The HD video quality is surprisingly solid -- comparable to Zoom, far surpasses Webex and Google Hangouts -- and uses a different protocol, codec(s) and network than Skype for Business, which I have always found spotty. MS Teams is the slated successor to Skype for Business (good riddance).

https://www.djeek.com/2018/01/microsoft-teams-and-the-protoc...

It can handle up to 250 participants for group video chat (similar to Zoom), and there's an MS Teams Live Events edition that can handle 10k participants. (20k during COVID)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live-e...

It actually does a few things better than Zoom -- its virtual background feature is able to better detect and eliminate complex backgrounds. It recently introduced on-the-fly automatic closed captioning (through speech recognition). Later this year, it will have a larger video grid (currently the limit is 3x3) and AI-based noise cancellation on mic input -- previously the domain of offerings like krisp.ai.

On iOS devices, it even lets you do live screen-sharing on mobile (using Apple's Screen Recorder mechanism), which makes it easy to demo mobile apps on a video call.

EDIT: --I don't think Zoom let you do this (yet?)-- not a true statement, but leaving this here with strikethrough.

Why the does chat need to take up so much space on the screen and why is everything presented in basically an old school SMS layout (I'm looking at you too, Signal). I tried a handful of their integrations nothing worked correctly. Trying to simply enable github commits/PRs/etc was a confusing nightmare of authenticating multiple parties and ultimately all it did was have a chatbot privately spam me, but couldn't have it reside in a channel.

Screen sharing is a disaster for everything business oriented too (ms teams, zoom, slack, whatever google's thing is called this week). They're slow, laggy, frequently crash, and resolution is unreadable most of the time. If you need to have screen sharing where your voice chat happens at the same time as your video actions, Discord is the only thing that works flawlessly. It's superior on simple voice chat too, persistent voice chat rooms, etc. It's lovely software.

[1] https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/02/teams-bet...

I can't comment on aesthetics since that's fairly subjective. I can't comment on integrations either since I've only tried a few, but I find it integrates fairly effortlessly with Azure Devops (ie Microsoft's attempt at replicating Github in what was previously Team Foundation Server) [1].

Here's the thing about Microsoft stuff -- generally things work well if you remain in the Microsoft ecosystem. Otherwise, you'll likely have to do extra work.

That said, Teams has improved drastically since 2017. Microsoft's philosophy these days seems to be move fast, ship crap and get better quickly. Not in every product line, but I've definitely seen this happen with Teams development and I've actually come to like what the Teams product has become today. I have to confess, Microsoft under Satya Nadella is a very different company from what it once was.

[1] We're not allowed to use Github in my organization (bigcorp, IP etc.) but I've found Azure Devops to be quite a decent substitute. It plays well with a git pull-request workflow, has almost full feature parity with Github as far as I can tell, plus has a built-in kanban board.

I like Github -- it's more tightly focused and simpler -- but I've been able to carve out a part of Azure Devops that is similar to Github and maintain my previous git workflow without much trouble. Azure Devops is not the dumpster fire I'd expected it to be -- it's actually fairly good in parts.

(the only pain-in-the-neck with Azure Devops is licensing cost -- it's not free. In the enterprise, it has named-user licensing which can get costly. I wouldn't have used it if we didn't already have it and couldn't use private Github.)

Is your organization aware that Microsoft owns Github and your Azure stuff is most likely hosted inside Microsoft data centers exactly like Github? Seems like a weird line in the sand to draw.

> Microsoft under Satya Nadella is a very different company from what it once was.

Yeah, Microsoft is doing great things in other areas. VS Code, Windows 10, WSL, DirectX on WSL, the massive focus on open source and giving back to the community. I just found MS Teams in particular is unusable garbage, but I'm very happy with Microsoft otherwise.

I don't know if you're old enough but MS Comic Chat was significantly superior to Microsoft Teams.

I've never used it but I'm old enough to remember Comic Chat. Fair enough, we have different positions and that's ok.

It's just quite surprising. I don't know if they did a bad job or if the momentum was just unlucky. But I have no idea how the OS manufacturer wasn't able to dominate this market.

The last paragraph makes a good point though. As good as Slack is, there is something that still feels inefficient to me. When I'm trying to communicate with people it's almost like shouting out into the ether. Did they see my message? Why haven't they responded yet? I need this question answered now.

