You mean to imply that a business would just lie to customers?
Come on, the market wouldn't permit that to happen! They'd lose all their customers!
/s
Edit: on a less sarcastic note, I'd be less critical of Zoom if their software were open source.
Come on, the market wouldn't permit that to happen! They'd lose all their customers!
/s
Edit: on a less sarcastic note, I'd be less critical of Zoom if their software were open source.
Meanwhile the companies in question universally refuse to acknowledge THEY NEVER ACTUALLY VERIFIED ANY of the claims around encryption. It would be hilarious if it weren't so terrifying. And oh, by the way, all of those companies refuse to admit they messed up so they ALSO haven't switched to another service, so Zoom is literally still selling on "If we weren't secure, these big guys wouldn't be paying for our service". It's insanity.
Saving face by not admitting egregious mistakes and even lying about making or not making them even after the evidence is public and irrefutable is just the human ego defending itself.
I'm starting to get past taht sort of childishness in my own life but having lived it for a long time I see it easily in others.
In most companies I've observed, the people deciding what products to buy are not capable of reviewing any of the products claims. If they happen to have an employee that is capable, and that employee points out a problem, they are usually ignored. Especially if it would make someone in management look bad for spending money on something they shouldn't have, or even worse if it would make them lose their free lunches and golf trips with their vendor buddy.
Now these are small to medium-ish size companies (20-500 people), so maybe it's not a big deal to Zoom's marketing bottom line. But it's definitely a thing.
Teams or Meet works fine (unlike the train wreck of Skype), have improved recently and are already paid for.
People are doing 50-200 person video meetings with Google? Has Meet really improved that much since March/April? That’s not that long ago. Otherwise it seems more like cost is the reason. Not anything relating to quality.
While we pay lip service to Zoom's super shitty security stance, we now run a video meeting service where it's trivially easy to click the "turn on captions" button, and see how good a job the world's biggest advertising agency is doing of transcribing all the audio in our most sensitive business WFH calls... :sigh:
(I have my own Jitsi Meet instance running on AWS, but there's me and about four of my tinfoil headwear sporting friends who care enough to bother using it...)
For the business model, it is the same as other OS, there are companies that want a tech insurance policy.
I disagree. Plenty of video chat software has comparable reliability and "just works"-ity.
Google Meet, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Discord...
Hell, Apple has had "just works" and "reliability" in their walled garden since FaceTime was introduced -- if you're willing to look only in their walled garden.
Zoom is almost as good on a laptop as dedicated Cisco gear.
I have been video conferencing mostly for work for almost a decade, and Zoom is the best solution for that that I've encountered.
I recently changed roles, and the use of Zoom was a small reason to go with the company I did.
The idea that a business needs a moat to be profitable is a problem endemic to business.
The value add would be in hosting services and support contracts. Video chat is needed by a lot of non-technical people. Furthering, plenty of people don't have sufficient bandwidth to host their own video chat even with just their own friends or teams. Even technical people often don't understand how to write secure software.
I'm pretty econ-left philosophically (socdem short-term, mutualist/ancom long-term), so you can't get much argument from me here. :)
But I want to steelman the other perspective: so long as we live in a pre-post-scarcity market economy, having some kind of moat is part of how one gains bargaining leverage in a price negotiation. (Think of "moat" in this context as influencing cost/benefit incentives, rather than an absolute barrier: the customer could build a boat to cross it, or they could pay the toll to cross the bridge, with the latter being usually cheaper.)
One answer is as you describe: hosting services and support contracts, in a market ecosystem of interoperable commodity services. Sign me up! But: such an ecosystem has a free-rider problem when it comes to the non-trivial expense of creating and maintaining the client software (including the risk of front-loading the 0-to-1 effort of building it before you know it will be adopted). In a FOSS model, other players in that ecosystem can obviously contribute to that effort, but those who don't contribute will have a competitive advantage, since commodity markets tend to viciously compete until margins are as near-zero as possible.
There are "moats" / competitive advantages that have nothing at all to do with the software itself: superior support experience, brand reputation, efficient hosting services through economy of scale. So I don't at all claim your model is unworkable, and there are many successful companies who do just that.
