recently.

I can say Zoom is way the hell better than: Slack/Screenhero, TeamViewer, join.me, GoToMeeting, WebEx, Skype, Google Hangouts, BlueJeans, ugh the list goes on over the past years.

But your flawless experience does not help me.

I had a horrible meeting today (not the first time, but today was particularly bad).

In fact, I recorded part of it with my phone and tomorrow I Will have a chat with our IT people to ask people to avoid using zoom.

> Can't a person have a bad experience and tell HN about it?

Not necessarily, no. It's downvoted because it's one low-evidence anecdote amidst comments from people who've been using it daily (two years, here). That doesn't mean it didn't happen, but without supporting evidence it's difficult to find relevance in a single poor call.

Some basic evidentiary questions for you to consider, that would help distinguish between "someone's Internet was broken" (more likely) and "Zoom is defective" (less likely), for example:

1) Was only one participant experiencing issues, or were all participants blurry? Did Zoom warn you that of connection instability? Did Zoom show yellow or red connection status bars for the affected participant(s)?

2) Does your (or their) Internet connection show instability such as high latency (Bufferbloat) when performing a speed test capable of measuring and reporting latency-under-load fluctuations? https://dslreports.com/speedtest

3) Did the sound quality issue involving one or more participants who were not using in-ear or over-ear headphones?

4) Was the sound quality issue reproducible in a followup call for testing? Was it reproducible using "call in by phone" audio rather than "internet" audio for testing?

EDIT:

5) If you stop sharing your video, does the problem improve? If you activate screen sharing, does the problem worsen?

"I Will have a chat with our IT people to ask people to avoid using zoom." Foolish. What works better combining VTC and easy join phone calls? Surely not Teams. Was on a 400+ person Zoom call that went great. Problem is likely in your network.

Why are you assuming that the Zoom software was the culprit? Perhaps you had an unstable connection with high jitter?

But if you downvote anything that is not compatible with your own experience, where does that leave us?

To answer your other questions: this was not the first time and there are others here expressing similar issues. Teams works reasonably well from same computer & network.

Because other teleconferencing software worked just fine under the same condition.

out of curiosity, why not Teams?

If you’d included that second paragraph in your anecdote, I personally wouldn’t have downvoted it.

For one, Teams doesn't include dial-in/dial-out, that's another $1.50 per month per line (still cheaper than Zoom if you have Office 365 already).

But another, more important one is: the last time we tried using Teams/S4B meetings, if you are contacting a client where they are in a different Office 365 tenant, and the security settings are turned up on their tenant to not allow logging in as a "guest" to other tenants, they can't join your meeting. (or at least, not without launching an incognito window and reopening the meeting link) Azure AD tries to login as their user account, fails because they aren't allowed, and leaves them on an error message screen without any way for the meeting host to troubleshoot. Zoom, since it's out of band of anything that IT usually touches (unless you turn on the "only allow people in my organization to join this meeting" function), won't have this issue since the outsider will automatically be offered the choice of logging into a Zoom account or just giving a name for this conversation (as far as I've seen).

It's one of those scenarios where Microsoft being so entrenched in the environment actually lessens productivity. You can argue that people shouldn't be blocked from joining outside meetings, or that shadow IT is evil and should never be encouraged, but when security steps in the way of productivity, shadow IT usually naturally results, as so many SaaS vendors (Zoom, Basecamp, Dropbox) rely upon. Zoom acts like malware (to a degree) by installing to user-only directories and working around corporate security to make it easier for the end user to use the product. At a big company, approval for a video conferencing system could take months of PoCs, vendor meetings, implementation, and so on. But if you can just say "Join my Zoom meeting! It takes a minute! It integrates with Outlook so we don't have to even go to another website! And it's cheap!", then all of the corporate BS is cut through, and by time IT finds out, half the company is using it and they'll start paying for it so the enterprise stuff works (i.e. SSO).

(Basecamp is another good example of this. It gets tons of adoption by running in a browser window and only costing $99 per month for unlimited users, so it fits on a manager's expense account and user onboarding is super simple from there. and it's really easy to use.)

Have you tried Jitsi Meet?

Jitsi Meet is open-source and self hostable. Conspicuously absent from your list :)

haha - if you agree to do technical support for all the people fumbling around with other clients - they MIGHT say yes.

One reason zoom is POPULAR with the IT folks - less tech support / help desk stuff. Test my audio is the biggest tip for folks stuck.

This exactly.

What's really funny is if a VP says, we should start evaluating enterprise conferencing software, get's down the road with the webex and friends sales teams, and then everyone tells them to go home because it's too late when they finally have the roll-out meeting or the feedback meeting - everyone is using zoom already.