As a remote worker who is on video conferencing calls most of the day, I have a lot of experience (aka strong feelings) with the tools mentioned in the article;
- Zoom is indeed great. Reliable and clean UI. Local recording to MP4 makes for easy sharing.
- Webex is a bit less intuitive, but still reliable. Proprietary video recording protocol makes it video's hard to share.
- Skype Business should die in a fire. Unreliable and terrible UI. The Mac version of it is pretty much broken. A lot of folks can't find out how to screen share.
- BlueJean. Trying too hard to be fancy with their UI. They are also very proud with their Dolby Voice, but I find it harder to properly understand people (My hearing is not that great).
- Google Hangouts / Meet doesn't work in Safari for no good reason IMHO. High CPU usage and could use some more features, like a personal room and default meetings settings (no vid/mute by default on join, default audio devices etc)
> - Zoom is indeed great. Reliable and clean UI. Local recording to MP4 makes for easy sharing.
I disagree on the "clean UI". The actual "call in progress" window, yes - easy to find screen sharing, chat etc.
The Zoom application on Windows, the scheduling 'feature' (did I get the right meeting room ID? Have I joined my personal one or the call's one?) and the website, both are among the most confusing UIs I've used. Beaten only by some enterprise Java-GUI'd software.
I completely agree. How many times I've been invited and didn't press the right buttons in the right order, there is always that dance "oh I didn't enable the camera, oh i didn't see my mic was disabled, can you hear me". It's not quite right. I always wondered why they couldn't really streamline that. And there is a serious flaw in their chat mechanism: it doesn't offer to email you or say "do you want to save your chat" before you log off, and I've lost more times than I remember some important notes.
Having used Zoom for several remote projects, I really do love it. It’s reliable, great image quality for sharing screens (which was necessary for us), and had crystal clear audio. Zoom is great, giving customers access to an enterprise grade software solution for video conferencing at a low price.
There’s several of what appear to be anti-WebEx posts around here, and it makes me question who have actually used it in its intended setup. The university I’m at recently redid a lot of the rooms, and created several so-called presentation zones that are outfitted with WebEx equipment. Multi-monitor presentation (for the speaker and audience), multi-view camera’s that track and focus on the current speaker/audience member, and an audio system who’s microphone can pick up sound from pretty much anywhere in the room and doesn’t feedback loop on itself. To me that’s the difference when you go with a Cisco solution. Other vendors you get a utility or software, Cisco gets you into an ecosystem of well integrated tools, both software and hardware. Whether or not you actually need them is up to you.
Until you have to connect to one of these so called solutions from your laptop. Using Webex puts my cpu at 100% with a mediocre quality, while I can use hangouts or Slack to call without these problems.
I connect to the stream with my laptop just fine, and it doesn’t stress my system. I’ve tried browser, temporary runtime, and real desktop app.
I did a test run on Friday with a guest speaker for today who was calling in from the west coast to us on the east coast. She was joining from a laptop. Connection was solid and worked great. Hopefully it stays that way today!
I'd almost guess so, I tried to install broken deb packages on Linux and I think I tried some app for android (it's long ago, don't remember), in both cases I wasn't able to connect.
As with every other business market, google has the design, technical and market reach resources to clean up. However, as with every other business market, they never will due to their mysterious aversion to providing
a) actual support
b) product lifespans that businesses can rely on
Their penchant for "surprise! sunset"ing major products that users rely on, and showing no reluctance to do this for business customers as well means only scrappy small players who feel like the cost differential or some specific feature is worth the threat of having to migrate one fine weekend.
Specifically in the chat/videochat domain, Google has released and sunsetted
gchat (to...)
google talk (to hangouts)
duo
allo
voice
Their sales and support approach to Meet hardware is also abysmal. If they sold hardware direct, supported it through an official channel, and had reasonable documentation around it, they would slay, especially for customers who already have G Suite. Instead, it’s a confusing web of resellers bundling off-the-shelf hardware.
Google has lost all goodwill in this space in my opinion. They’ve built, sunsetted, and rebuilt multiple solutions for video conferencing and at this point who can trust them with putting out a long-term product?
