What comes after Zoom? (2020)
ben-evans.com
ben-evans.com
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.
It reminds me of the German word Entnazifizierung ("de-nazi-fication"), which was relevant post WWII.
Where is this new word coming from?
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=e...
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.
I forgot exactly when Cory Doctorow introduced the term, but this blog post pretty well hashes out the concept
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 doesn’t just mean “bad”. It’s a name for the process that happens to VC funded businesses.
I don't know if it can handle sizable calls but it works well for me. It's simple, seems to have a decent privacy policy, and has always just worked.
The only drawback for me is they raised $10M a couple years back.
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?
For example:farplay.io .
Here I don't see even iOS / macOS users using it because there's simply almost nobody to call with it.
I don’t get the strategy.
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.
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/pair-programming-coscreen-dat...
(N.b., lack of Linux support is damning and the promised release has been long delayed)
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.
If you're going to speculate on what's next for communication, it's probably best to follow the technology.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
And idea what is holding you back?
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.
‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly’.
Scheduled meetings become "here's this persistent channel for our team, this meeting calendar entry just links you to join that channel"
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.
Complete garbage. I know why I'm in a call, it's none of your business, and I don't want products asking questions.
Also, who thought it would be a great product improvement to update as you are launching a call?
In addition, a few more things that suck about Zoom:
- No I don't want my screen to go to Zoom/fullscreen when someone shares their screen
- 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.
1 click on/ 1 click off. Just be simple!
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.
So my guess is , whatever solves that problem comes after zoom.
Little things matter. When I send a zoom link, it is ~20 characters and I can alternatively just give you a room number.
When I send a MS Teams link, the invite is 5 line long with hundreds of strange characters in the middle.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: Hope that didn't sound argumentative - was not my intention
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.
But I would say the same is true for all calls (where I cannot freely drift off or even work on something else).
I would try to reduce the number of calls you're in :S
If such a solution came along, I would use it and get rid of my monthly Zoom fee.
PS: end-to-end encryption would be good....
> I don't think I really need a centrally managed server for these - the scaling requirements are small
I think that's not a concern for the use case. But, maybe?