The thing is Skype had video calling but it didn’t have the “Hollywood squares” experience.
Watching these things come and go over a long period of time the baseline scenario is a low-grade of “enshittification” in that there is a lot of expensive and boring detail work to keep the experience low friction and no vendor seems to want to do this work once it has gotten established — So inevitably it becomes a matter of “it just doesn’t work” and somebody will tell you “You gotta meet me on XYZ” and when you’re skeptical they’ll say “XYZ works as good as Zoom did back in the day” and the simple feature that the product is in the honeymoon stage and attending to all the little details and not in the harvesting stage where every developer they can let go of is profit is more important than the headliner features in which the product is really innovative.
A counter to that is that one of these companies really can decide that it wants to be permanent, to some extent Facebook has done that, they saw what happened to MySpace and Yahoo and know it will happen to them too if they don’t keep up, which has often meant buying “the next thing” and also heavy investments in what could be the next platform. To play that game takes real courage because there will come a time you need to kill your cash cow so you’ll have another cash cow, something Zuckerberg can do because he controls so much of the company.
Everything else I’ve used - Zoom, Meet, Slack etc, has insane lag/delay even when I’m having a one-on-one with someone in the same city.
Then I made a FaceTime call to the opposite side of the world and it was like we were sitting next to each other. No delay. No weird interruptions. No “sorry, you go”. And I was on shitty pub wifi.
I don’t know what the deal is. Do all these other services route through slow-ass servers in the US? Bad client-side processing? FaceTime proves the possibility of near-real-time communication across the globe, why is no one else even close?
It really is amazing. I dearly wish Apple would open it up to the everyone else. Great when I need to talk to someone iPhone to iPhone or whatever, but I don’t understand why they don’t just move to replace all these services — the protocol is amazing and apple could be a global default.
Yes, this could change as Apple pushes further into services, but for Apple, services are largely in support of physical products. Their services help create a moat.
You buy iPhone, iPad, whatever, you get access to a whole bunch of unique software and services. It is the same strategy BlackBerry had with Blackberry messenger, it was a differentiator.
FaceTime has terrible echo cancelling. If any participant is on speaker the conversation is basically half-duplex. I personally can't stand it and unfortunately my relatives do not have the reflex of using headphones for calls.
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."
I forgot exactly when Cory Doctorow introduced the term, but this blog post pretty well hashes out the concept
As others have noted, from Cory Doctorow. But you're hearing it a lot recently because it's the mot du jour that people are lazily tossing around to mean "something that I don't like."
Then specify the complaint. It's like saying the food sucks at some restaurant. OK, I guess, but it doesn't really meaningfully add to a discussion.
(I don't even disagree that the desire to make more money or need to make any money at all has degraded many services, especially those where users were basically just taking advantage of dollar bills VCs were leaving on the floor.)
All of these have gone through this lifecycle and the underlying factor is that these platforms don't interoperate. There's a cognitive disconnect here: people don't think it is strange that a Verizon customer can text an AT&T customer or that an iPhone user can call a Samsung user. Because of that there is fierce competition for better phones, better networks, etc. People also don't think it is strange that a Skype user can't talk to a WhatsApp user... But the mechanics of two-sided markets mean that products like that start to rot as soon as they get established every single time.
In this case the push for more money is not the problem but cost reduction is. The analogy of the honeymoon where you start a relationship and are careful to do all kinds of little nice things and then you start to take the other person for granted is closer to it, rather than the scenario of Google becoming play-for-play and pushing up ad loads to the human limit of withstanding.
For me the quotes reflect both that difference and my discomfort with the word “shit” which use to be just way too popular on HN and in startup culture though I think the situation has largely corrected itself.
It feels older to me, too. It definitely gained a lot of momentum recently around Reddit's recent API pricing changes, but Google Trends shows it having a lot of interest in 2004 and then sporadic interest over the years.
I don't use Google Trends enough to know how to interpret that data, so maybe there's some quirk of Google Trends that makes it look more significant back then.
It would be awesome if some service had a similar feature to Google Ngram Viewer, but for content on the internet instead of books. Search interest isn't quite the same as how much it's being written in content.
Also earlier versions only worked about 75% of the time. The reliability impact on brands that were pre-zoom (webex, etc) made them less attractive well before the pandemic.
One potential flaw I see with this thinking is why would I want to use a built-in video chat feature if I can just send a zoom link? If you've ever watched the thousands of parody videos of things that go wrong with meetings over video, we all know what a pain it is to get everything configured right -- right webcam, right microphone, not blasting people's ears off or being too quiet, knowing where the mute button is, etc. If I have all my Zoom stuff already set up, I don't think I really want to do that for each individual app unless they have some sort of super compelling feature.
