This author seems shocked by this turn of events--with websites trying to be app platforms with embedded web views of websites--as if they are a recent phenomenon... have we all forgotten the (thankfully pretty short) time 15 years ago where everything that mattered suddenly had to be a Facebook app?
* Toggle the "Zoom Apps Quick Launch Button" sliders.
This took me about 30 min to figure out because all the emails from Zoom about how to 'manage' this was a link to their marketplace which is an upsell to add apps, not to disable it. HTH someone else.
“ Wow is the web a weird application delivery mechanism where people are writing applications and then essentially compiling them down to binaries using WebAssembly, but weirdly shoehorning it into a hypertext framework”
I thought this was an interesting quote from the article that relates back to something I’ve been thinking about as I’ve started to look at writing apps that run any where and realized that forces you into writing a web app, but web apps kind of suck because at the end of the day you’re really writing a website not an app…
I wonder if you could at this point reinvent the browser so it was specialized for web apps not sites, and what that would even look like.
That distinction doesn't matter all that much today. The entire "hypertext framework" part of most single page apps is a generic 10-line index.html. The app bundle can be downloaded and cached indefinitely and work perfectly even offline. This specialized browser for web apps not sites would look like – Chrome.
>> The entire "hypertext framework" part of most single page apps is a generic 10-line index.html.
This statement seems rather misleading. There ultimately ends up being vastly more hypertext delivered to the browser than can be represented by a 10-line html file.
I don’t know enough about non-web apps. What sucks about web apps? Speed is definitely a part of it, but I always saw that as a cost of interoperability.
Or you can make it go away completely with: https://zoom.us/profile/setting and search for 'apps'. Turn off "Zoom Apps Quick Launch Button" and I believe that makes the dock go away, too.
> Zoom, the app for ensuring the knowledge worker parts of an economy continue to work when there’s a pandemic,
How did Zoom achieve this status? I had literally never used or heard of Zoom at home or at work prior to the pandemic, and now many treat it as synonymous with video chat the way that workplaces use Slack for text chat. Was there some crazy marketing strategy?
Yes, they allowed companies and public institutions to sign up and use the product for free with quick on boarding. They basically set up a "use now pay later" approach where they allowed lots of leeway to let you figure out need and payments down the road.
The competition were charging by the user (you had to commit to some user license number) and you had to go through the regular onboarding process. Zoom was like you let us know what you need later. Let’s get you up and running and we’ll work out details later.
And you could invite anyone, i.e. external 'users'/customers, whoever. Webex allowed that, but not e.g. Teams, which many would already have been paying for via Office365 (ironic name to have and lose on this one).
Well, google was busy only supporting chrome browser for hangouts (yes you could have video in FF but it wouldn’t support blurring or any other advanced features it did in chrome), and Microsoft kept failing with Skype for Business.
End of day, when you needed an app for video conferencing that worked for everyone, your choice was mostly zoom.
That's another question: when did blurring become a thing? It mostly sucks, and it feel like it's not that hard to make sure that you are fine with what's in your back... If you are not, just don't enable the video, right?
Lots of people ended up suddenly working from home with little to no warning and had to make do with whatever home environment they had available, whether they had a home office or not. The simplest, least intrusive professional option was to use blur.
true, I worked at a place that was super-anal about always having video on all the time. Funny enough, bigger companies I worked at often don't care. But it's probably good for "visibility" anyway.
Companies needed interoperability (sales, vendor conversations, etc) really fast in the pandemic and not being Google, Microsoft, etc., helped Zoom in a big way.
Google meet wasn’t far behind - but it was behind in quality vs zoom. And it wants to herd every user into getting a google account - if you wanted to just meet online with a random group of people zoom had the fewest hurdles.
They were well-positioned at the beginning of the pandemic, mainly because their client applications were so easy to install (in large part because of how they circumvented OS security features). Other solutions are better now, but they were in the right place at the right time.
It was in the right place at the right time. I had used zoom quite a bit before the pandemic. It was a great alternative to Google hangouts--it ran instantly from your browser and required very little fuss or setup (unlike Skype or desktop apps). Google killed and messed up their video chat apps and zoom was the only real option when the pandemic hit.
I don't believe they had any marketing. It's just that no other app was doing group video calls for free at that scale and with that quality at the start of the pandemic. It was the perfect no fuss solution available at the perfect time. Just create a call and copy over the link to whoever you want without them having to create an account.
That was not 'the' alternative. Skype, Teams (which subsumed it), Jitsi (which we used as a partially remote team prior to the pandemic and then inexplicably switched from to Zoom during), Discord was just starting to leak out of gamer-sphere, I think Slack already had group video calls, etc.
In California where I live it was. Skype was used by virtually no one. Teams and Jitsi were minor players. Google meet did not yet have traction. Most companies were using WebEx.
So as you say, most were already using something non-Zoom, that's the up-thread point - where did Zoom come from.
Also I doubt Teams was a minor player, in usage maybe but not availability - it has a free tier I think but otherwise comes with O365, which is obviously not minor. Having it doesn't mean you use Teams, but it does mean that it ought to be an obvious choice if you suddenly, newly, have a need for a product like that, as so many companies did.
Step 2: Zoom detects what website/app you're screen-sharing and charges Google / Microsoft / Miro etc a fee to enable "Ultra HD" for Zoom users when that site is showing on the screen (or they can join the New Zoom App Partner Program™ and publish the site as an app -- for a small revenue share fee of course)
Reminder: the zoom desktop app has a history of terrible security practices and should not be installed on any machine with data you intend to keep private; use the (hidden with dark patterns) web version instead and never give these people access to your computer.
Seconded. Use the web app, and when you're the one choosing the meeting technology choose more open alternatives like Jitsi (which doesn't even require an account for everyone).
