12 ms·

Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

882 points by Lagogarda 6y ago

zozbot234 6y ago
What's surprising to me is that it was allowed before. They have had their own videochat solution for years, so I would expect the usual "eat your own dogfood" approach.
- lowdose 6y ago
  But then Alphabet risks that Hangout could become as good as Zoom & Slack combined. The golden rule is no Betabets by Alphabet.
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    It's frustrating because Google Hangouts used to be great, and then Google purposefully started cannibalizing their own platform. I really want to know what goes on within Product Management at Google, because looking from the outside in I cannot imagine anything other than sheer incompetence.
    - jensvdh 6y ago
      The only way to get promoted at Google is to launch new things.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      The rumors from inside Google is that there's no way to get credit/be rewarded as an employee simply for maintaining an existing solution, or even for fixing obvious breakage. Every incentive is tilted towards starting new projects, often multiple projects in the same domain directly competing with one another. There are some positives to this of course, but clearly it's being overdone.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - cosmodisk 6y ago
        But still...As a prod manager,you aren't coming up with new projects every week, your entire job is to ensure the roadmap is decent and not taking the product into the graveyard. The company has so many people and yet can't produce a single product with a decent UX.
    - KMag 6y ago
      I worked at Google 2006-2010, and from where I sat, Google's biggest problems were (1) rapid erosion of corporate culture over that time frame and (2) weak project management. A friend was managing a project on a shoestring budget. Upper management (C-suite) had reviewed the idea and green-lit it. He had been told Larry and Sergei in particular had voiced support. He got it done ahead of schedule and under budget by managing a stream of off-cycle interns. The week it was scheduled to go live, someone in middle management killed it. My friend and his team got zero credit for a job very well done, a big setback for him. He and I were working on an internal tool for datacenter management as a 20% project when I left. I asked him about it later, and our 20% project met a similar fate: enthusiastic support from management, including giving us some resources, all the way through completion, followed by cancellation shortly after completion. My friend left less than a year later. Another friend started a modest improvement to chat as a 20% project, which later got expanded to a full-time project for several engineers. I forget the external name, but the internal code name was "Taco Town" after the SnL skit. Walkabout / Wave was a skunkworks project that used its separate repository, which was very rare at Google. People knew something mysterious was going on down in Australia, but we really had no idea what it was, other than the Google Maps guys were running it and it was named "Walkabout". When Walkabout / Wave came out of skunkworks mode shortly before external launch, the Taco Town team realized they needed to launch very soon or their project would never launch because its functionality was subsumed by Walkabout / Wave. Taco Town rushed its launch, was a bit buggy and had some scalability issues that they knew about, but expected to be able to improve shortly after launch. I think Taco Town's botched launch a few weeks before Walkabout/Wave contributed to initial confusion around Wave and some of Taco Town's problems colored perceptions of Wave's launch. Shortly after I left, Google publicly announced they'd be putting "more wood behind fewer arrows", which was a step in the right direction. I get it that management doesn't want to discourage engineers or stifle innovation, and they know they don't have a good handle on what will be successful and what won't, but keeping around zombie projects gives engineers false hope. The "throw mud at the wall and see what sticks" style of project management can be soul-crushing for talented junior people managing small projects, unless they're properly supported and really get proper credit for doing a very good job engineering something that fails for non-engineering reasons.
      - 6y ago
- theandrewbailey 6y ago
  I'd expect that their own videochat solution changes every year or so.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tibbydudeza 6y ago
    Yet another crappy one.
- jedberg 6y ago
  What do you use when Hangouts is down to discuss fixing Hangouts? :)
  - basch 6y ago
    Duo https://duo.google.com/about/ https://duo.google.com/about/
    - brian_herman__ 6y ago
      What do you use when duo/hangouts/meet is down?
      - vkou 6y ago
        E-mail.
  - r00fus 6y ago
    Its not like Google doesn't have a half-dozen other chat services...
  - Itaxpica 6y ago
    Standard practice for Google SREs in any serious outage is to communicate via internally-hosted IRC, since it has a minimum amount of dependencies outside of itself
  - kazinator 6y ago
    Perhaps some internal Hangouts deployment that uses the last known stable version.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
  Googlers don't use Zoom for company work. It was banned as in it can no longer be installed on corp laptops.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    Right but it's also astonishing that was allowed before. If it's not needed for work why would it be installed? Why would any non-work software be allowed on corp laptops?
    - shaftway 6y ago
      Because sometimes there are contractors, or consultants, or vendors, or partners you work with that for one reason or another can't use internal options.
    - Jare 6y ago
      Spotify is not negotiable tbh.
    - rafi_kamal 6y ago
      Google allows personal software to be installed in a corp laptop, subject to restrictions and limitations like this. It's not encouraged, though, and if something happens because you installed a third party software then it's your responsibility.
    - hellomyguys 6y ago
      Don't think it's too uncommon to be able to install Spotify on a work computer.
    - x0x0 6y ago
      We used Zoom during sales into Google. Therefore, our prospect had to install Zoom.
    - jedieaston 6y ago
      Because then you don't impede people who might need a new widget installed because everyone and their mother in IT needs to try it and test it before you can use it. Especially at Google scale, where the BeyondCorp system described in their papers could automatically see when an endpoint was doing something naughty, block the user from accessing corporate resources, and give the user information on how to fix it, instead of blocking them from installing anything (even if what they want is perfectly harmless).
- brandmeyer 6y ago
  Working with vendors who don't use G Suite for whatever reason.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  You need to be able to test the competition. A former head of IE used Netscape as his principal browser to stay informed of how it worked.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    Obsess over your competitors, not your customers!(?)
- floren 6y ago
  As someone who uses Google Meets daily, dogfood is the right word.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Really? I've started using it more and more recently and it seems pretty good. Dependent on good Internet connectivity like anything else but otherwise it seems straightforward and streamlined--which IMO describes Gsuite in general.
  - bronson 6y ago
    Same, for kid's school. It's awful. Feels abandoned.
  - lima 6y ago
    What's wrong with it? We're GSuite customers and I spend at least an hour in Meet each day with zero issues :)
    - floren 6y ago
      The screensharing is truly atrocious. Any window over, say, 1280x720 looks like total garbage on the other end. Aliased to hell, unreadable text, "ghosts" when you scroll.
      - lima 6y ago
        This is true. We don't use that feature for this reason.
- Thristle 6y ago
  It's google, so probably they have at least 3 and one of them will be deprecated every year
  - adwww 6y ago
    Duo, Meets and Hangouts... off the top of my head. With various levels of being merged or not.
    - faizshah 6y ago
      Anyone remember Google Allo? I think it had video? If they made it a discord kind of thing it might have worked but instead they chose to compete with their own products.
      - Shank 6y ago
        Allo didn't have video, that was Duo's job. Hangouts Chat is their Slack/Discord competitor, and Hangouts Classic is the version that everyone has in Gmail. Hangouts Meet is their Zoom competitor. Both Hangouts Classic and Meet can video call, I believe. Chat piggybacks off of Meet. Hangouts Chat and Classic are named the same but are two different products.
- amf12 6y ago
  Some employees had it installed on corp devices, maybe to connect with their friends and families. Google has banned even installing that app on corp devices. Nobody used it for corp work.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    Corporate devices should be for work. Especially if you're sheltering-in-place anyway and you're not even physically at the office.
    - _delirium 6y ago
      It's surprisingly common for people not to own a non-work computer other than a phone/tablet, especially now that prevalence of desktop computers is declining. Some people do still have a home desktop, or a separate personal laptop, but a lot of people I know don't. Or they might have one but it's a shared family computer that's mostly used by the kids, while parents use their work laptops.
      - wolco 6y ago
        If you ever owned a desktop chance are you have one now. A lot of people skipped them and went straight to an iphone.
        kyuudou 6y ago
        and if it gets compromised, who's liable and how for what
      - azurezyq 6y ago
        Not surprising at all. I'm also among them. Reasons are: 1. performant laptops are expensive. 2. If not for work, most of the time you don't need it.
        thekyle 6y ago
        Do you use your work machine for side projects? If so who owns the IP?
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > What's surprising to me is that it was allowed before. > They have had their own videochat solution for years, so I would expect the usual "eat your own dogfood" approach. If an engineer from Microsoft has to speak to an engineer from Google, and you think they should both be dog-fooding their own video application... how do you see that working? Just both dig their feet in and never talk to each other? Seems silly to me. One or both are going to have to install a video application that isn't their own aren't they?
  - catalogia 6y ago