It's strange. Email for the most part you were reasonably assured when you hit the send button that it was off into their inbox. It would be kind of cool to see what the Snap of business comms could look like.

XMPP and now Matrix made good progress in that direction but are mostly obscure to date.

2) NAT really screwed us all by breaking the end-to-end nature of the Internet.

Don't worry, we'll all be on IPV6 any day now.

The most easily accessible alternative is another company's closed system.

I suspect NAT wasn't involved in that developing as much as money was - IRC, email, Newsgroups were hard to profit from. Having a distinctive service which is different from your competitors so customers can be attracted, and which is closed so customers want to bring their friends and family in to talk to them and then can't leave without the whole group leaving, is bound to be more profitable for the winners than taking part in a federated system where only one user can join and talk to their contacts with relays to other servers.

And then you add a committee and the lowest common denominator doesn't change very fast.

You can do audio/video calls and IM with it (using SIMPLE). The problem is being able to call people beyond your SIP servers. Companies don't want to allow it, probably because they don't want to have their service become a commodity.

Customer service is now so terrible that I don't want to talk to you and I damn sure don't want you to talk to me. At this point, I've kinda bought into the whole Millennial "If I can't do it online without interacting with a human, go die in a fire cause you aren't making a sale."

Quit hiding the price--you simply lost the sale. Don't ask for a quote-you simply lost the sale. Don't make me sign up before paying--you simply lost the sale. If I can't do a return solely through online interaction--you simply lost any further sales.

I see Zoom and its ilk the same way. Ubiquitous video chat--that nobody really wants.

Audio and, especially, video are very synchronous. Normally, the last thing I want in my schedule is another synchronous event.

Do I need some video? Maybe. Perhaps my one-on-one with my manager.

Do we need video for a weekly group meeting? Do we even need that weekly group meeting? Sure, it was convenient when everybody was in the office. How convenient is it now that everybody is at home?

My mom wanted to do a family video chat over Easter and I thought, "Hey, we use Google Meet at work. I bet it will be great for this." It was a completely unusable experience of frozen videos and dropped audio. I was ready to just completely throw in the towel on the entire idea.

My mom said, "Well, me and my sisters have been using Skype for years and it works just fine." So I begrudgingly downloaded Skype and created an account. It just works. It's amazing.

We've been doing video chats every Sunday evening with my mom and my brother's family for a couple months now. I thought I hated video chat. It turned out I just hated Google's idea of video chat.

My wife uses Facebook video chat with her mom and it works pretty acceptably too. I think Skype is still better, but Google Meet is absolute bottom of the barrel in video chat technology. Which is a shame because Google Meet works great for audio with screen sharing.

Maybe Zoom works comparably well to Skype. I hope so.

If you force your network adapter to be 1 Mbps mid-call, Zoom will quickly butcher the quality to keep up. Google will drop out.

I’ve had the opposite experience. Zoom is far from ideal but Aside from a twice-daily freeze (that I suspect has something to do with my audio driver) Zoom works wonderfully.

Google meet, on the other hand, has been miserable. I’ve had cases where the group could hear me but I couldn’t hear them, even when the “test audio” button in the browser client produced sound. Even after calling in using a mobile phone I could then hear the group but then they couldn’t hear me. It feels like an alpha product as far as reliability goes.

Meet has been rock solid and my team switched over to it about two weeks ago - 0 issues so far.

- At least half the time, one of the dialins doesn't work

- It's not uncommon for the meeting and caller id to be "below the fold", plus you can't resize the window with them, plus it scrolls to the top whenever someone joins. So you'll scroll down to see the meeting id, start typing, someone will join, it'll scroll back up, and you'll have to scroll back down.

There's just a bunch of minor issues like this that add up to make it seem like Zoom was done by one of those "oh, I can write that up in a weekend" people.

To add a note of positive, both of them are much better than some of the other systems I've used. There was one where the mute button was right next to the hang up button; I'd wind up accidentally disconnecting from calls accidentally on average once per call.

Everyone else would get sent a link which would download the client if not already installed (it would have been perfect if that had gone straight to the browser client) and then they were up and running.

The friction to getting started was significantly lower than Skype and Hangouts and whatever else. And now that almost everyone has Zoom installed, it's going to stay low.

The real power of digital communication is that it is searchable, remixable and that you don’t need to be at a specific place at a specific time to take part, and yet we now all have slots in our calendar requiring us to be in something that has none of those benefits. This is an anti-pattern.