The only thing I can really think of off the top of my head is using AI to modify the video stream (where that's like the primary purpose of the app). But I don't know, that seems more frivolous fun than something truly compelling.
I think the video conference market success is also linked to increased prevalence of camera us - i.e. mobile plans finally support streaming, laptops carry a camera as standard, etc. (Covid also increased demand)
If you're going to speculate on what's next for communication, it's probably best to follow the technology.
The market was pretty well primed pre-COVID. We were already doing a fair number of video calls at work, webinars (though usually just with slides) were very much a thing, and I guess a fair number of people would at least sometimes use Facetime to see the grandkids or whatever. As you say, webcams were getting pretty ubiquitous and mobile networks were improving.
When everyone switched to more remote interactions during the pandemic, it was natural to just really ramp up the technology they were already using and a lot of people were upgrading their video and audio gear to make videos anyway.
Not clear to me what is next. I'm pretty sure most people don't want a more immersive experience most of the time and some percentage of people resent peer pressure to be on video as it is--as noted in various comments.
ADDED: I do agree with one of the points I think Ben is making. There is still a lot of UX work that could go into simplifying screen sharing and other, for lack of a better term, multi-mode interactions.
What comes after Zoom? A regression to simpler lightweight tech. Most people here don’t even turn on their cameras. There’s no point. It wastes bandwidth, makes people self conscious, and adds little to no value.
Increasingly, we see the use of impromptu Slack huddles going up. Easy to jump in and out, feels more like a hallway or deskside conversation compared to the formal meeting room experience of Zoom.
With the remote work revolution happening on a large scale, we are learning what works and cutting out that which is unnecessary. Full camera setups are unnecessary: the digital equivalent of managers wanting to lord over rows of peons sitting at desks.
If you want to “team build” with coworkers then go setup a VR ping pong table happy hour during work hours and chat in your little metaverse, or take turns reading lines from Macbeth.
I can say from personal experience that people tend to drift off more easily if their cameras are off, no manager present. My team even just agreed themselves to enable the cameras during refinements.
Is the main problem boring meetings? Of course it is! But you won't get people involved by not having any team meetings at all... Sometimes the spark needs to catch first.
VR ping pong table??? Not every company here can and will afford VR headsets for everyone just for kicks.
And it is beyond the point. Trust is built by sharing, not by playing VR games. It can work, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient.
This statement is so cliche SV.
> But you won't get people involved by not having any team meetings at all...
Having worked from home for decades now, back in my day the connectivity wasn't good enough for meetings. I never found it limiting in that way. In fact, it was easier to get involved as you had time to get involved, not wasting away in useless meetings.
In my experience, the main problem is that most people working remotely were thrown into it during the COVID age and never took time to develop remote working skills, leaving their office skills they had built up to lean on, with everyone hoping they would carry over. But it doesn't work like that. Being skilled in one thing does not mean you are skilled in all things.
Likewise, my career has been spent working from home. If you threw me into an office, where I have no experience, I'd equally be a fumbling around disaster. They are entirely different skillsets.
But working together efficiently means acting as a team, being a "human" (sorry all cooperative animals, you're human too)
To act as a closely connected team that is able to sort things out and deal with the unforseen, helping each other out and understanding what the other needs, it is simply not enough to be a genius with chat and mail and a todo-list.
It might work, but then you either rely on others to deal with the chaos for you, making you a drone, or you remain well under potential - what you could achieve with a good team.
> To act as a closely connected team that is able to sort things out and deal with the unforseen, helping each other out
To a point, but it is generally understood that unskilled members of a team will bring down a team to unsustainable levels. A team can only compromise so far. If you have a medical team, for instance, you're not walking the streets to see the first hobo join. If you have a sports team, you carefully ensure the members are skilled at the game.
Same applies here. COVID brought extenuating circumstances, of which accommodations were made, but those who haven't developed the necessary skills at this point can go back to the office. They are not a good fit for these particular teams. And that's okay. There are many different teams for them to find a good fit.
If your meeting is so long, boring, and lacking my active participation to the point that I could fall asleep, your meeting should have been an order of magnitude shorter, the presenter should learn some basic speaking skills, or I should not have been in that meeting, and an email should have been sent instead.
And wouldn't it be preferable if you were so connected to your coworkers that you could say that (maybe not in these exact words), and either have better meetings, or be free to leave this particular meeting?
Do you really prefer sitting for hours in anonymous meetings, working on something else, just so you were "there", but not "there"?
You could work significantly better without all that nonsense in the background, right? Maybe even discussing important things?
I'm not held back. I'll happily tell people, most of the time after the fact, but in some more egregious cases in the moment, that I don't belong in this meeting, or ask that we get back to the topic at hand that required me in the meeting.
