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Comment by poisonborz | Hacker News Reader

For the average user, a privacy/security concern is a possible/theoretical issue, missing features a very real, instantenous issue.

Slack, Teams & co flat-out ignored calls and screen sharing until now. They were sidelined so-so features. Hell, on Slack you couldn't even see screen sharing from mobile, and you did not even got a notification that another person is sharing. Never mind missing even the most basic annotation features.

No wonder Zoom eats all the pies now. Sure, they made a lot of mistakes, but it was a huge landfall on a small(ish) company. That said, if the others top up their game, I'm happy to get rid of an additional app - but that's how market works.

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Just general video/audio performance too. Zoom is the only one I've used where everyone can have an open mic, have noise in the background (or even music), and the whole group can still have a good conversation.

This sort of dynamic is something I feel the Free Software/Open Source world often misses. Yes, security, openness and ideally freedom are desirable and in some cases essential, but if the software doesn't fundamentally work well at its primary task, for its intended audience, those benefits won't count for a lot.

I think Zoom certainly deserves the criticism that they're getting regarding security. But until the alternatives figure out things on the functionality front, I don't think that's a sufficient reason to kick Zoom to the curb.

I would say that the company I work for doesn't use Slack exactly for this reason. Screen sharing and group calls are not available in the free version, so slack trial didn't went beyond the first three users. Guess what, we're paying for teams and zoom now.

"Sure, they made a lot of mistakes" - is a strong understatement given how they have been treating the users. Just look at the history of posts about Zoom here.

Upd: These are not mistakes. They did all that intentionally, fogetting about the security for convenience even when it was beyond reasonable imho.

Upd2: Why downvotes? Some recent headlines from Hacker News:

- "Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China"

- "Zoom meetings aren’t end-to-end encrypted, despite marketing"

Are you calling these "mistakes"?

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