Group communication needs to be async, written and structured for easy access. The linux kernel mailing list is a much closer approximation of how it should be than any video conference, but it too is a high friction system. No tool so far has cracked this, although some like discourse and basecamp are trying. Google tried to once upon a time with wave, but they’ve given up and joined the physical meeting proxy club.

Asynchronous communication has its place, and it's amazing what has been accomplished over the LKML and similar. Software projects tend to make this sort of communication ideal, since they are amenable to individualized contributions. But the prescription that efficient digital communication must be asynchronous and textual is incorrect.

Sorry this was deep inside me and had to come out :D

And simple factual information belongs in good documentation, not being asked in Slack as a crutch and then claim "but it's searchable"

If we're doing it interactively, I can verify your comprehension and limit my need to elaborate, saving us both time.

And if we need back-and-forth collaboration, interactive is likely to be much better than multiple interruptions and context switches.

My general rule is, if it's going to be more than 2 back-and-forth exchanges, do a voice call.

And waiting while someone types a response is pure waste.

My feeling is: video conferencing took hold for two main reasons (in the university context):

1. It is the most straightforward continuation of whatever existed before (those who talk, talk and those who listen, listen)

2. People have desire for beeing close with others

However in terms of efficiency, I noticed that the raw educational value of some (often 4h+ long) meetings could have been summarized by watching a well produced 15min video and reading a 10 page PDF, if one were to skip all the chitchat and pointless hollow remarks. In terms of information density the seemingly unlimited nature of video conferencing doesn't work out well in practise (especially if paired with people who like to hear themselves speak).

Most of our educators are certainly not happy with what it does to the way they have to teach (less interactivity — anything other than a 3-way conversation is nearly impossible, the rest has to be passive). They say it leads to more frontal and less communicative education.

As musician, artist and programmer i know async collaborations and projects — the best stuff was always a combination of sync and async. This is why I tend to recommend to our educators to view video conferences not as the replacement for their usual seminars, but as part of a strategic mix with synchronous (video conferences) and asynchronous components (email, collaborative text editing, etc).

Personally I find the "chit chat and hollow conversation" far more pleasurable than spending those hours alone reviewing notes, obviously with the caveat that most of the discussion is related to the material at hand in some way

It is surprisingly difficult to create a useful 15 minute video. Go ahead and be rich if you find it easy. It takes me about 8 hours to produce 15 minutes of truly information-packed video content. And it is not as re-usable as you think.

> if one were to skip all the chitchat

Many people need the social chitchat to feel OK. It is not a negative side of video conferencing, it is added value.

I think that's exactly the point. Makes someone think about what they want to say. At least only one person has to do it, rather than all the participants doing the same work in their heads.

Apparently at Amazon you have to write a document/essay before every meeting.

i would consider that short!

the benchmark i have is 1 minute of video is 1 hour of production time.

So that would be 16 hours per minute of airtime, although admittedly that particular format was higher-than-average production quality.

I also have some personal experience producing scripted podcasts, and there I have about 0.5 hours per minute of airtime. It's a lot less work since I'm doing it as a single person and I don't have to care about video.

When you're saying "1 hour per minute" for video content, I actually find that incredibly efficient.

haha, i am only including editing of video (and may be the script). Not the research or anything like that.

The 1hr per minute is from professional editors for video production companies. it's like i, as a professional programmer, can probably get about 100 lines of debugged code per day, excluding thinking/research time.

I think this aspect really needs more attention. Personally, I have never felt much need for much of social bonding at work but I am fully aware that many people have stronger desires in this area.

We ignore human psychology at our own peril. Even very technical people with low social requirements remain human and, more importantly, work with other humans that may have different needs.

It is an added value for some, and it is a negative value for others.

Every minute that you're feeling great because of being "social" at work is a minute that someone else dreads, because they're feeling as if they were in a circus and would prefer to reserve being social for people they like spending time with, not the people they are forced to spend their time with.

And I never said chitchat isn't okay. I clearly said that this is part of why people do it. We have to realise that people sit at home, and can get very easily distracted. If you are an educator your goal should be to counter that by creating a clear structure. Let's say: 15mins of focused introduction, 20 mins on free chitchat, then watching a video collectively, then discussion about it, etc. This is what successful educators in our university do. If you don't structure it (e.g. I witnessed 4 hours of unstructured chitchat), you are exhausting everyone, and they would have gained more from just watching one youtube video on the topic.