You don't need to be buddy-buddy with your coworkers to tell them things that are directly relevant to our job at hand. In fact, I'm much more comfortable pointing out to my coworker that we've already talked about this subject, take it to a sidebar, than I am telling my friend that he's told the same story about his whitewater rafting trip 3 times. Because my friendships are based on enjoying each other's company, and I don't want to associate negative emotions with it. My coworkers are all here because we get paid. We get paid because we achieve goals. We achieve goals by actually doing productive work, not sitting through snooze-fest meetings.
It's a story of horses for courses. WhatsApp audio messages async, speakerphone on in the background for a couple of hours like a Trucker's CB one ear listening for your call sign, typical live video sessions with screenshares, and, yes, an embodied live version is almost good enough now for the watercooler convos in VR but will really be here when it's other people layered into the real world space around you to the point where we may have special designed layouts and seating just to accommodate remote participants kind of like room based telepresence solutions from a few years back. To me thats what comes after Zoom.
I really think Discord could pivot themselves to the SMB space if they wanted. Their audio/video call quality is better than anything else I've used, including both Zoom and Skype.
I think the most compelling feature behind Discord is having text and voice/video channels. By allowing people to just jump into a channel instead of having to call individual people or scheduling a call, it would allow remote teams to function pretty easily.
Scheduled meetings become "here's this persistent channel for our team, this meeting calendar entry just links you to join that channel"
I think part of that is just because people who use Discord generally have good internet and good microphones. It's not Jane from accounting with an 8 year old Dell.
When talking to people with good setups Google Meet is at least as good quality in my experience. Both Discord and Meet are significantly better than Zoom, so maybe they'd have a chance for people that absolutely can't use Google Meet for some reason.
Discord seems rather good at picking data centers for chat channels optimized for good voice quality, but not always as good at picking data centers for video quality. There's some latency graphs you can discover "hidden" in Discord's desktop interface. (It's a hover over the right part of the call "bar".) You can use that information to manually override the data center for the channel. I've had some good experiences with switching data center to closer to the people experiencing the worst video quality. (Of course, you need to be a channel admin to manually change the data center. It will also kick everyone else and force a rejoin to connect to the new data center, so it is something to add to a tech rehearsal ahead of time if relying on the channel for important meetings.)
> Zoom is the Skype of video - it turned a technology few people used much into a mass-market product. But next we’ll get the equivalents of Instagram and Snap - products that ask different questions. Zoom solved getting into a call, but why are you in the call?
Complete garbage. I know why I'm in a call, it's none of your business, and I don't want products asking questions.
> - No I don't want my screen to go to Zoom/fullscreen when someone shares their screen
There's a setting for that. Settings > Share Screen > Window size when screen sharing > Maintain current size
I'm sure you can imagine why this isn't the default. Many people work off their laptop screens and low res monitors. Few have 32" 4K ultrawide magic beans ones so full screen helps them actually see the content.
> - When the call ends, just end. Don't show me anything more with zoom, or make my screen go to a zoom/call ended modal.
I wonder if this is so that people don't panic, wondering whether the call _really_ ended or the window just disappeared by the other person can hear them.
You're taking this too literally. The product will not be asking you what you're doing. The product designer will ask these questions of themselves and create something that better serves these use cases.
I get it. But I don't want to the product designer to be asking these questions either. It's very obvious what I want, I want something that always works with no effort. I don't want something that is quirky or interesting or engaging, because someone somewhere is trying to hit some engagement metrics and aiming that increase my usage time. Just get out of my way, and I will love it. I love linux, I love git, I love vim, I love torrents. All of those just get out of my way and give me what I want without someone somewhere asking questions.
Linux wasn't the first OS, git wasn't the first source control, and vim wasn't the first editor. In each of these cases, someone used the existing solutions, asked themselves how they could be better for a particular use case, and came up with a solution.
You're taking this too literally. I don't mean that things can't be improved. I mean that anything backed by Ben Evans will have incentives which aren't mine.
If you look at the social sciences research about video conferencing, it's clear that zoom is bad for creating trust between participants(even on a 1-1 call) and that phone calls do a better job than zoom in decreasing loneliness.
So my guess is , whatever solves that problem comes after zoom.
I'm still not 100% clear on what zoom solved that led to such a surge in popularity. I'd used WebEx and other tools for work for years and they always seem "good enough". I probably prefer Zoom, but am not sure it improved life _that_ much...
Oh, everything popular before Zoom sucked so bad. Getting on a call was incredibly complicated, getting someone else in a call even more so. I got deflated whenever I saw a WebEx mail.
There were alternatives... But Skype was getting worse by the day, moving from decentralized to MS servers for all calls, and support for everything besides MS and the official App was also non-existant.
