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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

Zoom has gone from being a boring piece of enterprise software to being central in lots of engineers lives and unfortunately they were in the "grow quickly and apologise later" section of their development cycle when they suddenly were big and were apologizing.

They prioritzed ease of use on the engineering side, and corporate sales on the business side. They never planned ot be mission critical, but don't think for a second that ever stopped any of their sales team.

The backlash is well deserved, entirely inevitable, and incredibly unlikely to make any difference.

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> They never planned ot be mission critical

How do you figure? Wouldn't any enterprise-focused video conferencing software be considered mission critical?

Before COVID most non-remote companies could still function if their VC was broken; now it's impossible without VC.

Is video really that important? Sure it has benefit of being a bit more cozy, but in reality phone is sufficient to discuss work. Screenshare is much more important, especially for knowledge workers.

Absolutely. A lot of real work involves face to face talking, not looking at a shared screen or document.

With the exception of the involvement of a webcam, you can't do screenshare without being able to do video. Even if we assume video is irrelevant and screenshare is everything, you wind up in the same technological position.

Videoconferencing is used for a lot of things that don't involve reviewing a document or pair-programming. Many people find video quite helpful for such situations.

The problem with phone calls isn't the lack of video, but the lack of a "click here to join the meeting" interface.

Group meetings are much less hassle through Skype, or Teams, or Zoom, or whatever computer-based option you choose, than waiting for everyone to drag out their phones, dial the right number, type in the right meeting code.

> The problem with phone calls isn't the lack of video, but the lack of a "click here to join the meeting" interface.

If "dial this number to join the conference call" is too hard for modern professionals, what the hell is happening to our society? (I do not believe it's actually too hard for them. I think it's incredibly patronizing to suppose that dialing a phone number might be too hard for otherwise capable members of the general public.)

I didn't say it was too hard, but frictionless wins out more often than not.

Why wouldn't frictionless + more features win over tedious and incapable of screen sharing?

Friction isn't a binary, and nothing is truly frictionless. Zoom requires you to install an application, while conference calls only require you to have a phone. I would say the former is more friction, particularly since this particular application is one I'd not like to install on any of my personal devices.

Plain phone tends to have worse audio quality

My experience with conference calls overwhelming confirms that dialing in and entering a code will waste ~10 mins of any meeting.

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