The worst thing about this is just how much we normalized using Zoom, a private company who shamelessly admits to using your meetings to train AI, as a way for people to receive therapy. It’s not like the American healthcare system is swimming in money and can easily self-host a meeting platform on servers that they control or anything. No I don’t trust that Zoom obeys HIPAA laws even if they swear up and down they do, because tech companies violate it all the damn time and never get any consequences, so violating it is literally a no-brainer for profit chasing CEOs.
What REALLY weirded me out is that…Skype was doing video calls for years before the pandemic, Skype got picked up by Microsoft, the biggest software house in the world with the power to make Skype non-removable on 90% of the work computers in the word…And they lost to some no name company that sprang up out of nowhere.
It doesn’t surprise me that Google failed, because they’d probably started, advertised, ran, monetized, abandoned and shut down three different and incompatible video conferencing suites so “Let’s just use Google Spew” “Wait I thought it was called Youtube Both Ways” “You mean Teams?” “No that’s a Microsoft thing isn’t it?”
Slack was like “…nah we’re still just IRC for work.”
Microsoft Teams for business is pretty good as long as the call stays within the company. Go outside of that and you run into loads of problems thanks to Microsoft’s hubris. The problem really is Microsoft.
If we haven’t (I might have missed it), a few years from now we’ll get an insider’s story on how Microsoft killed Skype.
There must have been some really fucked up political shenanigans with the “Skype for Business” into “MS Teams” folks that must be at the root of much of Regular Skype™'s enshitification.
Now we just wait for third time to become the charm: MSFT will buy Discord, rebrand it “Teams for XBOX”, then promptly enshittify it because it’s eating into their own B2B marketshare.
The worst thing about this is just how much we normalized using Zoom, a private company who shamelessly admits to using your meetings to train AI, as a way for people to receive therapy. It’s not like the American healthcare system is swimming in money and can easily self-host a meeting platform on servers that they control or anything. No I don’t trust that Zoom obeys HIPAA laws even if they swear up and down they do, because tech companies violate it all the damn time and never get any consequences, so violating it is literally a no-brainer for profit chasing CEOs.
What REALLY weirded me out is that…Skype was doing video calls for years before the pandemic, Skype got picked up by Microsoft, the biggest software house in the world with the power to make Skype non-removable on 90% of the work computers in the word…And they lost to some no name company that sprang up out of nowhere.
It doesn’t surprise me that Google failed, because they’d probably started, advertised, ran, monetized, abandoned and shut down three different and incompatible video conferencing suites so “Let’s just use Google Spew” “Wait I thought it was called Youtube Both Ways” “You mean Teams?” “No that’s a Microsoft thing isn’t it?”
Slack was like “…nah we’re still just IRC for work.”
Did it? Isn’t Google meet one of the rare things they were successful with?
Skype had become a really horrible program under Microsoft. Aweful buggy app, bad video quality, … Here’s someone else’s testimony, which matches my own experience: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/skype/forum/all/skype-is-horrible/83ceff2b-3217-4ddd-bfa5-fcec0b390997
Microsoft Teams for business is pretty good as long as the call stays within the company. Go outside of that and you run into loads of problems thanks to Microsoft’s hubris. The problem really is Microsoft.
Zoom and Google meet just work in my experience.
If we haven’t (I might have missed it), a few years from now we’ll get an insider’s story on how Microsoft killed Skype.
There must have been some really fucked up political shenanigans with the “Skype for Business” into “MS Teams” folks that must be at the root of much of Regular Skype™'s enshitification.
Now we just wait for third time to become the charm: MSFT will buy Discord, rebrand it “Teams for XBOX”, then promptly enshittify it because it’s eating into their own B2B marketshare.
A Message From the Skype CEO