    > If an engineer from Microsoft has to speak to an engineer from Google, and you think they should both be dog-fooding their own video application... how do you see that working? They could use a telephone. (Yes, they still exist.) Edit for response: Neither Google nor Microsoft forbid their employees from using telephones, and neither would even consider it. The assumption that they'd dogfood their own video chat platforms is obviously not a supposition that they'd ban telephones. Your comment frames the matter as though a third party video chat service is the only pragmatic option. Video chat was a fringe concept not very long ago, considered mostly to be in the realm of science fiction. Even today, inter-company telephone meetings are still common. Tech-fetishists working in this industry often seem to lose sight of the obvious time-tested solutions that still work today. I think a lot of people are earnestly forgetting that telephones still exist.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      > They could use a telephone. Well that's example of what I suggested they'd have to do - use someone else's service.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    Who sent the email scheduling the meeting?
- FriendlyNormie 6y ago
  I was once invited to the Google campus in Mountain View. The employee showing me around laughed in disbelief when I pulled out my Android phone to show her something. She said that she and all of her coworkers use iPhones.
- duxup 6y ago
  My understanding is that 'generally' for a lot of things Google lets teams decide what tools best fit their needs.
- rusty__ 6y ago
  They've probably run in to a similar issue to Apple whereby they've found their consumer-grade "phone auntie susan once a week" offerings don't stand up to the needs of everyone working remotely needing screen sharing, hot seating in and out all day long chats. We're using MS Teams and it seems to be pretty great for us (team of about 15), we use Skype to contact the remaining 20ish more junior staff who don't need Teams licenses just to be able to keep in touch with their work and keep the face to face communication going.
geggam 6y ago
I would assume Zoom is banned at many corporate offices. I can name two not published
benatkin 6y ago
I hope that Zoom will make it easier to use their web client because of this.
- _wldu 6y ago
  Yes. Google still allow that. The ban is on the app/installer.
- nimish 6y ago
  This is lifechanging, the zoom native app is a security nightmare and the web experience is deliberately crap.
  - benatkin 6y ago
    It would be wonderful. I don't want to be a Zoom hater, but they give me no choice. I'm uninstalling it now in hopes that next time I need to join a Zoom, the web experience will be improved.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
    This might explain why the people around me don't understand why it's so popular. None of us is reckless enough to install their application, so all we've seen is the web version.
softwaredoug 6y ago
God please don't make me use a non-zoom video conferencing tool! I have used about a dozen over the years in my role as a consultant, and Zoom has been by far the most reliable. I’m hopeful lots of good can come from the scrutiny, but please Zoom get your act together so I don’t have to use some other buggy thing that doesn’t actually work.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- softwaredoug 6y ago
  I knew I would get downvoted. But folks seriously don’t remember the pain before Zoom. And the current pain anytime we have to use a GoToMeeting, Google Meet, Webex or other tool that barely functions. Human interaction that actually works right now is so important. And I simply have a hard time trusting another product to actually do the call reliably
  - karatestomp 6y ago
    I'd second that. It's the first tool I've used that felt like more than just a resolution upgrade from what we had back in like 2002(!).
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    No idea what kind of unreliable networks people get to use, but WebEx has been quite good during the last 10 years.
    - falcolas 6y ago
      So has Google Meet and Hangouts. So was Skype, when I used it about 5 years ago. Perhaps I'm just used to them as a remote worker, but they were never all that janky to begin with. Or, rather, more janky than the other tools available at the time.
      - tialaramex 6y ago
epa 6y ago
Hangouts is not that bad
- franze 6y ago
  Yeah, it's working, sometimes for most of the participants. Than turns your computer into a toaster before it clogs it completely.
  - lindgrenj6 6y ago
    Agreed. This is my biggest complaint with it, the functionality is amazing but if you're on any sort of laptop the poor thing will melt halfway through a meeting.
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    > Than turns your computer into a toaster That kinda applies to any modern client. H.323 and SIP are ok, but webrtc is brutal.
- apl002 6y ago
  hangouts isn't bad at all. Dumb product decision to only be able to see 4 people at once tho. Probably biggest reason people are on Zoom and not hangouts right now
  - lindgrenj6 6y ago
    https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-meet-grid-view/bjkegbgpfgpikgkfidhcihhiflbjgfic https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-meet-grid-v... Since finding this I find hangouts meet much more tolerable!
  - andreygrehov 6y ago
    There is a Chrome plugin to solve this problem - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-meet-grid-view/bjkegbgpfgpikgkfidhcihhiflbjgfic?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-meet-grid-v...
- 6y ago
andreygrehov 6y ago
How do people feel about BlueJeans?
- bobongo 6y ago
  They are banned at my work. We are told to wear trousers.
  - downerending 6y ago
    https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-10-08 https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-10-08
- nixpulvis 6y ago
  From a usability perspective, it worked decently for me for about a week, then stopped working (dying upon opening) for about a week. Now it seems to work again. This is on the Linux (X11) client.
- mgfist 6y ago
  Used to use it at my company. It didn't scale well with many people. We switched to zoom a while back and it's been much much better.
- gammarator 6y ago
  Not nearly as good.
- pmlnr 6y ago
  Have been our work official one for nearly 7 years. Works, and has h.323, sip, phone, webrtc. That said, it's very simple, wit just about minimal features.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Use it. It's "OK." It's integrated with room systems. Use primetime for bigger broadcast-style meetings. However, I've switched to Google Meet for when I set up meetings, in part because it's better integrated with Google Calendar so it's just easier (fewer steps). I'm not sure one is necessarily better than the other once you're in the call but I prefer Meet for the Calendar integration.
chvid 6y ago
Is there any technical merit to this ban? Why would forcing use of web version mitigate any concerns? (The concerns I have heard are lack of proper end-to-end encryption, servers in China and the possibility to join chatrooms by guessing a name (zoom-bombing)).
- mulmen 6y ago
  Seems perfectly sensible to ban all software that is not pre-approved by IT, InfoSec and Legal. You can't safely assume all your employees are properly assessing the risks unless that is their actual job. If you only allow what you know then you can reason about your risk.
  - chvid 6y ago
    This reads like it is specifically targeting zoom.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - closeparen 6y ago
    Google’s reputation as an employer stems in large part from rejecting that belief, and more generally the enterprise bureaucratic culture it lives in. Engineers aren’t clamoring to get into the kinds of companies where IT needs to pre-approve software for their workstations.
    - thelean12 6y ago
      You might be disappointed to know that native applications need pre-approval in most cases. There's a whitelist. Of course, after years and years and hundreds of thousands of engineers, the whitelist is pretty robust. I don't know for sure, but I bet Zoom has been on that whitelist, and "banning" is removing it from that whitelist.
      - 6y ago
blntechie 6y ago
Same in my org. Employees cannot setup Zoom meetings but can join meetings set by others from outside the org but only via browser. Zoom apps are banned and all installed apps in managed devices will be removed by IT.
hacker_newz 6y ago
I interviewed at Google a while back for an SRE position working with the Hangouts team. My first interview was in another office and the audio in Hangouts session would not start. We ending up having to move on to the next interview. I'm not surprised even Google employees don't use it.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  There was a running joke (out of frustration, really) back when I was at Google (2013) that Hangouts was happily adding hundreds of new emoji, yet did not consider "reliable message delivery" to be a key feature. Some of this is consumer vs. enterprise tension, though. Emoji demo really well on an initial product tour; reliability is one of those key features that's really hard to get people excited about, but which people hate to find lacking.
- cameronbrown 6y ago
  > I'm not surprised even Google employees don't use it. I wouldn't go that far - there's something like 250k hangout meetings per day at Google[0] and that was before Covid. [0] https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/how-google-went-all-video-meetings-and-you-can-too/ https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/how-google-went-all... (2017)
  - sah2ed 6y ago
    Relevant text from your link: "Nearly a decade has passed since we built the first prototype. Face-to-face collaboration is ingrained in Google’s DNA now—more than 16,500 meetings rooms are VC-equipped at Google and our employees join Hangouts 240,000 times per day!"
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  Hangouts Meet actually works very well overall. I work at Google and almost never have problems with it. Hangouts Chat, on the other hand...well okay, it seems reliable enough, doesn't have that problem that old Hangouts did. Comparing the UX to Discord just makes me sad though.
psanford 6y ago
Zoom has a not very well published chrome app (intended for chromebook users). You can install it in normal chrome and it gives you a much better experience than the web version without all the issues of the desktop app. I trust zoom a lot more when it is running inside a chrome sandbox than as a native app.
- eagsalazar2 6y ago
  I use this because I have a pixelbook and it works pretty well except for two issues: (1) minor issue that you have to click the "leave meeting" button, you can't just close the window or else it strangely relaunches and (2) major issue is that you can't change your video background which is a killer feature IMO.
  - snazz 6y ago
    I haven't been able to find a way to change my video background on the Linux client either. The image recognition software must be difficult to reliably implement for their lower-value platforms (as in, it would cost them too much to get it working well relative to the number of users).
    - xur17 6y ago
      You have to be signed in to use it.
    - ereyes01 6y ago
      Works for me on Linux, after signing in (I'm using a paid plan).
- bsimpson 6y ago