Of this list, only Hangouts is a video conferencing application, is it not? Allo's primary goal was chat, Duo's is 1-1 interaction, GTalk is simply the older version of hangouts, and so on.
> only Hangouts is a video conferencing application
btw, there are three different versions of Hangouts: Classic, Meet, and Chat. Hangouts Classic will be EOL'd later this year. Hangouts Meet is the video conferencing for business. Hangouts Chat is a Slack clone for business that includes video calling.
Google will transition Hangouts Classic users to Hangouts Chat, not Meet:
The fact that this is so confusing is part of the problem - consistency of product vision is not their forte and there are market economic consequences as a result.
Within our company we use Google for one person meetings, and BlueJeans for team meetings. Hangouts doesn't work well on anything other than Chrome. In Firefox it doesn't work with video on. It doesn't work well when other party is in China. We tend to use Skype for China calls.
It has some great hidden features - seamless network switch (my wifi was giving problem. I switched to LAN. Skype displayed a message something like - 'detecting and switching network'. Call quality improved without disconnecting), make\promote an attendee a presenter. Their core tech is strong.
Agree on Skype Business. Even the audio call quality is terrible. Based on the nag messages I get every day, though, it appears they’re migrating it Teams, which I still haven’t used. Does anyone know if it’s better?
No. My company just migrated from Skype to Teams and it's worse. Half the time, scheduled meetings don't connect. Mute button will randomly not work. Entire UI/UX is poorly thought out. Beyond that, I think Teams is trying to do everything at once, chat, fileshare, boards, etc. Without doing one thing well and expanding from there.
Teams video and audio is the best part of Teams.
Teams was launched as a Slack killer, but in reality I think it's closer as a replacement to Zoom than Slack.
I agree with most of this, except I've had good luck with BlueJeans (relatively few people) and had some audio quality issues with Zoom. To be fair, it could be the wireless connectivity of the people I was connecting to...Screen sharing seemed to work fine for both...
Zoom is interesting to me, because we've been using GoToMeeting pretty exclusively for 8-10 years, and in that time the stability & software quality has kind of cratered.
Personally, I don't think it can be understated how impactful Zoom's IPO is. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Eric Yuan is the first Asian billionaire created from running an American tech company. Others have come close (Justin Kan/Twitch, Tony Hsiehs/Zappos), but Eric is the first.
And I think this really marks the start of an increase in Asian/Indian-American entrepreneurs making waves in the upcoming decades. For all the talk about overrepresentation of Asian-Americans in tech, most are limited to technical/individual contributor/engineering roles. Very little Asian representation in management/executive roles, but it's quickly rising. Andrew Chen, Connie Chan @ a16z. Jessica Lee @ Sequoia.
I'm Asian-American, grew up in SV (currently in college). An explanation for the pattern I described above is that my and most of friend's parents are immigrants from Asia. Often went to the top universities in their country, and came to US for graduate school, then work for the big tech companies.
And so for them, they weren't able to take any risk - they were there to settle down and start a family. But the new generation of Asian-Americans go to these top colleges, and are able to have the ambition to do entrepreneurship. I'm extremely excited and optimistic to see more AA representation in startups and driving real-world impact.
Yahoo IPO'd 23 years ago, gained 154% on first day of trading. Jerry Yang has probably long been a billionaire (20+ years). Yahoo stock peaked around $120 during dotcom boom. Inital price at IPO was $13.
Re: Asian billionaire created from running an American tech company
You also forgot Jensen Huang of Nvidia. He co-founded Nvidia 1993 (perhaps you weren't born at the time), been CEO and running Nvidia ever since, with a current net worth of $3.6 billion.
And there are older generation Asian-American CEOs running big tech companies and reach billionaire status since 1950s!
- Wang Laboratories CEO An Wang [1]
- Computer Associates International, Inc. former CEO Charles B. Wang [2]
Would definitely bet Steve Chen is near billionaire status now if he joined Google 2006 and stayed for a bunch of years. Google stock and stock market generally has done very well in that time period (minus 2009-10)
The US made Eric attempt to get a visa eight times before he was finally successful. We should be poaching the world's talent belligerently, strategically, handing out citizenship and saying thank you for choosing our country over others. Instead, the clowns in Washington DC make the best and brightest go through hell just to come here and contribute. Only either a malevolent or incompetent government would sabotage its own nation in such a manner.
