You can’t demand somebody turn on their camera when their computer has no camera to begin with.
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Well hate to say this is totally incorrect information but then again it may depend on how good you are at sales and what tools you’re using. Were using a virtual sales presentation tool called Lead Symphony and most of our customer sales are up nearly 50% over in-person visits. And we’re talking $100,000 to maybe $200,000 extra per month in sales. It all depends upon your skillset and how good you are I guess. 
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And nothing of value was lost.
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Zoom/Webex/BlueJeans/etc:
Individual 1: “Hello? Can you hear me?”
Individual 2: “Hello?”
Individual 2: “yes”
Individual 1: “Hello?”
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Why did you publish this article, Mark? This is a series of baseless assertions drooled out in no particular order. If there’s a case to make, then make it. Otherwise, trotting personal opinions is a waste of time, on the order of “Red is a better color than blue.”
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Indeed, if everyone spends most of their days in front of a screen anyway, with the right tools there is not reason to re-open offices except for a party now and then.
Personally I don’t like Slack, not enough focus on privacy and security for my taste. I have introduced Mattermost (OpenSource, but with optional paid enterprise support plans) in a few companies as Slack alternative.
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Despite a lot of their better moves in business and their behaviour recently when compared to the current big bad bogeymen of tech (Apple / Facebook / Google), a lot of people have a deep distrust of Microsoft.
On top of which, there’s still an ingrained belief that Microsoft apps are unwieldy bloatware.
Teams doesn’t do everything well, and can be positively byzantine if you regularly flip between log-ins, but broadly, I agree with you. Its collaboration tools are second to none.
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Their operating systems are crap, but the office suite was always excellent for professionals who knew what they were doing. A pity they sold it to the average person who was neither tech savvy nor in need of more than 5% of the features. But it made them a lot of money…
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Because Zoom works and is easy for everyone to figure out. And I speak as a member of a highly skilled, deeply technical IT department within one of the premier scientific research organizations in the country. We used Webex prior to the pandemic. We’ve almost entirely switched to Zoom now for almost everything and find it vastly superior. We already had focused chat channels using Jabber and other tools (Slack, Mattermost, etc), what we needed was software for group meetings that provided solid performance and high functionality.
Powerful is no replacement for “it just plain works and is simple to figure out.”
Though I’m in tech, my line on this is “who cares.” I don’t need video conferencing software and chat channels built into my other apps, that sort of feature creep and bloat is useless for most people. Maybe the apps and development teams need them, but most of the rest of the enterprise won’t. I would, though, like to be able to show folks what I’m working on when we meet. Zoom accomplishes that.
I sympathize, though, with folks whose organizations are forcing them to be “on camera” at all meetings. There was an initial push to do that with our org because someone thought it was more “professional.” It’s since gone away, because the one thing you can’t do with an organization consisting of 8,000 mostly introverts in the sciences is make them toe the corporate line. Hell, they’d had to give up mandating dress codes years ago because no one paid attention to them. The days of short sleeve button downs with pocket protectors have been long gone.
Yes, I’m lucky to work where I do, and not just because we make incredibly awesome science shit.
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You can demand your employee buys one, or you can buy them one. But yes, in the United States an employer could demand this as part of the work conditions. We’d all agree they’re a massive poopyhead if they do, though.
I used to be a sceptic, but was pleasantly surprised by a Jitsi birthday party that went on till early morning.
I find goToMeeting (a Zoom alternative) better than face to face meetings.
We have bug reviews for a large project. The project leader goes through the bug list and the person working on the bug replies. Then we all go around the table that isn’t there saying what we have done. Most of the time I will be listening to others, but there is a small chance the something they say may mean I have something to contribute.
There are about 20-30 people at an average meeting. Getting them all into one room used to be a major job. There weren’t always enough seats. It is much nicer being able to do this from home. We all have video images when we can, and I like it.
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Yep, that sounds pretty much like the average meeting I attend. I’m half working on other things, half paying attention in case I need to chime in. Zoom meetings are quicker, easy to organize, and far more productive than in person meetings ever were. And we no longer have to schedule some of the larger meetings around limited room availability.
Ultimately I expect this is the way work will function in the future. Now that lots of folks have experienced it, a large percentage are going to keep agitating for work from home. Businesses will find the cost of conferencing software far cheaper than the cost of renting or building new offices. It reduces the carbon footprint by taking single-car commuters off the roads. It’s just a massive win all around. And, if we had smart government (we don’t of course), it would spur new broadband buildouts nation wide to provide the high speed, reliable network connectivity it’ll require, thus creating large numbers of good paying jobs.
My catch phrase lately: when you can work from anywhere, you can live in the middle of nowhere.
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Your mileage may vary. MS Teams has to be provisioned and administered properly, and it often isn’t. My experience, having used Teams in one of the earliest/largest installations in a private company, is that Zoom is far more reliable and provides higher-quality, more consistent service than Teams. I can’t tell you how often I’ve been dropped from a Teams call, or lost just the audio portion, or been locked out and unable to join a Teams call at all.
My biggest problem with Zoom (and MS Teams, Google Meetings, WebEx etc.) is that it has facilitated having MORE meetings.
A lot of people I interact with are based in different towns/cities. People who wanted to meet maybe once every couple months before the pandemic now seem to want to meet every couple weeks because they discovered video-conferencing software (and they are stuck at their home desks instead of being able to do field work).
It needs to stop - I’ve been doing my best to decline meetings but they just keep coming and eventually people will have their feelings hurt.
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Well sure, you’ve got to get the corporate cult meetings in.
It’s the same thing just generally not done as well as your average dime store cult leader manages it.
Same feeling here. Also the video is indispensable for people who lip read to communicate.
From what I know of them, yes. Or idiots. Sometimes both. It’s shocking, really.
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Considering that 99% of my meetings are on MS Teams with screen sharing the scrum board instead of video, I often forget that I can use video. Nobody wants to use it, because it eats bandwidth and because it has lost its novelty already.
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So much hate when the main point is Zoom right now is a replacement for not getting COVID and a great substitute for in person meetings.
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