  I've found the same. Link is https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zoom/hmbjbjdpkobdjplfobhljndfdfdipjhg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zoom/hmbjbjdpkobdj... I haven't audited the files yet to see what technology they use (e.g. why is the web experience shit, but the Chrome App is OK), but I certainly trust Zoom a lot more in a sandbox.
crazygringo 6y ago
I mean, Google bans MS Office from employees' computers as well (with special-case exceptions), so they use Docs instead. Since Google has Meet (Hangouts), this isn't really surprising. It mainly sucks for when an employee (especially in sales) has a call with a client that uses Zoom and can't use Meet, because then you're forced to dial in, which just puts you at a disadvantage when everyone can see everyone's face except yours. Edit: per comments, people can still use the browser version of Zoom, so doesn't seem that bad.
- gnicholas 6y ago
  > because then you're forced to dial in, which just puts you at a disadvantage when everyone can see everyone's face except yours. Can't they just participate in a call from the browser? I thought Google only banned the application/app, not usage of the service altogether.
  - StudentStuff 6y ago
    The browser version of Zoom seems to require a free account be created, and it was audio only in Chromium, I could not get it to use my camera. Zoom refused to work in Firefox. Jitsi and Google Meet seem to work in both browsers, without requiring me to log in.
    - reubenmorais 6y ago
      It's improved a bit, and actually works fine in Firefox Nightly right now, but you have to craft the web client URL directly. The UI will try its very best to make you download the client.
      - netsharc 6y ago
        Seen somewhere else: when you get to the web page that launches the app, don't allow that launch, hit (IIRC) "Retry", still don't allow it, and the page should say "Having trouble?" offer a link to the web version. Or better yet, don't use Zoom...
QUFB 6y ago
Some thoughts: 1. Google's threat model may not be your threat model, and it definitely isn't the threat model of my daughter's school. A corporation like Google may be concerned using native applications, written in unsafe languages, written by developers from other corporations in China. That said, Zoom isn't wrong for everyone. 2. Google is motivated to push their own solution for obvious reasons. 3. Tavis, or others, at Project Zero might know some things, maybe we'll find out.
- jMyles 6y ago
  > Google's threat model may not be your threat model, and it definitely isn't the threat model of my daughter's school. A corporation like Google may be concerned using native applications, written in unsafe languages, written by developers from other corporations in China. That said, Zoom isn't wrong for everyone. Google's threat model surely differs in some way from a school, but the specific threats you named seem like threats equally applicable to the surfaces identifiable in the threat model of a school.
  - CameronNemo 6y ago
    No they are not. A business can have trade information they want to protect. A school would be more focused on individual privacy and safety. These threat models are quite different.
  - Mvandenbergh 6y ago
    The threat model for a school is kids/others disrupting sessions and creepers using access to gawp at (or communicate with kids). Since the Chinese government is unlikely to feel the need to compel Zoom to do that, the fact that they have all the keys centrally stored is not a problem. Google's threat model actually does include state level attack (And specifically by China) to steal IP or access confidential user data.
    - jMyles 6y ago
      > The threat model for a school is kids/others disrupting sessions and creepers using access to gawp at (or communicate with kids). Not if the school actually cares about the future of its students. From a blog post[0] we published at NuCypher a while back: > If we fail to take action now, we risk a world in which unsavory actors - domestic and foreign - have built rich, comprehensive profiles for every one of our children, following the trajectories of their education, home life, consumer habits, health, and on and on. These profiles will then be used to manipulate their behavior not only as consumers, but as voters and participants in all those corners of society which, in order for freedom and justice to prevail, require instead that these kids mature into functional, free-thinking adults. 0: https://blog.nucypher.com/todays-kids-need-end-to-end-encryption/ https://blog.nucypher.com/todays-kids-need-end-to-end-encryp...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
arrty88 6y ago
Zoom's issues are fixable... unlike a hardware defect like the macbook pro keyboard and the iphone antenna that didn't work well... Zoom is clearly better than the alternatives and has my 80 year old uncle talking about it. This too shall pass.
- eagsalazar2 6y ago
  If the issue are innocent technical screw ups, they have deep deficiencies in their dev org that are not easy to fix and could take years. If the issues are ethical or political, they aren't ever going to get fixed.
- addison-lee 6y ago
  Gotta somehow bash Apple!
- gwd 6y ago
  I uninstalled zoom and refused to use it after they did that skanky "start up a local webserver to avoid Safari's user-safety questions". Then everyone was using Zoom, so I gave them another chance and installed the native client. Turns out the native client install also contains skanky hacks to avoid user-safety questions. So I uninstalled it again, and now my company has told us all not to use the native app. Once may have been an honest mistake. Twice (and now more) is definitely a culture problem that's not going to be fixed without massive turnover.
- jplayer01 6y ago
  I don’t understand why people are so eager to trust this company with sensitive business information. They’re totally untrustworthy after what they’ve done. It doesn’t matter what they pretend they’re fixing. Their word is worthless. What is it with you people blindly believing whatever garbage comes out of these companies?
jefftk 6y ago
"Employees who have been using Zoom to stay in touch with family and friends can continue to do so through a web browser or via mobile." (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
- unihb 6y ago
  Yeah this should be higher. Also work @ G, and it's just the desktop version of the app that's been disallowed. We can still run the Zoom web app on corp machines.
  - klenwell 6y ago
    One thing that puts me off about Zoom is the way it tries to push you into downloading the desktop app when the web app should be fine and is what I prefer. It uses shitty dark patterns that require two or three clicks and at one point, if I'm not mistaken, waiting for a link to appear after a delay. In my most recent experience with it, it led to a zip file being automatically downloaded to my computer. This when I already have had plenty of previous experience with the web app and was deliberately trying to reach to the web page for a meeting for which I had been sent a URL. Slack does similar things but isn't quite so aggressive about it.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      > One thing that puts me off about Zoom is the way it tries to push you into downloading the desktop app when the web app should be fine and is what I prefer. I'm pretty sure they do that because their web app is garbage, and they know people will get a much better experience in the native app. Notably, Zoom's native app is truly native; it's not some electron wrapper like Slack or Teams. I don't think it's a coincidence that Zoom is both (A) the only major solution that seem to work consistently with large numbers of participants, and (B) the only one not using WebRTC.
      - shbooms 6y ago
        > and they know people will get a much better experience in the native app. not if I'm a user who is actively trying to not install the native app. for me, and likely many others, security and privacy trump performance benchmarks and UI/UX all day, every day.
willart4food 6y ago
LOL, of course!
eagsalazar2 6y ago
Can someone with more experience using Jitsi comment on benefits/limitations for use at work? We typically have 2-5 people on calls but occasionally up to 20. I tried it a bit with 1-1 calls and it was pretty great but I'm assuming there are some limitations vs Zoom to be aware of.
- xenonite 6y ago
  One important thing until it is fixed: Firefox doesn’t work at the moment, tearing everyone’s performance down. Hence use Chrome/Edge/Opera/Vivaldi.
- gwd 6y ago
  At work, our team of 4 has been using it for several weeks too, and it's been just fine. Our church group has been using it with 12-ish participants once a week for several weeks now. There are individuals who consistently have problems, but since it's always the same people, I tend to think they'd have similar issues with Zoom. (Zoom meetings with different sets of people have had similar sorts of issues.) People are saying that Firefox "technically works" but that due to limitations in the spec, one person in your conference using FF causes everyone else's cpu to go through the roof. (Can't speak authoritatively on that, but FF is labeled as not fully supported.) Fundamentally, I think it probably comes down to the business model. The company that runs meet.jit.si, 8x8, doesn't make money on that service; they make money selling some large integrated business solution. Running the free service seems to be less of a loss leader than a massive pool of beta testers. So they aren't pushing it as hard as Zoom, where (at least originally) the free version was limited to 40 minutes to directly up-sell you to the paid version. Two other things about Zoom: 1. Easy to get the client installed, and once it's installed, it's easy to use. Of course, they consistently do that by working around the protections your OS has in place by dodgy methods. 2. It seems to work well in China. Not sure how Jitsi fares in that respect. EDIT: Some cool things about Jitsi: 1. NO INSTALL AT ALL for desktops. People just click the link and bam, you're in a meeting. 2. Rooms are created when a URL is visited. So if you want so split into two groups, half of you can just add "2" to the URL, and bam -- group is split in two. Ready to join back together? Delete the '2' and you're back together again. Anyway, all that to say -- I think Jitsi is definitely worth a try. Tell people to use something Chromium-based until they've fixed the issue with FF (I use Brave) and give it a shot.
mfer 6y ago
You can make joining via the web an option. No app install required. Details at https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115005666383-Show-a-Join-from-your-browser-Link https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115005666383-Show-... Note, works best in Chrome (likely Chromium) based on what the docs say.
ronreiter 6y ago
Smells like banning due to Google competing directly with Zoom.
codazoda 6y ago
I put together instructions for creating an install-free dock icon for Zoom. Nothing ground breaking here, I just combined several sets of instructions I found useful. https://blog.joeldare.com/creating-an-install-free-dock-icon-for-zoom-on-mac/ https://blog.joeldare.com/creating-an-install-free-dock-icon... Zoom stopped the browser login from working for a few days, but it seems to be back working now.
