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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

What makes your comments even better is that Zoom's response from the get-go has basically been "Look at all these large companies that are using our service. Would they be using our service if we weren't secure?"

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.

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Meanwhile the companies in question universally refuse to acknowledge THEY NEVER ACTUALLY VERIFIED ANY of the claims around encryption.

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.

I've been in the interview loop as of late, and there's been a crazy shift away from Zoom. Almost every video chat I had was using Zoom a couple months back, now everyone is using Google Chat or MS Team Meetings.

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.

It’s the business model. Scaling up Zoom or Webex is costly because it’s based on meeting hosts.

Teams or Meet works fine (unlike the train wreck of Skype), have improved recently and are already paid for.

Is any one choosing Teams for Teams alone and not because of already having a relation with Microsoft? That’s Microsoft’s playbook.

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.

We're using Google Meet, but for the very Microsoftian reason of "it comes with our GSuite"...

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...)

The National Australia Bank (one of Australia’s “big 4”, and our biggest business bank), settled on Zoom for all internal video comms. It’s usability made such a material difference to daily ops that physical meetings were halved way before COVID. I believe the review of Zoom constituted a dot-point analysis of their marketing claims.

Nope, this is human nature at it's most basic and obvious.

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.

People don't mind lies though. General public will forget about it after a week if you keep silent or show them lies. Admitting your mistake isn't always a good choice in the corporate environment.

Feels like Theranos except the only difference is that Zoom has working software

I don’t understand. That means it’s fine. Theranos big issue was not having anything. Otherwise they lied a ton. Not unlike many, many companies.

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