Why zoom is so popular?

[orangpelupa]

Everyone use zoom for some reason despite its

1. really cumbersome to use. If you use desktop you need to refuse the app, before it give the option to zoom via web browser. If you mobile phone it force you to install zoom.
2. Buggy as heck. Stuck in driving mode (fix: disable driving mode in settings, outside of meeting), cannot join voice over internet (fix: enable auto join voice over internet in settings, outside of meeting), blank video (fix: rejoin the meeting), etc
3. Really low frame rate, basically making playing videos to students useless.

Competitors like Google Hangouts are better in 1, 2, and 3. But why zoom is the most popular?

There are other competitors like MS Teams, Jitsi, etc. But i rarely use them (and no one use them apparently) so i don't know their quality very much. But AFAIK jitsi solved 1,2, and 3 too. Like hangouts.

 

[snarfbot]

Yea I dunno I honestly never heard of zoom before the pandemic but I was aware of the others, its a mystery!

 

[orangpelupa]

Yeah me too. Zoom was unknown before the pandemic. People even already know Skype.

Plot twist : zoom was popular because the free tier have a time limit?

 

[snarfbot]

Lol, I didn't even know it did. That's a good excuse to just suddenly leave the session tho. It was so buggy anyway you could just leave half way through a meeting or turn off your camera if you werent feeling it. Lots of plausible deniability opportunity there.

 

[BRiT]

It was probably one of the first results shown in Google search done by non-techies?

Fortunately my work was looking into various remote meeting technologies in early 2019 and Microsoft Teams won out. Both from a price perspective once scaled to our need and also from technology standpoint. Surprisingly it was even substantially cheaper than some other voice-only conference options as well. My group was trialing it by late summer 2019. Other groups were being brought on board in the winter 2019. I believe the entire/rest of the company was tied in during the pandemic in 2020.

 

[Arwin]

We were already using teams before ... and way before that we used Slack and Hangouts.

However Zoom has better functionality in some cases (that we don’t need, but others do).

https://www.businessinsider.nl/google-meet-vs-zoom?international=true&r=US

 

[pascal]

Zoom is popular because it is fast when you have may people connected or low quality telecom.
The low latency and the capacity to hold the quality with many people (hundreds) in a single meeting room makes it a great option.
My experience:
- Talk with my daughter while she was in UK (I am in Brazil). Pretty Good. Much better than other options (Whatsapp, Facetime, Google Meet, etc..).
- Presentations with up to 300 people. Works very well.
- Meetings with up to 50 people. Excellent.
- ADSL (15 Mbits/sec) and was much better than Google Meet.
- 4G smartphone and still the best option.
- Fiber optics at home and Zoom is still the best.

 

[orangpelupa]

Zoom is popular because it is fast when you have may people connected or low quality telecom.
The low latency and the capacity to hold the quality with many people (hundreds) in a single meeting room makes it a great option.
My experience:
- Talk with my daughter while she was in UK (I am in Brazil). Pretty Good. Much better than other options (Whatsapp, Facetime, Google Meet, etc..).
- Presentations with up to 300 people. Works very well.
- Meetings with up to 50 people. Excellent.
- ADSL (15 Mbits/sec) and was much better than Google Meet.
- 4G smartphone and still the best option.
- Fiber optics at home and Zoom is still the best.

Thank you. So the issues I mentioned in the OP actually became a hot feature.

Because it runs in low frame rate, its more bandwidth friendly and resource friendly.

Because its very adamant in telling you to use its own app, it have better efficiency rather than running off a web browser

 

[pascal]

Exactly.
It probably has a very good computer server too.
For me in the end, Zoom had one average a higher stable framerate and low latency response time than Google Meet, Teams, Whatsapp, Facetime, and Blackboard.

It this world with so many people using Python, Javascript, and other low-performance technology, people tend to forget about stable framerate and low latency response time.
I could share my computer screen with my daughter in UK and it worked great!

Off-topic. Maybe it is time for a Tecno-Reset, to clean our technology base.

 

[orangpelupa]

Exactly.
It probably has a very good computer server too.
For me in the end, Zoom had one average a higher stable framerate and low latency response time than Google Meet, Teams, Whatsapp, Facetime, and Blackboard.

It this world with so many people using Python, Javascript, and other low-performance technology, people tend to forget about stable framerate and low latency response time.
I could share my computer screen with my daughter in UK and it worked great!

Off-topic. Maybe it is time for a Tecno-Reset, to clean our technology base.

WebRTC is the standard to fix those, AFAIK. dunno its widely used or not

 

[nutball]

It's the least worst option.

Skype is not great for meetings of more than a few people. Teams is ... Teams. Microsoft at their very best. Webex needs to die in a fire, with dinosaurs and asteroid strikes included.

My institute is strongly encouraging us to use Teams for all student-facing and teaching-related work, because GDPR and they play the MS tithe. So we do that. But when we have ad-hoc staff-to-staff meetings about non-teaching-related issues we tend to default to Zoom. It's just better.

 

[Malo]

We use Teams at work but I've used Zoom specifically for some gaming weekends due to a specific feature that hardly any platforms can provide: the ability to stream from 2 separate cameras on the same device at the same time.

 

[BRiT]

That's an interesting feature.

Have you send any feedback to Teams/Microsoft asking to support it? Maybe it'll pique the interest of a developer and they'll try to squeeze it in.

 

[orangpelupa]

That's pretty neat. A build-in OBS so to speak

 

[Malo]

Yeah for my purpose it allows me to have a separate webcam on an articulated arm overlooking the map on the table. The built-in webcam on the laptop is facing the GM and players so the remote gamers can see both the other players and the tabletop in separate windows.