jasonv 6y ago
If the tech community can't prioritize security over features, it's pretty rich for same community to declare that the "average joe" doesn't care about security.
- walrus01 6y ago
  The same "tech community" that's been drinking the "move fast and break things" and "be disruptive in your market segment" koolaid for 15-20 years? Unsurprised.
  - jasonv 6y ago
    I was a bit unclear in my original post. I meant this tech community here.. lots of "don't make me use something else" posts in a community of people who ostensibly are tech oriented. But your point stands either way. I'm just surprised at the pass being given to Zoom given the blitheness of their gaffes.
coleifer 6y ago
I don't like zoom either, but what exactly made them the HN punching bag of the month? Ad/surveillance giants like Google or FB are typically spoken of with notes of reverence and awe on here. Zoom gets lit-up for sending data to FB, but FB gets a pass? I don't know I just can't get into the mood. extinguishes torch in moat.
- fosk 6y ago
  The stock price.
- gipp 6y ago
  > Ad/surveillance giants like Google or FB are typically spoken of with notes of reverence and awe on here. Uh. Are we reading different websites? This is the most vocally anti-everything-FAANG community I've seen on the Internet, since about 2017 or so. Except Apple, mostly.
  - jakear 6y ago
    Netflix also seems to be acceptable.
    - gipp 6y ago
      Yeah, that's true, although we all know they're just in there so the acronym works.
    - gpm 6y ago
      I'll just chime in that Apple and Netflix the FAANG companies I dislike the most, for balance ;)
    - lonesword 6y ago
      Microsoft too seems to be getting less hate than Google/Facebook. EDIT: Ok MS is not FAANG.
- ilikehurdles 6y ago
  And on the FB note, let's clear that up -- FB ships a mandatory phone-home analytics feature on their mobile SDKs used to enable the "sign in with facebook button". This sends your users' data over to their servers _even when_ those users do not use a Facebook social sign-on. Zoom removed that SDK within a day of finding out this was happening, yet it continues to be plastered around the web as if its an ongoing data collection; meanwhile, crickets at the fact that half the apps on our phones have this Facebook spyware.
monkeydust 6y ago
I work at a large corp, our own in house video conf went down for a few hours. Our backup conference system also tied to same system of course went down. Rather than postpone meetings we took them on zoom. It just works and I hope they get over this security issue and start ramping up their feature set.
mancerayder 6y ago
I just wish Slack didn't use so much firepower on my machine, it seems to make my Macbook pro 2015's fan go wild and the CPU to spike, and it seems to "rot" over time, and get worse.
jmcnulty 6y ago
Zoom have responded very quickly to the complaints levelled against them. Their problems are more PR than techinical now.
- TwoBit 6y ago
  Yeah, but allowing China access to meetings seems so bone-headed that I question what other problems may be lurking.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mikekij 6y ago
I'm seeing references to Zoom "getting over these security issues". Some of the issues (e.g. not requiring passwords) can be relatively easily addressed. Others, like transmitting symmetric encryption keys over the wire and storing them in databases in China, are more fundamental to Zoom's corporate strategy. I doubt Zoom would change the most jarring of their security gaffes in a way that would satisfy security-focused companies like Google.
- chelovek89 6y ago
  It seems to me Zoom follows the "dont ask for permission, ask for forgiveness later" model. You don't accidentally send data to China. Zero excuse.
  - mikekij 6y ago
    Not sure why this is getting downvoted. I totally agree.
antonyh 6y ago
Google banning it is almost an endorsement for me. Anything the Chocolate Factory hates can't be all that evil. Joking asides, this is a weak way to promote the fact they have a competing tool.
jariel 6y ago
A more existential question is why the Google and MSFT with 'All the King's Horses and All the King's Men' can't make a basic, reliable, video conf. I understand there are some business reasons here and there (MS wants people on Teams not Skype) but it doesn't matter. 'Basic Video' should be as common, robust and reliable as making a phone call.
- tytso 6y ago
  All of our meetings at Google are using GVC (aka Google Meet from gSuites), and while there are people who have reported problems (mostly in low bandwidth situations and/or using Firefox), my experience is that it is quite reliable. I've had video conferences from my Dad's Senior Center (obviously, pre-COVID-19) using a MiFi box, and there things were more reliable if I turned off my camera, but other than that, I've personally never had any problems using Google Meet from either a Linux box running ChromeOS, or a Chromebook. In fact, I've never had to worry about attending meetings remotely so much that I really can't speak to the reports of people complaining about Google Meet being unreliable.
dqpb 6y ago
That’s pretty embarrassing for google if their own employees prefer zoom over google hangouts.
- codemac 6y ago
  It's more the following workflow: - your friends set up a zoom happy hour - current personal laptop is fubar or super old/unsupported - you use work laptop, installing zoom As someone not in sales, I have never seen anyone try to use Zoom for actual work meetings.
neil_s 6y ago
(disclaimer: I work at El Goog) A number of companies have rightfully banned Zoom's native apps, given how insecure they are. I had previously uninstalled it when the news about the secret web server they install came out. Google is still allowing use of the web app, but the web app bizarrely doesn't support Grid/Gallery View, which is the main reason my friends/family wanted to use it. Hangouts Meet was optimized for work meetings where most people would be dialing in from high-bandwidth meeting rooms, not everyone individually dialing in from home, but hopefully now they've heard the loud feedback about the especial usefulness of Gallery View during quarantine times and will introduce the feature soon. For now I'm using the Chrome extension that enables this feature client-side using JS/CSS, and staying tf away from Zoom. With how little I used Zoom before quarantine, I don't understand the adoration for it (I found its UI confusing and quality similar to other tools), and I haven't been able to find any benchmarks comparing its video quality for people on less good internet connections (my home network is pretty strong).
- jacobsenscott 6y ago
  We switched from google hangouts to zoom a while ago because the quality "felt" better. We are a small distributed team where our internet connections run the range of fast to slow. We didn't track numbers or anything, but fewer dropouts, frozen videos, better sound quality, etc. Maybe we all just had better internet days each time we used zoom though. Never know. The UI is initially confusing, but so is the UI for every video chat app I've used. It seems to be the fad to have "clever" UI in video chats apps (controls that auto-hide, non-standard icons, low contrast, non standard control placement (use the standard toolbar luke!) etc. On top of that zoom has always "just worked". The "just worked" thing is now resulting in security woes, but still. Start a meeting, send link. Done. Online works, dial in works. Contrast with hangouts (dropped non-chrome browser support for at least a year). To this day we have users that can't use slack video for unknown reasons (app store slack doesn't work as well as slack installer slack or something). WebEx is some horror show that seems to constantly re-install itself for each meeting. You're lucky if you can get it going before the meeting is over. Where most apps stop at video chat and maybe poor quality screen sharing, zoom has a pretty deep enterprise feature set. Good webinar support, integration with SIP systems, SSO, recording etc.
BooneJS 6y ago
Is it not common for companies to control what apps are installed on corporate computers, and where company data is stored (cloud providers, etc)? I get the whole Zoom backlash, but this is taking a specific instance of company and app and harvesting clicks.
jbverschoor 6y ago
Chrome has similar installers etc
vondur 6y ago
It makes sense. Doesn’t hangouts work for this purpose?
patricklovesoj 6y ago
this is more incentive bias playing out. taking the opportunity to push google hangouts.
codesternews 6y ago
Why Zoom is making so many silly mistakes. They should take advantage of this situation instead they are blowing up. Every time they apologies or make statement trust has been lost.
nitrobeast 6y ago
I believe Google also bans non-Google file sharing tools like Dropbox or OneDrive from employee’s computers too.
mark_l_watson 6y ago
A question: I have avoided installing the native macOS Zoom client, but I use the iOS native app on my iPhone. Does the iOS app have the same vulnerabilities as the macOS native app? I searched in these comments for ‘iOS’ to see if someone already discussed this. Thanks.
skc 6y ago
Must be nice to be an upstart. You have a throng of tech savvy people to defend you at best and forgive you at worst. If this was a Microsoft/Google product it would be pilloried to death.
DeathArrow 6y ago
Google banning competition? Totally unexpected.
zwaps 6y ago
Other large technology companies that manufacture stuff but are not Chinese have made the same decision. I write like this because I am not sure what I can disclose.
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Ban is not long term. You need a better solution. Not sure it is from google. But not from china or associated with china is important.
baby 6y ago
Spoiler alert: Google has paid for a third party assessment of zoom, the pentest came back with catastrophic results
- tilolebo 6y ago
  Source? The article doesn't mention that.
sgt 6y ago
I prefer Zoom primarily because of two things: 1. We used google meet a lot, but it's very CPU intense and also does not run in Safari so I have to start Chrome to run it 2. It's a better UI and Video Conf experience, hands down. I realize that it has issues but nothing truly major as far as I can see.
hyko 6y ago
It doesn’t matter what your personal threat model is: these videoconferencing apps have become de facto critical infrastructure for many countries almost overnight with no scrutiny and a joke security posture, because the IRL channels they replace are unavailable. This has dire implications for all of us, both in terms of espionage and the potential for massive disruption. Threat modelling is fine for your home security, but it is now dangerously anachronistic when evaluating anything connected to the internet. One solution would be to at least educate people about the need for a security mindset on a massive scale, or at worst craft some laws to force it. I’m sure there are many people who would accept the risks of drink driving: we don’t let them.