Google Calls/Hangouts/Meet/? was mistrusted by all MS shops (and still is)
Teams was nowhere it is right now beginning of the pandemic, and required buying into the Ecosystem.
In fact, Zoom was a (!) low entry, mostly platform-independent solution that was easy to set up if you had nothing to start from. And joining a call was not asking much from customers, students, business partners, etc.
All the competitors learned a lot from Zoom and we take these things for granted now.
There were other solutions of course, but sometimes you're lucky, and ads help.
I literally don't think I ever had an issue getting on a WebEx call, using it many times a week every week for as many years as I can remember. Not that I'm passionate about WebEx, it just so happens to be the tool we used before we used Zoom.
I don't think it had anything to do with familiarity to be honest - you noted that "Getting on a call was incredibly complicated, getting someone else in a call even more so." I suspect you overstated this point and, anecdotally, my experience was quite different to your own. I met with colleagues ranging from the technically proficient to technically incompetent and never had an issue. I'm not trying to repudiate your own experiences, just that I don't think things were so bad before Zoom that video conferencing was consistently awful
Edit: Hope that didn't sound argumentative - was not my intention
I also think in an (enterprise) company context, the sum of all those little things matters more. Corporates need out of the box integrations and processes, built-in auditing etc., and it seems that Zoom catered to those needs well.
It made video calls more accessible. They used mobile first approach so it was more accessible to lot of people. WebEx was a pain the ass use on desktop and it still is. Eric Yuan begged Cisco to invest more in WebEx and got frustrated and left and built Zoom.
Yeah, me neither. In my enterprise, we already had Teams in place (via o365). After Zoom's surge in popularity, we still have Teams in place, but now we're spending money on both Zoom and Teams. I doubt this is due to vendor redundancy because it would be the only enterprise service with this feature. I personally prefer Teams because I always have Teams open, it integrates better with Outlook and it's more or less included with o365. I guess it's a different story if you didn't already have a solution in place...
In my personal life, um... video chat with many people is not really a part of it. I just used Google Duo/Meet when needed.
anecdotally, zoom succeeded by being a neutral third party with a name that's fun to say.
if your company is on microsoft and you want to arrange a meeting with people at a company that uses google apps, you have to decide on which company's video call platform to use. and inevitably, if your company's video call platform is used you'll have to help the people at the other company figure out how to use your platform, and you'll have to apologize for any connection issues. so the best solution was to use a new app that wasn't the one any party in the meeting used.
Thinking back, Zoom had optimized its codec to provide lower latency than WebEx. The lower latency caused a noticeable improvement in user experience. Combine that with the SMB-oriented pricing model that had a free tier and I think that’s all they really needed.
For me, the best post-zoom thing is calls WITHOUT video. Video calling is extremely tiring. A couple of Zooms whacks me out for the rest of the day. Note that I am considered a “geriatric millenial” so your mileage may vary.
We have lived in GoToMeeting sessions -- internally and with customers -- since inception, but we never, ever, ever turn on video. We use the meeting to share screens for joint testing, or investigation, or discussion of feature planning, or whatever. Video was never appealing; it'd just be a drag on the performance of the rest of the meeting.
When COVID happened, some of our customers went all-in on Zoom and camera-on conferences, and couple of especially entitled ones suggested "we like it when cameras are on!", like they could passive-aggressive us into complying.
Nah. Furthermore, for lots of work-at-home people, turning on video just CLOBBERS their whole connection because they're on like 10mb down/3 up or whatever.
I have a weekly Zoom call with a small group of photographers, or weekly one-to-one calls. I don't think I really need a centrally managed server for these - the scaling requirements are small. I would love a low-cost alternative where the host ran the server and it was always invitation only. Of course there would have to be simple client apps for MacOS, Windows, Linux, iOs and Android.
If such a solution came along, I would use it and get rid of my monthly Zoom fee.
Watching these things come and go over a long period of time the baseline scenario is a low-grade of “enshittification” in that there is a lot of expensive and boring detail work to keep the experience low friction and no vendor seems to want to do this work once it has gotten established — So inevitably it becomes a matter of “it just doesn’t work” and somebody will tell you “You gotta meet me on XYZ” and when you’re skeptical they’ll say “XYZ works as good as Zoom did back in the day” and the simple feature that the product is in the honeymoon stage and attending to all the little details and not in the harvesting stage where every developer they can let go of is profit is more important than the headliner features in which the product is really innovative.
A counter to that is that one of these companies really can decide that it wants to be permanent, to some extent Facebook has done that, they saw what happened to MySpace and Yahoo and know it will happen to them too if they don’t keep up, which has often meant buying “the next thing” and also heavy investments in what could be the next platform. To play that game takes real courage because there will come a time you need to kill your cash cow so you’ll have another cash cow, something Zuckerberg can do because he controls so much of the company.