[velcro]

Not defending them in any way - but don't think security was the primary reason for Zoom taking off. It was stability - it just worked and at the same time competitors didn't.

Everybody used to have Skype and I would have gladly handed over my data to MS if only it would have been able to do stable video calls. It was often a disaster for just 2-way calls, let alone group.

[londons_explore]

> don't think security was the primary reason for Zoom taking off. It was stability

Stability was the main draw, but company IT departments would have had more power to ban it if there were bigger and clearer risks of corporate secrets escaping.

[mfer]

Industrial espionage is real. There are many companies who are concerned about this and take active steps to keep data secret who would likely not have approved zoom use if they'd known e2e encryption wasn't to the level they were told.

Some folks are concerned with more than stability and ease of use.

[AmericanChopper]

Any company IT department's power to ban something is inversely related to how much it's users want to use it. Also, the videoconference provider stealing company secrets it not part of most companies threat model. Teams and Slack are incredibly popular corporate tools, and neither of them offer this feature. WebEx is the only reasonably popular tool I can think of that supports it, and any security department that cared strongly about E2EE, would be asking questions like "do you perform key escrow" if they were thinking of migrating off something like that.

[rndgermandude]

Or state secrets, or court secrets, or just preventing random zoom admins from watching children in virtual class rooms.

[unityByFreedom]

> It was stability - it just worked

Also due to deception, it auto reinstalled on macs until they were caught.

[eznzt]

"this software I uninstalled keeps reinstalling itself. oh well, I guess I will have to use it!" said no one ever.

[SkyPuncher]

> It was stability - it just worked and at the same time competitors didn't.

This is absolutely huge. We've tried Teams (and I have previously used Webex and Hangouts).

It seems like there is _always_ one person that struggles with other video services. Can't join, video/audio issues, CPU usage, latency, etc. Painful when 10%+ of a meeting is consumed by getting one last, key person trying to fix their issues.

[Xelbair]

and it could be more stable because it didn't implement e2e encryption.

[levosmetalo]

It's much easier to make a stable communication product if you don't need to worry about security and privacy.

Just look at the troubles and hurdles Signal messenger need to overcome to implement some features, while the competition that is not so security focused has them since forever.

[WhyNotHugo]

They took money from many clients to provide a service.

They did not provide the service the advertised: they provided something much inferior (and that's actually unsuitable for many industries).

It's not really really about "what would clients have done otherwise". It's a matter of giving money back.

If you pay me to write a program, and it only does half of what I promise, wouldn't you want [part of] your money back?

[vaccinator]

Skype was better before the MS aquisition... and it used to be P2P. It'd be nice if the pre-MS source would leak somehow.

[DangerousPie]

I think you may be viewing history through slightly rose-tinted glasses there - I used pre-MS Skype a lot and it was never anywhere near as reliable as Zoom is and didn't support group video chat at all. And the fact that it was P2P meant that some features that everyone would expect to work these days (offline messages, mobile support) were simply not possible at all.

[kristofferR]

Fun fact, the original Skype developers also developed the great (for its time) P2P filesharing app/network Kazaa/FastTrack.

[michaelmior]

I'm not sure what would be accomplished if the source leaked. Someone would still need to maintain both the client and now a new set of servers. This would be difficult given that Microsoft would almost certainly use whatever means they could to stop this from happening.

[pulse7]

It was stability and speed! It uses very little CPU for everything!

[tonetheman]

THIS THIS THIS. End users (generally) do not care about security they just need it to work.

That is what was great about zoom. The security becomes important after it works.