882 points by Lagogarda 6y ago

What's surprising to me is that it was allowed before. They have had their own videochat solution for years, so I would expect the usual "eat your own dogfood" approach.

lowdose 6y ago
But then Alphabet risks that Hangout could become as good as Zoom & Slack combined. The golden rule is no Betabets by Alphabet.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  It's frustrating because Google Hangouts used to be great, and then Google purposefully started cannibalizing their own platform. I really want to know what goes on within Product Management at Google, because looking from the outside in I cannot imagine anything other than sheer incompetence.
  - jensvdh 6y ago
    The only way to get promoted at Google is to launch new things.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    The rumors from inside Google is that there's no way to get credit/be rewarded as an employee simply for maintaining an existing solution, or even for fixing obvious breakage. Every incentive is tilted towards starting new projects, often multiple projects in the same domain directly competing with one another. There are some positives to this of course, but clearly it's being overdone.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - cosmodisk 6y ago
      But still...As a prod manager,you aren't coming up with new projects every week, your entire job is to ensure the roadmap is decent and not taking the product into the graveyard. The company has so many people and yet can't produce a single product with a decent UX.
  - KMag 6y ago
    I worked at Google 2006-2010, and from where I sat, Google's biggest problems were (1) rapid erosion of corporate culture over that time frame and (2) weak project management. A friend was managing a project on a shoestring budget. Upper management (C-suite) had reviewed the idea and green-lit it. He had been told Larry and Sergei in particular had voiced support. He got it done ahead of schedule and under budget by managing a stream of off-cycle interns. The week it was scheduled to go live, someone in middle management killed it. My friend and his team got zero credit for a job very well done, a big setback for him. He and I were working on an internal tool for datacenter management as a 20% project when I left. I asked him about it later, and our 20% project met a similar fate: enthusiastic support from management, including giving us some resources, all the way through completion, followed by cancellation shortly after completion. My friend left less than a year later. Another friend started a modest improvement to chat as a 20% project, which later got expanded to a full-time project for several engineers. I forget the external name, but the internal code name was "Taco Town" after the SnL skit. Walkabout / Wave was a skunkworks project that used its separate repository, which was very rare at Google. People knew something mysterious was going on down in Australia, but we really had no idea what it was, other than the Google Maps guys were running it and it was named "Walkabout". When Walkabout / Wave came out of skunkworks mode shortly before external launch, the Taco Town team realized they needed to launch very soon or their project would never launch because its functionality was subsumed by Walkabout / Wave. Taco Town rushed its launch, was a bit buggy and had some scalability issues that they knew about, but expected to be able to improve shortly after launch. I think Taco Town's botched launch a few weeks before Walkabout/Wave contributed to initial confusion around Wave and some of Taco Town's problems colored perceptions of Wave's launch. Shortly after I left, Google publicly announced they'd be putting "more wood behind fewer arrows", which was a step in the right direction. I get it that management doesn't want to discourage engineers or stifle innovation, and they know they don't have a good handle on what will be successful and what won't, but keeping around zombie projects gives engineers false hope. The "throw mud at the wall and see what sticks" style of project management can be soul-crushing for talented junior people managing small projects, unless they're properly supported and really get proper credit for doing a very good job engineering something that fails for non-engineering reasons.
    - 6y ago
theandrewbailey 6y ago
I'd expect that their own videochat solution changes every year or so.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tibbydudeza 6y ago
  Yet another crappy one.
jedberg 6y ago
What do you use when Hangouts is down to discuss fixing Hangouts? :)
- basch 6y ago
  Duo https://duo.google.com/about/ https://duo.google.com/about/
  - brian_herman__ 6y ago
    What do you use when duo/hangouts/meet is down?
    - vkou 6y ago
      E-mail.
- r00fus 6y ago
  Its not like Google doesn't have a half-dozen other chat services...
- Itaxpica 6y ago
  Standard practice for Google SREs in any serious outage is to communicate via internally-hosted IRC, since it has a minimum amount of dependencies outside of itself
- kazinator 6y ago
  Perhaps some internal Hangouts deployment that uses the last known stable version.
kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
Googlers don't use Zoom for company work. It was banned as in it can no longer be installed on corp laptops.
- mulmen 6y ago
  Right but it's also astonishing that was allowed before. If it's not needed for work why would it be installed? Why would any non-work software be allowed on corp laptops?
  - shaftway 6y ago
    Because sometimes there are contractors, or consultants, or vendors, or partners you work with that for one reason or another can't use internal options.
  - Jare 6y ago
    Spotify is not negotiable tbh.
  - rafi_kamal 6y ago
    Google allows personal software to be installed in a corp laptop, subject to restrictions and limitations like this. It's not encouraged, though, and if something happens because you installed a third party software then it's your responsibility.
  - hellomyguys 6y ago
    Don't think it's too uncommon to be able to install Spotify on a work computer.
  - x0x0 6y ago
    We used Zoom during sales into Google. Therefore, our prospect had to install Zoom.
  - jedieaston 6y ago
    Because then you don't impede people who might need a new widget installed because everyone and their mother in IT needs to try it and test it before you can use it. Especially at Google scale, where the BeyondCorp system described in their papers could automatically see when an endpoint was doing something naughty, block the user from accessing corporate resources, and give the user information on how to fix it, instead of blocking them from installing anything (even if what they want is perfectly harmless).
brandmeyer 6y ago
Working with vendors who don't use G Suite for whatever reason.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
You need to be able to test the competition. A former head of IE used Netscape as his principal browser to stay informed of how it worked.
- mulmen 6y ago
  Obsess over your competitors, not your customers!(?)
floren 6y ago
As someone who uses Google Meets daily, dogfood is the right word.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Really? I've started using it more and more recently and it seems pretty good. Dependent on good Internet connectivity like anything else but otherwise it seems straightforward and streamlined--which IMO describes Gsuite in general.
- bronson 6y ago
  Same, for kid's school. It's awful. Feels abandoned.
- lima 6y ago
  What's wrong with it? We're GSuite customers and I spend at least an hour in Meet each day with zero issues :)
  - floren 6y ago
    The screensharing is truly atrocious. Any window over, say, 1280x720 looks like total garbage on the other end. Aliased to hell, unreadable text, "ghosts" when you scroll.
    - lima 6y ago
      This is true. We don't use that feature for this reason.
Thristle 6y ago
It's google, so probably they have at least 3 and one of them will be deprecated every year
- adwww 6y ago
  Duo, Meets and Hangouts... off the top of my head. With various levels of being merged or not.
  - faizshah 6y ago
    Anyone remember Google Allo? I think it had video? If they made it a discord kind of thing it might have worked but instead they chose to compete with their own products.
    - Shank 6y ago
      Allo didn't have video, that was Duo's job. Hangouts Chat is their Slack/Discord competitor, and Hangouts Classic is the version that everyone has in Gmail. Hangouts Meet is their Zoom competitor. Both Hangouts Classic and Meet can video call, I believe. Chat piggybacks off of Meet. Hangouts Chat and Classic are named the same but are two different products.
amf12 6y ago
Some employees had it installed on corp devices, maybe to connect with their friends and families. Google has banned even installing that app on corp devices. Nobody used it for corp work.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Corporate devices should be for work. Especially if you're sheltering-in-place anyway and you're not even physically at the office.
  - _delirium 6y ago
    It's surprisingly common for people not to own a non-work computer other than a phone/tablet, especially now that prevalence of desktop computers is declining. Some people do still have a home desktop, or a separate personal laptop, but a lot of people I know don't. Or they might have one but it's a shared family computer that's mostly used by the kids, while parents use their work laptops.
    - wolco 6y ago
      If you ever owned a desktop chance are you have one now. A lot of people skipped them and went straight to an iphone.
      - kyuudou 6y ago
        and if it gets compromised, who's liable and how for what
    - azurezyq 6y ago
      Not surprising at all. I'm also among them. Reasons are: 1. performant laptops are expensive. 2. If not for work, most of the time you don't need it.
      - thekyle 6y ago
        Do you use your work machine for side projects? If so who owns the IP?
chrisseaton 6y ago
> What's surprising to me is that it was allowed before. > They have had their own videochat solution for years, so I would expect the usual "eat your own dogfood" approach. If an engineer from Microsoft has to speak to an engineer from Google, and you think they should both be dog-fooding their own video application... how do you see that working? Just both dig their feet in and never talk to each other? Seems silly to me. One or both are going to have to install a video application that isn't their own aren't they?
- catalogia 6y ago
  > If an engineer from Microsoft has to speak to an engineer from Google, and you think they should both be dog-fooding their own video application... how do you see that working? They could use a telephone. (Yes, they still exist.) Edit for response: Neither Google nor Microsoft forbid their employees from using telephones, and neither would even consider it. The assumption that they'd dogfood their own video chat platforms is obviously not a supposition that they'd ban telephones. Your comment frames the matter as though a third party video chat service is the only pragmatic option. Video chat was a fringe concept not very long ago, considered mostly to be in the realm of science fiction. Even today, inter-company telephone meetings are still common. Tech-fetishists working in this industry often seem to lose sight of the obvious time-tested solutions that still work today. I think a lot of people are earnestly forgetting that telephones still exist.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > They could use a telephone. Well that's example of what I suggested they'd have to do - use someone else's service.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  Who sent the email scheduling the meeting?
FriendlyNormie 6y ago
I was once invited to the Google campus in Mountain View. The employee showing me around laughed in disbelief when I pulled out my Android phone to show her something. She said that she and all of her coworkers use iPhones.
duxup 6y ago
My understanding is that 'generally' for a lot of things Google lets teams decide what tools best fit their needs.
rusty__ 6y ago
They've probably run in to a similar issue to Apple whereby they've found their consumer-grade "phone auntie susan once a week" offerings don't stand up to the needs of everyone working remotely needing screen sharing, hot seating in and out all day long chats. We're using MS Teams and it seems to be pretty great for us (team of about 15), we use Skype to contact the remaining 20ish more junior staff who don't need Teams licenses just to be able to keep in touch with their work and keep the face to face communication going.

geggam 6y ago

I would assume Zoom is banned at many corporate offices. I can name two not published

benatkin 6y ago

I hope that Zoom will make it easier to use their web client because of this.