This is the problem. Why does it matter if it takes 8 hours?

What this comment replies to talks about 4 hour meeting but just with 3 people it nets 3 hours saved as a collective (assuming all 3 watch the 15 minute video).

This past week there was an article on HN that talked about the benefits of written communication. The argument of effort to produce such "memos" was throughout the discussion but it is the very same as the conversation about video here.

I've seen this at multiple places that contributors don't want to put the upfront additional work for the collective benefit. Human nature at it's best, selfishness.

If it's truly collaborative, with each person contributing on the fly, then there's no way to make that 15 min video without all participants anyhow.

It matters because letting impatient people get rid of social conventions placing boundaries on their access to others' time is a dangerous thing to do, doubly so when the pretext for doing so is dumping responsibility for creating deliverables on small subsets of an org, which they will never be able to escape once the expectation is established.

The thing about synchronous is that the important people who refuse to read anything all have to sit in a chair and fidget at the same time to get the answers they want. There is no fiction that I will produce an artifact allowing me to disseminate information 1-to-M, and each important person enforces with the others that they can't interrogate me out-of-band and skip the meeting. There's only collective benefit if the document author can tell people "fuck you, read the memo." Otherwise, you're just spending hours putting up a sign-post for lazy people to bother you.

Balancing efficiency and normal social contact can be tricky to get right even in a physical office setting, but I'm fairly sure aiming for peak efficiency to the exclusion of all casual conversation is not a good plan. Those friendly chats when everyone is getting to work in the morning or while the coffee is on matter. One of the downsides of remote working, particularly in the current situation with the virus, is the sense of isolation and potentially loneliness it creates if you don't take active steps to stay connected to your colleagues, and video chat allows that in a way no glorified mailing list ever will.

In person 4h+ meeting would have equally low value. In all seriousness. Plus, people would be all antsy due not inability to go to bathroom or get the drink.

When you are at 4h+ meeting, the video conferencing is the least of problems.

If you are talking about 4 hour meetings of collaboration, then you are creating something together. And while it's quite often more efficient to see a distilled version of something rather than going through all steps as it's developed (kind of like reading a review article in a journal as opposed to all of the original research), the problem is that you need to go through that original stuff (the 4 hour meeting) to get to the outcome. If you aren't participating then you aren't helping create that information.

On the other hand, if you are talking about 4 hour presentations that can be distilled to 15 minutes of actual value, that's a different problem entirely.

You really don't join the kind of video conferences I'm called into, where an hour long meeting might easily have been done in a few minutes by email.

Edit: Typo, and on a sidenote, I'm glad I hear about these sorta meetings from others, my boss does his best to keep us out of useless cruft.

this has never been my experience. group meetings devolve into explaining the same thing in many different ways, for every item that is discussed.

“We need to be async only yada yada. It’s how the Linux kernel is developed”

We do that until our projects are late or we have an outage, then it’s just endless synchronous calls until we get our smug on again.

Just have both in moderation.

It’s a model I’m thinking about quite a bit lately given how distracting I’ve been finding a lot of IM/chat apps lately. I’m with you, both forms in moderation, and ideally with the sync stuff concentrated into reasonably-sized reasonably-spaced chunks.

The Library of Congress has ~38 million books in it. Imagine you could search it, it's easy to say that would make it more useful. And it probably would for some people - but a human has very little processing power and slow reading speed, if you got 38 million books reduced to 1,000 context-free paragraphs, that's still too many to read through.

This leaves "search" as a tool for limited situations such as: You remember roughly who put the content there and when and close-enough exactly what it said. Often in this situation that's still not enough to find it. Or, you want something popular like "iTunes Store Login" or "$Restaurant opening times". Or you are a researcher/archeologist.

Outside those kinds of usecases, "it's searchable" is more of a tragedy of the commons style problem - people who are best placed to do it (those making decisions) don't want to do it, and offload the problem to everyone else saying "it's searchable". This leaves decisions, documentation, and history scattered over an ever-increasing wasteland and intermingled with countless book-equivalent-volumes of chat, jokes, memes, flamewars, "donuts in the breakroom" trivia, outdated status updates, and all sorts.

