I’m more shocked that this massive tech industry has like one decent solution to remote video conferencing. Maybe we really have gone too far down the road of making bullshit apps, and stopped solving real problems.

Shame on us.

Shame on the telcos who prevent residential customers from using the internet as intended. If everyone was given an IPV6 address block and freedom to accept outside connections from anywhere, none of this would be an issue.

>freedom to accept outside connections from anywhere

Without NAT from home gateways (like consumer routers) preventing inbound connections from the internet, security would be far more of a nightmare than it is today. Requiring that people manually forward specific ports is the best way to handle it. We would be seeing news about Blaster-like worms pretty much every week of the past 20 years, otherwise.

Also, even if it were a good idea, this still wouldn't solve the problem at all. The NAT-traversing capability of Zoom and other products is like 0.01% of the value they provide. You still need good software.

agree on telcos preventing ppl from using internet as intended, but we'd still need good and easy to use videoconferencing software

MS Teams is pretty good, but it's Microsoft so people aren't using it as much. Which is understandable.

And it runs on Ubuntu! To be honest I'd rather not use software made or hosted on US/Chinese/Russian soil but I don't really have much choice at my workplace. If it didn't ran on Ubuntu I'd dual boot to windows just for meetings.

This would be a great time for some proper European alternatives.

Teams and Hangouts have the same problem -- they are hard to set up.

Zoom "just works". My in-laws joined a Zoom conference without help. There is no way they would have figured out Hangouts or Teams.

Yeah, totally agree. Our company uses Zoom. I'm happy enough with it. I've been forced to use MS Teams though, and I actually like it a fair bit.

And yet, almost nobody has commented on this sad state of affairs. You'd think there would be plenty of healthy competition in this space, but there is none. Why not?

I've worked for a couple of companies where capacity planning was way out of whack with the sales side.

The worst case of this was when a manager came and told me we had just landed a big customer and my response was, 'Oh, fuck me'.

When your product isn't built for scale, you can sell the hell out of it to small and medium sized customers, or sit back and let organic growth bring you people by word of mouth, and they will all be happy. Invite yourself to the Big Show before your systems are ready and you're gonna have a bad time.

In this case, there is probably nothing Zoom could have done to avoid this level of scrutiny at this time. Handle that scrutiny better? Sure. But it was going to happen either way.

Apart from that FBI warning of Zoombombing, I don't know a single non-tech person that's actually aware of all these security concerns, including China privacy.

Yeah, I've been seeing this all over. For example my sister in law hosted her wedding over Zoom this past weekend. Approx. 0% of the people who attended couldn't have cared less about encryption or security concerns. They just wanted the easiest way to join in on a video feed with their friends and family. It's even become a verb now: "zooming in" e.g. "Please zoom in to our meeting". That's the mark of something that's going to stick. Once searching on the web became "googling" in the general population it became impossible to unseat Google. I think the same will hold true for Zoom.