_wldu 6y ago
Yes. Google still allow that. The ban is on the app/installer.
nimish 6y ago
This is lifechanging, the zoom native app is a security nightmare and the web experience is deliberately crap.
- benatkin 6y ago
  It would be wonderful. I don't want to be a Zoom hater, but they give me no choice. I'm uninstalling it now in hopes that next time I need to join a Zoom, the web experience will be improved.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  This might explain why the people around me don't understand why it's so popular. None of us is reckless enough to install their application, so all we've seen is the web version.

softwaredoug 6y ago

God please don't make me use a non-zoom video conferencing tool! I have used about a dozen over the years in my role as a consultant, and Zoom has been by far the most reliable. I’m hopeful lots of good can come from the scrutiny, but please Zoom get your act together so I don’t have to use some other buggy thing that doesn’t actually work.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
softwaredoug 6y ago
I knew I would get downvoted. But folks seriously don’t remember the pain before Zoom. And the current pain anytime we have to use a GoToMeeting, Google Meet, Webex or other tool that barely functions. Human interaction that actually works right now is so important. And I simply have a hard time trusting another product to actually do the call reliably
- karatestomp 6y ago
  I'd second that. It's the first tool I've used that felt like more than just a resolution upgrade from what we had back in like 2002(!).
- pjmlp 6y ago
  No idea what kind of unreliable networks people get to use, but WebEx has been quite good during the last 10 years.
  - falcolas 6y ago
    So has Google Meet and Hangouts. So was Skype, when I used it about 5 years ago. Perhaps I'm just used to them as a remote worker, but they were never all that janky to begin with. Or, rather, more janky than the other tools available at the time.
    - tialaramex 6y ago

epa 6y ago

Hangouts is not that bad

franze 6y ago
Yeah, it's working, sometimes for most of the participants. Than turns your computer into a toaster before it clogs it completely.
- lindgrenj6 6y ago
  Agreed. This is my biggest complaint with it, the functionality is amazing but if you're on any sort of laptop the poor thing will melt halfway through a meeting.
- pmlnr 6y ago
  > Than turns your computer into a toaster That kinda applies to any modern client. H.323 and SIP are ok, but webrtc is brutal.
apl002 6y ago
hangouts isn't bad at all. Dumb product decision to only be able to see 4 people at once tho. Probably biggest reason people are on Zoom and not hangouts right now
- lindgrenj6 6y ago
  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-meet-grid-view/bjkegbgpfgpikgkfidhcihhiflbjgfic https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-meet-grid-v... Since finding this I find hangouts meet much more tolerable!
- andreygrehov 6y ago
  There is a Chrome plugin to solve this problem - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-meet-grid-view/bjkegbgpfgpikgkfidhcihhiflbjgfic?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-meet-grid-v...
6y ago

andreygrehov 6y ago

How do people feel about BlueJeans?

bobongo 6y ago
They are banned at my work. We are told to wear trousers.
- downerending 6y ago
  https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-10-08 https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-10-08
nixpulvis 6y ago
From a usability perspective, it worked decently for me for about a week, then stopped working (dying upon opening) for about a week. Now it seems to work again. This is on the Linux (X11) client.
mgfist 6y ago
Used to use it at my company. It didn't scale well with many people. We switched to zoom a while back and it's been much much better.
gammarator 6y ago
Not nearly as good.
pmlnr 6y ago
Have been our work official one for nearly 7 years. Works, and has h.323, sip, phone, webrtc. That said, it's very simple, wit just about minimal features.
ghaff 6y ago
Use it. It's "OK." It's integrated with room systems. Use primetime for bigger broadcast-style meetings. However, I've switched to Google Meet for when I set up meetings, in part because it's better integrated with Google Calendar so it's just easier (fewer steps). I'm not sure one is necessarily better than the other once you're in the call but I prefer Meet for the Calendar integration.

chvid 6y ago

Is there any technical merit to this ban? Why would forcing use of web version mitigate any concerns? (The concerns I have heard are lack of proper end-to-end encryption, servers in China and the possibility to join chatrooms by guessing a name (zoom-bombing)).

mulmen 6y ago
Seems perfectly sensible to ban all software that is not pre-approved by IT, InfoSec and Legal. You can't safely assume all your employees are properly assessing the risks unless that is their actual job. If you only allow what you know then you can reason about your risk.
- chvid 6y ago
  This reads like it is specifically targeting zoom.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- closeparen 6y ago
  Google’s reputation as an employer stems in large part from rejecting that belief, and more generally the enterprise bureaucratic culture it lives in. Engineers aren’t clamoring to get into the kinds of companies where IT needs to pre-approve software for their workstations.
  - thelean12 6y ago
    You might be disappointed to know that native applications need pre-approval in most cases. There's a whitelist. Of course, after years and years and hundreds of thousands of engineers, the whitelist is pretty robust. I don't know for sure, but I bet Zoom has been on that whitelist, and "banning" is removing it from that whitelist.
    - 6y ago

blntechie 6y ago

Same in my org. Employees cannot setup Zoom meetings but can join meetings set by others from outside the org but only via browser. Zoom apps are banned and all installed apps in managed devices will be removed by IT.

hacker_newz 6y ago

I interviewed at Google a while back for an SRE position working with the Hangouts team. My first interview was in another office and the audio in Hangouts session would not start. We ending up having to move on to the next interview. I'm not surprised even Google employees don't use it.

nostrademons 6y ago
There was a running joke (out of frustration, really) back when I was at Google (2013) that Hangouts was happily adding hundreds of new emoji, yet did not consider "reliable message delivery" to be a key feature. Some of this is consumer vs. enterprise tension, though. Emoji demo really well on an initial product tour; reliability is one of those key features that's really hard to get people excited about, but which people hate to find lacking.
cameronbrown 6y ago
> I'm not surprised even Google employees don't use it. I wouldn't go that far - there's something like 250k hangout meetings per day at Google[0] and that was before Covid. [0] https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/how-google-went-all-video-meetings-and-you-can-too/ https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/how-google-went-all... (2017)
- sah2ed 6y ago
  Relevant text from your link: "Nearly a decade has passed since we built the first prototype. Face-to-face collaboration is ingrained in Google’s DNA now—more than 16,500 meetings rooms are VC-equipped at Google and our employees join Hangouts 240,000 times per day!"
TulliusCicero 6y ago
Hangouts Meet actually works very well overall. I work at Google and almost never have problems with it. Hangouts Chat, on the other hand...well okay, it seems reliable enough, doesn't have that problem that old Hangouts did. Comparing the UX to Discord just makes me sad though.

psanford 6y ago

Zoom has a not very well published chrome app (intended for chromebook users). You can install it in normal chrome and it gives you a much better experience than the web version without all the issues of the desktop app. I trust zoom a lot more when it is running inside a chrome sandbox than as a native app.

eagsalazar2 6y ago
I use this because I have a pixelbook and it works pretty well except for two issues: (1) minor issue that you have to click the "leave meeting" button, you can't just close the window or else it strangely relaunches and (2) major issue is that you can't change your video background which is a killer feature IMO.
- snazz 6y ago
  I haven't been able to find a way to change my video background on the Linux client either. The image recognition software must be difficult to reliably implement for their lower-value platforms (as in, it would cost them too much to get it working well relative to the number of users).
  - xur17 6y ago
    You have to be signed in to use it.
  - ereyes01 6y ago
    Works for me on Linux, after signing in (I'm using a paid plan).
bsimpson 6y ago
I've found the same. Link is https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zoom/hmbjbjdpkobdjplfobhljndfdfdipjhg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zoom/hmbjbjdpkobdj... I haven't audited the files yet to see what technology they use (e.g. why is the web experience shit, but the Chrome App is OK), but I certainly trust Zoom a lot more in a sandbox.

crazygringo 6y ago

I mean, Google bans MS Office from employees' computers as well (with special-case exceptions), so they use Docs instead. Since Google has Meet (Hangouts), this isn't really surprising. It mainly sucks for when an employee (especially in sales) has a call with a client that uses Zoom and can't use Meet, because then you're forced to dial in, which just puts you at a disadvantage when everyone can see everyone's face except yours. Edit: per comments, people can still use the browser version of Zoom, so doesn't seem that bad.

gnicholas 6y ago
> because then you're forced to dial in, which just puts you at a disadvantage when everyone can see everyone's face except yours. Can't they just participate in a call from the browser? I thought Google only banned the application/app, not usage of the service altogether.
- StudentStuff 6y ago
  The browser version of Zoom seems to require a free account be created, and it was audio only in Chromium, I could not get it to use my camera. Zoom refused to work in Firefox. Jitsi and Google Meet seem to work in both browsers, without requiring me to log in.
  - reubenmorais 6y ago
    It's improved a bit, and actually works fine in Firefox Nightly right now, but you have to craft the web client URL directly. The UI will try its very best to make you download the client.
    - netsharc 6y ago
      Seen somewhere else: when you get to the web page that launches the app, don't allow that launch, hit (IIRC) "Retry", still don't allow it, and the page should say "Having trouble?" offer a link to the web version. Or better yet, don't use Zoom...