Were I briefly king, one of the first things I'd do is task the Federal Reserve to create a large 'steal the talent fund' (by another name) and set out on draining the world of as much talent as possible. I'd use clever funding programs to make it easier for the best to move to and transition to the US. A tiny bit of inflation in exchange for a massive long-term return. The rest of the world would in part pay - via the international holdings of dollars - for my program to steal their own best and brightest.
Every graduate of a major US university gets automatic citizenship. The best scientists, engineers, doctors, and so on, I'd want all of them. I'd do almost anything it takes to get them to my shores. Half of everything America is in its wealth or accomplishments, spanning two centuries now, is owed to brave immigrants that chose to abandon a life elsewhere and seek opportunity here at great risk. It's hard to comprehend the enormity of the mistake that is the US immigration system. We don't even take a neutral approach, we take a make-it-difficult approach.
We've always had a "make-it-difficult" approach. And as you pointed out, it's worked out really well for us. If you are using america's success as an example, then you are really arguing for highly limited immigration policy. The idea that america welcomed immigrants with open arms is historically false. As a matter of fact, for much of US history, we've highly limited or even banned immigration. From Benjamin Franklin ( on his anti-german immigration ) to the immigration bans in the 1800s ( mostly anti-irish and anti-chinese and much of 1900s ( quotas banning almost all immigration ).
Your idea of giving every international college graduate citizenship sounds nice, but when we have a major underemployment problem in the US of college graduates, more graduates is going to cause further problems.
I know we are that immigration is what caused america's greatness. But things are a lot more complicated than that. We became the largest economy and the greatest military power under extensive immigration bans.
For example, the The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 banned almost all immigration for much of the 20th century.
I am for legal and vetted immigration but you are painting a false picture of the history of america and the reason for america's success.
Also, china, japan, south korea, etc became wealthy nations little to no immigration. So the immigration and economic success argument is a lot more complex than people think.
Visa fraud is a big thing in China, if there's a way of easy visa, it's destined to be abused, won't be surprised that half of China would want to come to the US if given the chance.
" We should be poaching the world's talent belligerently" - this is hard to identify. Sometimes not, but most often, yes.
"Every graduate of a major US university gets automatic citizenship." This basically means Universities are in the business of selling cheap citizenship. So, no.
Most importantly: " I'd do is task the Federal Reserve to create a large 'steal the talent fund'"
Wow. I hope you don't mean that! There are 1000 initiatives the gov. wants to be involved , we just don't print money willy nilly!
I should add: yes, 'getting talent' is a good initiative, of course! And it should be facilitated by the government mostly in terms of 'smart immigration reform' - I don't think there needs to be a 'fund'. Private enterprise can definitely 'fund' that by hiring people.
I think if the H1 programme we re-thought so that it was not abused - and there were some kind of 'path to citizenship' in some cases that would be ideal. So long as it's managed properly.
I think the key here is 'intelligent policy' that works well with private enterprise, not a big spend.
This sounds very similar to what I would do and I am not even American or in the states. I think America's greatest power comes from the ability to attract the best and brightest and giving them an environment to thrive in.
> Each time users logged on to a Webex conference, the company’s systems would have to identify which version of the product (iPhone, Android, PC or Mac) to run, which slowed things down.
are all executives really that clueless about tech or do they say those dumb things to target investors that they know are clueless about the tech?
The second,
I was working with very smart CEO who was tech savvy, but had to invent exactly such kind of narratives because our not very tech clients were never understanding normal, real, even very very simplified, explanations.
Tech was something mystical to them, and required mystical tales.
In present day yes, but 5-10 years ago when you went to download the client their web interface didnt know what OS you were running, it would prompt and ask you to download either the .dmg or .exe
Anecdote: Sometime last week, I was given a Skype for Business link to login from my Linux laptop. Since regular Skype works fine on my Linux laptop, I thought this would be ok. Wonder of wonders, it wanted me to download and install an MSI :)
I still don't understand how
1. Companies are paying so much for their software. How much do they charge for licensing to make so much money?
2. They intend to defend their position from competitors
3. How they will ever grow to justify a PE ratio of 2,123.29!!!
I actually use their software and love it, but do they really have a secret sauce that won't be copied soon?