Slogging through 1,000 paragraphs from the Library of Congress search results is still possible. Increasingly, every move is dogged by the weight of "search the 10,000 GitHub issues and read all the screens and screens of backlog" and "search the mailing list archives", the Slack archives, the IRC archives, the email threads, the forum threads, skim-reading junk and junk and junk, only to have to do it again 5 minutes later when your boss says "what was the status of X project?" and 20 minutes later when your coworker says "any reason X was changed?" and 10 minutes later when you want to know if X library should be behaving this way or not.

"Do nothing and let the search be our panacea" has always won over "big-organize up front" but it should be clear to everyone by now that Google search results get worse year on year. Nature lets things rot, unless you put maintenance effort in to keep them. We burn some money and a LOT of people's time keeping junk by default, on the "it might come in useful oneday" principle that leads to hoarder houses.

We act as if data can't cause disease and can't attract cockroaches, but ignore the fact that it piles up, clutters things up, gets in the way, it's the arterial plaque, the drainpipe sludge, the rust, of computer systems.

The power of digital communication is space travel - it's possible for people far away to be involved, and time travel - people who weren't there see what happened. "Searchable" is the Siren's call, that's not its power, that's its road to Hell paved with good intentions.

> I'm not sure what you meant by "blargh". If you meant foo then [long explanation, probably with bullet points]. If you meant bar then [a different long explanation].

This isn't an efficient use of either of our time. Also, if the explanation was already a bit intimidating (in terms of amount of content) then double that is even worse, even if half of it is actually irrelevant.

The alternative is that I ask what they meant by "blargh" but often the response doesn't get the heart of the difference, probably because the difference is subtle enough they didn't realise there was one in the first place. So it takes a few messages to sort out, by which point the whole conversation has dragged on for a few extra hours precisely because the communication is asynchronous so messages aren't replied to instantly by either of us, which is distracting us (or me, at least!) for that long.

In a conversation where there's likely to be some ambiguities in what you're saying, it's just much faster and less wasteful to iterate your joint understanding with a synchronous conversation. I often have highly technical conversations that are like this, but it's probably true even of lots of non-technical conversations.

Of course what I've said is mostly true of one to one conversations. But depending on the nature of a meeting, often lots of these happen between pairs of people in the meeting.

You get one sentence addressing the simplest interpretation of the simplest interrogative clause across the body of the message and as far as they're concerned it's off their to-do list.

For these people I need to physically impose my presence (or at least heavy breathing over audio) to elicit the minutes of time spent on task required to obtain the information I need.

And there are people you just can't collaborate with in that way - you'll never get back what you need.

And by big, I mean 40+ inches and resolution of 1080p or greater.

If you’ve ever tried it, you’ll see how incredible videoconferencing can actually be. It’s as different of an experience as Wolfenstein 3D was from the previous 2D map version. Totally different.

FYI, helps to have it to the side of you instead of in front of you for best results, so that it’s like sitting beside someone.

It would have to be a device that's as simple to use as a phone. Not a cell phone, a regular phone that sits on a desk, the old-fashioned kind.

I bet a whole lot of people wish that they had something like that working during the pandemic.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collaboration-endpoin...

Or at least that's how it worked last time I tried a month ago or so.

We're glad we have it now, but getting it working wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't been staying over for a week. Google at least isn't thinking about this product the right way.

https://www.noisolation.com/uk/komp/

Why? Smartphones are already ubiquitous and there are plenty of extremely capable dirt-cheap models thanks to economies of stale.

Just get your grandma a $100 smartphone.

Older/differently abled folks have real issues with tech designed for the young and nimble.

https://www.theregister.com/2004/09/15/amstrad_e3_launch/

What is Zoom's Yo?

Perhaps a link to a three-second "Never gonna give you up..." Rick-roll video?

Yo was one-bit Twitter. I don't know what one-bit video looks like?

Today the conversations seem so stilted because there's 50+ milliseconds of latency at a MINIMUM that makes interrupting and a back-and-forth conversational flow absolutely impossible. Also lost completely are the little "ahs" and "ums" that add color to a conversation.

"we are waiting for the Snap, Clubhouse and Yo." If products like this emerge they will be niche like Twitch is for gaming video live streaming.

For example somebody pulls up document in a call. For team work it would make sense if it was editable by everyone right there in the conference tool.

Overall it does require people to take work from home seriously though! Back in the days when we worked in offices video calls did have less pets and random people or kids walk in!