QUFB 6y ago

Some thoughts: 1. Google's threat model may not be your threat model, and it definitely isn't the threat model of my daughter's school. A corporation like Google may be concerned using native applications, written in unsafe languages, written by developers from other corporations in China. That said, Zoom isn't wrong for everyone. 2. Google is motivated to push their own solution for obvious reasons. 3. Tavis, or others, at Project Zero might know some things, maybe we'll find out.

jMyles 6y ago
> Google's threat model may not be your threat model, and it definitely isn't the threat model of my daughter's school. A corporation like Google may be concerned using native applications, written in unsafe languages, written by developers from other corporations in China. That said, Zoom isn't wrong for everyone. Google's threat model surely differs in some way from a school, but the specific threats you named seem like threats equally applicable to the surfaces identifiable in the threat model of a school.
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  No they are not. A business can have trade information they want to protect. A school would be more focused on individual privacy and safety. These threat models are quite different.
- Mvandenbergh 6y ago
  The threat model for a school is kids/others disrupting sessions and creepers using access to gawp at (or communicate with kids). Since the Chinese government is unlikely to feel the need to compel Zoom to do that, the fact that they have all the keys centrally stored is not a problem. Google's threat model actually does include state level attack (And specifically by China) to steal IP or access confidential user data.
  - jMyles 6y ago
    > The threat model for a school is kids/others disrupting sessions and creepers using access to gawp at (or communicate with kids). Not if the school actually cares about the future of its students. From a blog post[0] we published at NuCypher a while back: > If we fail to take action now, we risk a world in which unsavory actors - domestic and foreign - have built rich, comprehensive profiles for every one of our children, following the trajectories of their education, home life, consumer habits, health, and on and on. These profiles will then be used to manipulate their behavior not only as consumers, but as voters and participants in all those corners of society which, in order for freedom and justice to prevail, require instead that these kids mature into functional, free-thinking adults. 0: https://blog.nucypher.com/todays-kids-need-end-to-end-encryption/ https://blog.nucypher.com/todays-kids-need-end-to-end-encryp...

deleted 6y ago

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arrty88 6y ago

Zoom's issues are fixable... unlike a hardware defect like the macbook pro keyboard and the iphone antenna that didn't work well... Zoom is clearly better than the alternatives and has my 80 year old uncle talking about it. This too shall pass.

eagsalazar2 6y ago
If the issue are innocent technical screw ups, they have deep deficiencies in their dev org that are not easy to fix and could take years. If the issues are ethical or political, they aren't ever going to get fixed.
addison-lee 6y ago
Gotta somehow bash Apple!
gwd 6y ago
I uninstalled zoom and refused to use it after they did that skanky "start up a local webserver to avoid Safari's user-safety questions". Then everyone was using Zoom, so I gave them another chance and installed the native client. Turns out the native client install also contains skanky hacks to avoid user-safety questions. So I uninstalled it again, and now my company has told us all not to use the native app. Once may have been an honest mistake. Twice (and now more) is definitely a culture problem that's not going to be fixed without massive turnover.
jplayer01 6y ago
I don’t understand why people are so eager to trust this company with sensitive business information. They’re totally untrustworthy after what they’ve done. It doesn’t matter what they pretend they’re fixing. Their word is worthless. What is it with you people blindly believing whatever garbage comes out of these companies?

jefftk 6y ago

"Employees who have been using Zoom to stay in touch with family and friends can continue to do so through a web browser or via mobile." (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

unihb 6y ago
Yeah this should be higher. Also work @ G, and it's just the desktop version of the app that's been disallowed. We can still run the Zoom web app on corp machines.
- klenwell 6y ago
  One thing that puts me off about Zoom is the way it tries to push you into downloading the desktop app when the web app should be fine and is what I prefer. It uses shitty dark patterns that require two or three clicks and at one point, if I'm not mistaken, waiting for a link to appear after a delay. In my most recent experience with it, it led to a zip file being automatically downloaded to my computer. This when I already have had plenty of previous experience with the web app and was deliberately trying to reach to the web page for a meeting for which I had been sent a URL. Slack does similar things but isn't quite so aggressive about it.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    > One thing that puts me off about Zoom is the way it tries to push you into downloading the desktop app when the web app should be fine and is what I prefer. I'm pretty sure they do that because their web app is garbage, and they know people will get a much better experience in the native app. Notably, Zoom's native app is truly native; it's not some electron wrapper like Slack or Teams. I don't think it's a coincidence that Zoom is both (A) the only major solution that seem to work consistently with large numbers of participants, and (B) the only one not using WebRTC.
    - shbooms 6y ago
      > and they know people will get a much better experience in the native app. not if I'm a user who is actively trying to not install the native app. for me, and likely many others, security and privacy trump performance benchmarks and UI/UX all day, every day.

willart4food 6y ago

LOL, of course!

eagsalazar2 6y ago

Can someone with more experience using Jitsi comment on benefits/limitations for use at work? We typically have 2-5 people on calls but occasionally up to 20. I tried it a bit with 1-1 calls and it was pretty great but I'm assuming there are some limitations vs Zoom to be aware of.

xenonite 6y ago
One important thing until it is fixed: Firefox doesn’t work at the moment, tearing everyone’s performance down. Hence use Chrome/Edge/Opera/Vivaldi.
gwd 6y ago
At work, our team of 4 has been using it for several weeks too, and it's been just fine. Our church group has been using it with 12-ish participants once a week for several weeks now. There are individuals who consistently have problems, but since it's always the same people, I tend to think they'd have similar issues with Zoom. (Zoom meetings with different sets of people have had similar sorts of issues.) People are saying that Firefox "technically works" but that due to limitations in the spec, one person in your conference using FF causes everyone else's cpu to go through the roof. (Can't speak authoritatively on that, but FF is labeled as not fully supported.) Fundamentally, I think it probably comes down to the business model. The company that runs meet.jit.si, 8x8, doesn't make money on that service; they make money selling some large integrated business solution. Running the free service seems to be less of a loss leader than a massive pool of beta testers. So they aren't pushing it as hard as Zoom, where (at least originally) the free version was limited to 40 minutes to directly up-sell you to the paid version. Two other things about Zoom: 1. Easy to get the client installed, and once it's installed, it's easy to use. Of course, they consistently do that by working around the protections your OS has in place by dodgy methods. 2. It seems to work well in China. Not sure how Jitsi fares in that respect. EDIT: Some cool things about Jitsi: 1. NO INSTALL AT ALL for desktops. People just click the link and bam, you're in a meeting. 2. Rooms are created when a URL is visited. So if you want so split into two groups, half of you can just add "2" to the URL, and bam -- group is split in two. Ready to join back together? Delete the '2' and you're back together again. Anyway, all that to say -- I think Jitsi is definitely worth a try. Tell people to use something Chromium-based until they've fixed the issue with FF (I use Brave) and give it a shot.

mfer 6y ago

You can make joining via the web an option. No app install required. Details at https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115005666383-Show-a-Join-from-your-browser-Link https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115005666383-Show-... Note, works best in Chrome (likely Chromium) based on what the docs say.

ronreiter 6y ago

Smells like banning due to Google competing directly with Zoom.

codazoda 6y ago

I put together instructions for creating an install-free dock icon for Zoom. Nothing ground breaking here, I just combined several sets of instructions I found useful. https://blog.joeldare.com/creating-an-install-free-dock-icon-for-zoom-on-mac/ https://blog.joeldare.com/creating-an-install-free-dock-icon... Zoom stopped the browser login from working for a few days, but it seems to be back working now.

jasonv 6y ago

If the tech community can't prioritize security over features, it's pretty rich for same community to declare that the "average joe" doesn't care about security.