The secret sauce for Zoom seems to reliability. For some reason it just always works, independent of how many people join the call (we have calls with more than 100 people calling in independently), which OS you use (most of us use Linux, but also Android, Windows, macOS and iOS). It just always works, in the last two years I had zero problems with it, no idea how they do it.
Last I checked Zoom avoids using WebRTC in favor of using media over websockets. This should obviate a lot of the reliability problems with enterprise networks that you would normally need to solve with STUN/TURN/ICE.
I think the other thing they do is decrease the image quality when multiple people are simultaneously connected. This is a nice hack since you don't really notice the difference, and users blame bad images on the network not the product.
The biggest challenge to their business IMO is if/when WebRTC becomes stable between all browsers. There are still many kinks that need to be worked out. Everything falls apart in the P2P version when you have more than like 5 people connected as the amount of information that needs to be transferred across the network scales exponentially.[0] So you need to add a gateway and connect everyone over a single pipe.
I thought let's download and try to find out their secret sauce by reverse engineering. Their download is just a web browser client [0]. So, my guess is pg_bot is right. They might be using web sockets.
pg_bot covered the technical side, I'll take the social side.
That's the great thing. There might be an entire market of options out there for an idea, but if they don't get something like reliability right, then that's the easiest foot in the door.
If your product has no marginal cost (as much software effectively does) then you can justify any P/E with the prospect of increasing sales without increasing opex or capex. Of course that's just an approximation since you will realistically have some kind of customer acquisition cost, some of which is also realized in adding more developers to create features that are adoption-blockers. But still, that scalability is what makes early stage software companies such attractive investments.
I would be much more worried about competition. Video conferencing has a small moat especially since major incumbents are already in the space
Only if it's a very competitive market, and even that effect will only happen over time.
Product differentiation introduces pricing power for individual firms, and depending on the style of competition you think will occur (e.g., Cournot oligopoly vs. Bertrand), you may very well never approach anything close to perfect competition with the small number of firms there are in this market.
> Though in economic theory cost should approach marginal cost
...in a perfectly competitive market. In a situation where monopoly rents can be charged (which is what having a moat is about), prices should hit the point where unit price × sales - cost is maximized.
Well, good questions, but how is it that we’ve had 20+ years of video conferencing over the internet and most solutions are total crap?
Product management is a fine art... Maybe Microsoft and Google will manage to catch up, maybe in trying so they’ll dig themselves further into a hole...
Because imo, the decision of which video conferencing solution to pay for is rarely made on the basis of the quality of the software, at least in the corporate world. Cisco and Ms have very effective sales teams selling WebEx and Skype as bundled add ons to ip phone systems and windows site licenses. The fact that they're both complete garbage is never considered.
Not so much the windows site licenses as their office ones but yes. For anyone running office 365, base teams/skype conferencing is free and adding on call in lines and the rest is generally just a matter of ticking boxes and won't require purchase approval or the rest.
People tend to underestimate just how different it is at most companies to modify/increase an existing agreement vs. setting up a new one.
Its possible that the people who bought it recently were employing that exact strategy. If the spike in price really had nothing to do with the underlying company you might be better off shorting it. That way you will profit when people who bought it (on purpose or by mistake) try to unwind their trade
From speaking to friends, getting everything to work reliably for videoconf is a really really hard problem given the number of variables involved (codecs, networking, firewalls, bandwidth, locked down enterprise environments), so any solution that provides even close to reliable service is in a position to charge a lot.
But don't you think it's one of those things, like the 100 minute mile, that once someone shows that it's possible then 10 clones will show up overnight?
Depends. If the 'moat' is a strong UX + a reputation for 'just works' + the tricky enterprise customers all have your connectors installed already, that could be difficult to overcome.
I'm surprised at how big Zoom became. Video conferencing is a competitive market and other players in the space were spending a lot on sales to get all the big clients.
Microsoft, for example, has a lot of deep integrations of Skype for Business with the Office suite and I'd imagine they'd make it compelling for their enterprise customers (who I'd imagine is the main user of video conferencing) to use it.
How did they win the market in the face of competition from all these large players?