If people are able to have a dedicated office this works better but obviously not everyone was prepared for a forced work from home experience. It does require a solid internet connection which has been strained lately.

a. the person with feedback or background noise causing the video to flip to them

b. someone displaying their lunch for everyone to see

c. Zoom specialty: obnoxious video backgrounds

Zoom helps you block trolls, but does nothing for the pain of having to listen to someone's feedback during an hour long meeting. And you often don't want to interrupt the meeting to pester people about their microphone.

It's a similar problem to Slack. We have some people who overuse @here and various similar sins, and Slack's answer is there's no reason to block, just fix your company.[1]

What this misses is there's a broad range of behavior between pleasant and malicious. There are also a broad range of social remedies we normally use to deal with this behavior.

Most of those social remedies don't work well online. It's surprisingly hard to craft a written correction that doesn't come across as an attack, especially if you're senior and don't want to unintentionally throw that rank around.

[1]: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481

For class-related stuff or larger meetings/seminars, we use the Events portion of WebEx instead of Meetings. It's basically the same thing, but there are more "roles" so there's a host who can mute/unmute participants or assign privileges. Panelists are the speakers who can turn their audio and video off by themselves but can only screen share if made a "presenter". Attendees are just the people watching the thing, and they can chat with text but can't turn their own mics on. They can raise their hand or the host can find them in the attendee list if they need to unmute them.

Once people got used to how it works, it has been surprisingly effective. You don't need to make sure every attendee in a 300-person seminar has headphones on--just the people who are presenting. If one of the presenters is unwilling or unable to use headphones, I can mute them if they have a live mic that's just causing echo while they sit there and listen. Students and other attendees can still speak with their mics, but only when called on.

Incidentally, this also does away with all of the issues of people disrupting Zoom calls because you can only join as a panelist if you are on the list and have the right link. You can still publish the attendee link publicly because the worst thing an attendee can do is type in the chat (and even then, they can only send to "all participants" if you enable it).

I see management sitting on a porch swing with beautiful scenery in the background and know I need to ask for a god-damn raise

I haven't given this much thought but maybe this is an interesting direction to explore?

It will even stream an in-progress video message to you as it's being recorded if you happen to be looking at the app then.

Check out a stream today to see it in action: https://dexter.live/

Positional 3D audio is the last frontier. But I'm not sure you will want it for public gatherings,

it should be a friends only thing in a sea of chat bubbles above the characters heads.

The chat feed is not interesting because the context is lost and trolling is too easy.

Spatial presence is incredibly important: you can face towards the person you're speaking to. You can whisper to the person next to you. Crowded rooms naturally organize in cliques/groups. In a video chat all of this is broken or awkward.

VR today is way too bulky and annoying. It's in the "luggable microcomputers" stage before laptops and phones, but it shows a glimpse of the future.

For example, standalone Oculus is less of a hassle than thethered headsets. Camera-based hand tracking demos show how people can freely gesticulate in the VR space. Imagine that extended to full-body tracking and in-headset sensors that capture facial expressions and "deepfake" you in VR.

Speaking of spatial presence, I recently came across tonari[0] through a post[1] here on HN and thought it looked really cool. In case any of the tonari developers happen to hang out around here: I would love to try this out sometime! :)

(Side note: The blog post linked in the HN discussion below does a much better job at explaining what it is that they're doing – at least to me as a techie.)

[0] https://tonari.no

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23540586

If I were to guess maybe some kind of Mixed Reality system. Having Audio, Video with Video sharing is good. For some niche industries like CAD / CAM and also VR /AR / Video game design if you had some kind of Mixed reality system that could allow people to collaborate with 3D data you could actually have an interesting product.

Another thought. Last year at the peak of Fortnite hype, when top DJs were hosting parties live in game etc, there was talk that the next big thing in communications might be everyone hanging out in games, Fortnite or whatever came next. I do think that lots of young people are meeting friends in games, but it hasn't had the enormous breakthrough in culture that Zoom has. We can probably retire our expectations of some kind of Metaverse for a few more years.

Microsoft happened

In 2004-2006 my ISP in Canada illegally "intentionally degraded the quality and reliability of Skype calls" to convince customers that Skype sucked and that we should buy/use their video/call software.

It worked, in one sense. I have hated Skype ever since because it was absolutely the worst, and never trusted it to work. I do know that wasn't their fault but still won't use them. They also seem to have super bad security, IMO.