walrus01 6y ago
The same "tech community" that's been drinking the "move fast and break things" and "be disruptive in your market segment" koolaid for 15-20 years? Unsurprised.
- jasonv 6y ago
  I was a bit unclear in my original post. I meant this tech community here.. lots of "don't make me use something else" posts in a community of people who ostensibly are tech oriented. But your point stands either way. I'm just surprised at the pass being given to Zoom given the blitheness of their gaffes.

coleifer 6y ago

I don't like zoom either, but what exactly made them the HN punching bag of the month? Ad/surveillance giants like Google or FB are typically spoken of with notes of reverence and awe on here. Zoom gets lit-up for sending data to FB, but FB gets a pass? I don't know I just can't get into the mood. extinguishes torch in moat.

fosk 6y ago
The stock price.
gipp 6y ago
> Ad/surveillance giants like Google or FB are typically spoken of with notes of reverence and awe on here. Uh. Are we reading different websites? This is the most vocally anti-everything-FAANG community I've seen on the Internet, since about 2017 or so. Except Apple, mostly.
- jakear 6y ago
  Netflix also seems to be acceptable.
  - gipp 6y ago
    Yeah, that's true, although we all know they're just in there so the acronym works.
  - gpm 6y ago
    I'll just chime in that Apple and Netflix the FAANG companies I dislike the most, for balance ;)
  - lonesword 6y ago
    Microsoft too seems to be getting less hate than Google/Facebook. EDIT: Ok MS is not FAANG.
ilikehurdles 6y ago
And on the FB note, let's clear that up -- FB ships a mandatory phone-home analytics feature on their mobile SDKs used to enable the "sign in with facebook button". This sends your users' data over to their servers _even when_ those users do not use a Facebook social sign-on. Zoom removed that SDK within a day of finding out this was happening, yet it continues to be plastered around the web as if its an ongoing data collection; meanwhile, crickets at the fact that half the apps on our phones have this Facebook spyware.

monkeydust 6y ago

I work at a large corp, our own in house video conf went down for a few hours. Our backup conference system also tied to same system of course went down. Rather than postpone meetings we took them on zoom. It just works and I hope they get over this security issue and start ramping up their feature set.

mancerayder 6y ago

I just wish Slack didn't use so much firepower on my machine, it seems to make my Macbook pro 2015's fan go wild and the CPU to spike, and it seems to "rot" over time, and get worse.

jmcnulty 6y ago

Zoom have responded very quickly to the complaints levelled against them. Their problems are more PR than techinical now.

TwoBit 6y ago
Yeah, but allowing China access to meetings seems so bone-headed that I question what other problems may be lurking.

deleted 6y ago

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mikekij 6y ago

I'm seeing references to Zoom "getting over these security issues". Some of the issues (e.g. not requiring passwords) can be relatively easily addressed. Others, like transmitting symmetric encryption keys over the wire and storing them in databases in China, are more fundamental to Zoom's corporate strategy. I doubt Zoom would change the most jarring of their security gaffes in a way that would satisfy security-focused companies like Google.

chelovek89 6y ago
It seems to me Zoom follows the "dont ask for permission, ask for forgiveness later" model. You don't accidentally send data to China. Zero excuse.
- mikekij 6y ago
  Not sure why this is getting downvoted. I totally agree.

antonyh 6y ago

Google banning it is almost an endorsement for me. Anything the Chocolate Factory hates can't be all that evil. Joking asides, this is a weak way to promote the fact they have a competing tool.

jariel 6y ago

A more existential question is why the Google and MSFT with 'All the King's Horses and All the King's Men' can't make a basic, reliable, video conf. I understand there are some business reasons here and there (MS wants people on Teams not Skype) but it doesn't matter. 'Basic Video' should be as common, robust and reliable as making a phone call.

tytso 6y ago
All of our meetings at Google are using GVC (aka Google Meet from gSuites), and while there are people who have reported problems (mostly in low bandwidth situations and/or using Firefox), my experience is that it is quite reliable. I've had video conferences from my Dad's Senior Center (obviously, pre-COVID-19) using a MiFi box, and there things were more reliable if I turned off my camera, but other than that, I've personally never had any problems using Google Meet from either a Linux box running ChromeOS, or a Chromebook. In fact, I've never had to worry about attending meetings remotely so much that I really can't speak to the reports of people complaining about Google Meet being unreliable.

dqpb 6y ago

That’s pretty embarrassing for google if their own employees prefer zoom over google hangouts.

codemac 6y ago
It's more the following workflow: - your friends set up a zoom happy hour - current personal laptop is fubar or super old/unsupported - you use work laptop, installing zoom As someone not in sales, I have never seen anyone try to use Zoom for actual work meetings.

neil_s 6y ago

(disclaimer: I work at El Goog) A number of companies have rightfully banned Zoom's native apps, given how insecure they are. I had previously uninstalled it when the news about the secret web server they install came out. Google is still allowing use of the web app, but the web app bizarrely doesn't support Grid/Gallery View, which is the main reason my friends/family wanted to use it. Hangouts Meet was optimized for work meetings where most people would be dialing in from high-bandwidth meeting rooms, not everyone individually dialing in from home, but hopefully now they've heard the loud feedback about the especial usefulness of Gallery View during quarantine times and will introduce the feature soon. For now I'm using the Chrome extension that enables this feature client-side using JS/CSS, and staying tf away from Zoom. With how little I used Zoom before quarantine, I don't understand the adoration for it (I found its UI confusing and quality similar to other tools), and I haven't been able to find any benchmarks comparing its video quality for people on less good internet connections (my home network is pretty strong).

jacobsenscott 6y ago
We switched from google hangouts to zoom a while ago because the quality "felt" better. We are a small distributed team where our internet connections run the range of fast to slow. We didn't track numbers or anything, but fewer dropouts, frozen videos, better sound quality, etc. Maybe we all just had better internet days each time we used zoom though. Never know. The UI is initially confusing, but so is the UI for every video chat app I've used. It seems to be the fad to have "clever" UI in video chats apps (controls that auto-hide, non-standard icons, low contrast, non standard control placement (use the standard toolbar luke!) etc. On top of that zoom has always "just worked". The "just worked" thing is now resulting in security woes, but still. Start a meeting, send link. Done. Online works, dial in works. Contrast with hangouts (dropped non-chrome browser support for at least a year). To this day we have users that can't use slack video for unknown reasons (app store slack doesn't work as well as slack installer slack or something). WebEx is some horror show that seems to constantly re-install itself for each meeting. You're lucky if you can get it going before the meeting is over. Where most apps stop at video chat and maybe poor quality screen sharing, zoom has a pretty deep enterprise feature set. Good webinar support, integration with SIP systems, SSO, recording etc.

BooneJS 6y ago

Is it not common for companies to control what apps are installed on corporate computers, and where company data is stored (cloud providers, etc)? I get the whole Zoom backlash, but this is taking a specific instance of company and app and harvesting clicks.

jbverschoor 6y ago

Chrome has similar installers etc

vondur 6y ago

It makes sense. Doesn’t hangouts work for this purpose?

patricklovesoj 6y ago

this is more incentive bias playing out. taking the opportunity to push google hangouts.

codesternews 6y ago

Why Zoom is making so many silly mistakes. They should take advantage of this situation instead they are blowing up. Every time they apologies or make statement trust has been lost.

nitrobeast 6y ago

I believe Google also bans non-Google file sharing tools like Dropbox or OneDrive from employee’s computers too.

mark_l_watson 6y ago

A question: I have avoided installing the native macOS Zoom client, but I use the iOS native app on my iPhone. Does the iOS app have the same vulnerabilities as the macOS native app? I searched in these comments for ‘iOS’ to see if someone already discussed this. Thanks.

skc 6y ago

Must be nice to be an upstart. You have a throng of tech savvy people to defend you at best and forgive you at worst. If this was a Microsoft/Google product it would be pilloried to death.

DeathArrow 6y ago

Google banning competition? Totally unexpected.

zwaps 6y ago

Other large technology companies that manufacture stuff but are not Chinese have made the same decision. I write like this because I am not sure what I can disclose.

ngcc_hk 6y ago

Ban is not long term. You need a better solution. Not sure it is from google. But not from china or associated with china is important.

baby 6y ago

Spoiler alert: Google has paid for a third party assessment of zoom, the pentest came back with catastrophic results

tilolebo 6y ago
Source? The article doesn't mention that.

sgt 6y ago

I prefer Zoom primarily because of two things: 1. We used google meet a lot, but it's very CPU intense and also does not run in Safari so I have to start Chrome to run it 2. It's a better UI and Video Conf experience, hands down. I realize that it has issues but nothing truly major as far as I can see.

hyko 6y ago

It doesn’t matter what your personal threat model is: these videoconferencing apps have become de facto critical infrastructure for many countries almost overnight with no scrutiny and a joke security posture, because the IRL channels they replace are unavailable. This has dire implications for all of us, both in terms of espionage and the potential for massive disruption. Threat modelling is fine for your home security, but it is now dangerously anachronistic when evaluating anything connected to the internet. One solution would be to at least educate people about the need for a security mindset on a massive scale, or at worst craft some laws to force it. I’m sure there are many people who would accept the risks of drink driving: we don’t let them.