I don't disagree that the world would be a better place (and the overall economy perhaps more efficient), if most/all software was FOSS, and business models required less centralized control. (Note that nothing has stopped us from a building a pure FOSS E2EE VC client with a comparable feature-set; we still could.) But say I'm a board member or an investor in Zoom, whether pre- or post-success: how would you pitch me on the business value of open-sourcing the expensive-to-produce client software?
Okay. Consider the following fantastical talk from technical me to you, oh dear fantastical board member:
Let's face a fact: yeah open source software is "free (as in free speech)" and it can also be "free (as in free beer)". Anyone can inspect it. Anyone can "steal" it so-to-speak and set up a competitor. That will always be the case. Just look at how many stolen software products end up in your favorite app store. Games are ripped off right down to their copyrightable artwork, malvertisements added, and reuploaded with a new name. But I think worrying about that is like worrying about the people brewing their own beer. I think that's preventing us from building a brewery.
Let's face another fact: what's expensive isn't software. That's pretty cheap. That's just man-hours. A kid in a garage can build video chat over a weekend or two. What's expensive is experience. Experience is basically an impossible-to-estimate number of man-hours. We'll never be able to pay one person or one team to understand all of the pieces and platforms and make it work for everyone.
Customers want to run Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android... and all of that is hard to keep up with. Customers have a plethora of network and hardware configurations. Customers have crazy different bandwidth and latency profiles. It's really hard for us to make our software work in all of that. But some of our customers are experienced and they're curious and they are looking at our software with a fine toothed comb. We simply can't stop them from doing so. That's how we got into these repeated PR messes after all. So let's embrace that. I think there's a good chance that some of those customers would solve our problems for us if only there was a way they could contribute fixes.
Like I said, experience is expensive. With experience comes ideas. Ideas are gold. That's why we're worried about our competitors after all. We don't really have any solid ideas. Neither do they. Even if we did have a solid idea, they'd create a competing idea or even just outright steal ours. And we'll still be left holding the bag, we'll still have these PR details for not getting things right in the first place. So let's turn that on its head.
If we open source our software, we give these technical people the opportunity to help us fix problems before they become problems. There's a ton of home brewers out there and some of them would love to be able to help our big brewery. We're not going to stop home brewers. So we shouldn't even try. But home brewers do need tools. Let them come up with their own recipes.
So, we provide the tools for free. But we can sell the recipe. Or, technically: provide a cheap service for the people who need something they know is secure but don't have the technical know-how and/or time to set it up themselves. Lawyers have a legal requirement to keep their conversations private. Schools have a legal requirement to keep their children safe from stalkers. Even citizens have a right to privacy. We'll make all of the tools available for anyone to audit and validate. The recipe to use those tools is where we make profit.
The recipe is the environment. We'll provide, for a fixed cost, the ingress bandwidth and compute needed. We'll provide secure storage of recorded conversations and an audit history of who's accessed it. We'll provide the experienced technical support to directly either fix problems or point at misconfigured devices outside of our control (and why it's the source of a problem); we'll be able to understand the debug logs that the software provides. Of course, any other technical person could too. But that's already the case so we're not really losing anything here. Indeed, we're gaining here. We're gaining the trust of law firms and governments; the trust that they're getting the value that they want for the services they need and that they can go directly to us if they need troubleshooting.
I'm not arguing against centralization. Centralization is good for us and for our customers. It's an anchor point for experience to grow from. I'm saying that open source software can help us avoid further technical problems from our lack of security experience. And who knows? Maybe some of those home brewers are interested in a paying job at our brewery -- if only they could prove they knew a little bit about beer, if it was free. We could definitely use the experience.
/pitch
it would be very dangerous for the primary value add to be in hosting services. any hyperscale cloud provider could offer the service and undercut zoom (based on superior unit economics and market reach)
most of 8x8 revenue comes from sources and products unrelated to jitsi.
so, i don't think you can say that it seems to work fine for them compared to zoom.
You scoff, but isn’t that exactly what we’re all doing to Zoom right now?
And they can be changed without you knowing it. Do you have a Fingerprint that what you get is what they share?