What we have here is a failure to communicate. About a failure to communicate, in fact.
The problem is, there’s not a cloud of people centered on me, such that they can all simply settle on the standard that I happened to pick.
It’s more of a worldwide network with potentially trillions of acquaintances, and people who may need to communicate even if they don’t know each other yet.
If we might step back a moment, and approach this by way of metaphor, suppose there were a dozen popular kinds of telephones and a steady stream of new obscure ones, and you could only talk to people who had the same kind you had (this fact is analogous to what I originally asked about, and, yes, they need the same kind of telephone). So we would all have and maintain and learn how to use several kinds, and that still wouldn’t let us talk to anybody we needed to. I have a Teams phone I use the most because of work, and also a FaceTime phone I’ve used with some friends because we all happen to have Apple products, and I also have a Facebook Messenger phone I haven’t tried out yet. I’m wondering, is this good enough? I guess maybe I should get a Zoom phone, because so many people now got theirs.
The idea that we should just install new software every time we need to chat with somebody incompatible doesn’t work on my PC, because it’s a corporate PC that’s locked down and the process of getting approval of previously unapproved software was lengthy and slow and involved a lot of paperwork back before the pandemic; it’s probably impossible for the foreseeable future. And it’s not so appealing for my Mac because every so often installing new software messes things up, which is the last thing I want to do right now – and that’s if there’s a Mac version available.
So, this sounds like the usual computer industry mess.
So when you want to talk with a bunch of folks in your company, you use whatever program your corporate IT department said to use for that. That one fails to be a problem precisely because it is locked down.
My first exposure to Zoom was when one guy in my D&D group said “We should do our next session online, instead of meeting in person. I’ve gotten this Zoom program that seems like it should work.”, and so I got Zoom, too, and we tested it out and it still seemed to work, so all the rest of the group got it, too.
I can envision a world where, at that initial e-mail, someone else in the group had said “We already have Facetime and know how to use it; how about we do that instead?”. And then we would have decided as a group which one to use, and then whichever one we decided, everyone would get that one, instead. That wasn’t the world we were actually in, but it would have worked just fine, too.
Napier is specifically talking about communicating with people outside his company. Those people may be locked out of the standard that Napier is locked into. Facetime is a prime example. It’s only available on Apple devices. That accounts for less than 10% of computer users and less than half of smartphone users.
The answer here is Zoom, Webex, or GoToMeeting. All three are easy to download and run, prompted by the link sent out by the host. There are minor differences between the three, but any will do, and they’ll work on nearly any platform.
My company computer lives behind one of the hardest firewalls around and my computer is locked down to an extraordinary extent. I’ve been able to download and install for Webex, GoToMeeting, and BlueJean. For some reason, our InfoSec has whitelisted the conferencing apps. I always give it a try on my company computer before I fall back on something like my phone (Our IT is paranoid enough that there is no wi-fi for employees’ non-company devices).
I ran a Zoom meeting for my critique group last Thursday and they have done away with the time limit for the free version. I don’t know about the attendee limit - we were nowhere near that.
I’ve used WebEx and some other programs a lot, but Zoom seems easier to install than they are. My critique group is not exactly computer savvy (and I’m relatively young compared to the others) but no one had a problem installing it. One person has a Mac.
Would you rather have someone mandate the use of one program only and destroy innovation?
Your corporate IT department no doubt limits software installations in order to not have to deal with incompatibilities from random software being installed - which they’d have to resolve - and also to limit security issues. But you shouldn’t as a rule be doing personal stuff on your corporate PC. They do scan it.
Zoom works fine for Macs. So does WebEx. If your Mac starts acting up when you load software from trusted sources, don’t blame the industry.
This has been asked and answered. Furthermore, it’s an imaginary problem.
I work in an ITAR-controlled environment, which means we have strict limits on which apps we can use as well as who we can videoconference with. If the different-online-meeting software problem actually existed, it would be a problem for us. It’s not a problem.
Sometimes we have to convince vendors to use our preferred platform rather than theirs, but vendors who do ITAR work have to communicate with multiple companies, all with locked-down machines. So their machines have all the apps installed: Skype for busines, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, GoToMeeting, WebEx, etc. It’s not hard to install all of these on a single computer.
I use FaceTime to talk to my mom, because we both have iPhones. I use Zoom and Skype on my iPhone to talk to my brother on his Android phone. This is not a hard problem to solve.
Feeling anxious about the solution—the OP seems anxious about installing MacOS software—is not the same thing as having no solution.
I gather the OP wants a particular kind of solution—video conferencing cross-compatibility—and that already exists. But that’s behind the scenes, and you can’t use Skype to join a Zoom meeting. So what? The available solution is to find one app both parties can use. Sure, there could be a more elegant solution in theory, but the one we have in practice isn’t particularly challenging for most people.
Missed the edit window (by a lot), but I should have expanded that acronym:
ITAR stands for “International Traffic in Arms Regulations.” These are the US laws and regulations that govern the manufacture and export of things that might be useful for defense. It covers a range of things that some might not expect, and the restrictions are tricky. The burden of ITAR is sort of analogous to the regulatory burden HIPAA creates in the American health care system.
There is no doubt that there are speed-humps in using these applications. I found that individual industries can sometimes end up with a single application, mostly via a random walk that evolves towards one. But that doens’t work when one needs to go outside industry partners.
Talking to any larger company always seems to get you into problems. There is always an IT support group that has much of the internal networking locked down, and strict firewall rules. Most applications can now work their way through the worst, but with some hackery. The number of times trying to set up meetings with new clients I have had to have conversations with their IT group to ensure we had end to end communication before the actual meat of the engagement could happen was quite depressing. That was the oil exploration industry. Thankfully now mostly a previous life. Now I worry about ITAR too. It isn’t just a USA thing. Any country that deals with the US with ITAR controlled technology has to follow the same rules. And they are not simple.
In terms of default standards, I was horrified to find that across a lot of the petroleum industry, the standard medium for information interchange is a Powerpoint presentation. They use Powerpoints like any normal person would use a tar or zip file.