I think it's very similar to how Trello made an impact in their segment. After a point, simplicity is what literally what people want. You can check the customer acquisition page of WebEx and Zoom and you'd know the difference of how easy it's for someone to get started with Zoom and set up a webinar or video conference.
IMO there was a point at which Microsoft, Google, Cisco etc. just stopped innovating in the videoconferencing space and relied on their sales teams to get new customers and keep existing ones. Zoom has really stepped up in their absence and moved the experience a few years into the future.
It used to take thousands of dollars and loads of specialized equipment to get a videoconferencing solution for a single room, and even then half of every meeting would be spent getting it to work. Now you need an iPad Mini with the Zoom Rooms app and everything just works.
I suppose complacency and other things (bureaucracy, politics, risk adversity etc etc), especially by the big leading companies is what makes them not always continuing to innovate, thus allowing smaller players to enter. Look at Tesla for example. Also, in software, I’m always amazed by how successful Slack is but I suppose they’re competing with a lot of old legacy tools like Skype (again) that even though they have a lot of usability things they probably should fix, they are doing quite well.
> I'm surprised at how big Zoom became. Video conferencing is a competitive market and other players in the space were spending a lot on sales to get all the big clients.
Focus on sales is what doomed other video conferencing. Sales in such context usually means they focused on convuncing some exec to buy the product, who inevitably used it personally not that much.
Zoom seems to have focused on tech and end user experience.
Totally agree on experience--hardware competitors were $3000+ systems with terrible interfaces resembling DVRs from the late 90's. It seemed for corporate conferencing, the competition was sort of diffuse, with many being rigid and expensive hardware sets from Cisco, Polycom, and not just Skype/Bluejeans/Google Hangouts.
Zoom had great value, they took advantage of existing tech so that companies could set up reliable conferencing gear for a fraction of the cost, using a cheap PC, an iPad for the remote, a Bluetooth speaker, and a generic webcam.
It's shocking how FAANGS have not utterly dominated what should be a utility market by now. Shame on them - not for 'not doing a good job' but for arguably getting in everyone else's way with crap. I'm thinking of you Skype. It really goes to show how inefficient things can be when there is not product focus, and tons of money coming in from some other division.
I think there is definitely enough money to interest MS and Cisco, as we see with MS's move to compete with Slack.
MS, more than any company is very well positioned for this - they have the relationships and sales force.
Cisco has that, but in kind of another way.
Google has the tech, but they need 'Enterprise Oriented Product Management' - which they don't quite have, and a kind of Enterprise Sales, which they don't quite have.
Their Cloud offer has suffered due to this, granted, that's a much bigger nut to crack, with other kinds of overlapping issues.
I think if Bezos, or another CEO decided it should be a focus, it would be.
I don't think Salesforce is hot on this area yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if eventually they did, as Benioff seems to be keen to extend horizontally, and they are good at integrating stuff.
Good on Zoom though, I hope VC's take note and back quality efforts in classical markets.
Zoom is a great example of how it is possible to enter a saturated space with big players and carve a growing slice of the user base by providing better UX and technical execution.
Is there any competitive comparison on what underlying technology and codec/compression the various video conferencing players use? Does one have better quality/datarate than others?
I do not have the metrics / data required but in my very limited experience, I can confirm zoom does the video conferencing / remote troubleshooting better than webex. That, while Webex is also good at what it does, zoom feels slightly better.
The only issue I have ever had with Zoom is that sometimes dial-in audio users have terrible audio quality and drop outs. I was never able to get their support to resolve it.
- Zoom is indeed great. Reliable and clean UI. Local recording to MP4 makes for easy sharing.
- Webex is a bit less intuitive, but still reliable. Proprietary video recording protocol makes it video's hard to share.
- Skype Business should die in a fire. Unreliable and terrible UI. The Mac version of it is pretty much broken. A lot of folks can't find out how to screen share.
- BlueJean. Trying too hard to be fancy with their UI. They are also very proud with their Dolby Voice, but I find it harder to properly understand people (My hearing is not that great).
- Google Hangouts / Meet doesn't work in Safari for no good reason IMHO. High CPU usage and could use some more features, like a personal room and default meetings settings (no vid/mute by default on join, default audio devices etc)