Not on your Zoom, not on Teams, not Google Meet, not BlueJeans. WebEx, Skype and Houseparty make us itch. No, not FaceTime, not even Twitch
- Reference: 1605522554
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/16/monday_column/
- Source link:
We all have our own revelations. Mine have been that as a freelance tech writer, lockdown and total freedom are indistinguishable; that it's a mug's game struggling home with bottles of supermarket plonk when nice young men will bring crates of the superior stuff to my door; and that there are two entirely separate toilet paper industries. Who knew?
One epiphany unites us all, though, that one technology has promised a bright future and delivered an unrelenting hellscape. Videoconferencing must die. It must die today.
It finally hit me last week, with the same sense of total relief I got when CNN [1]called Pennsylvania for Biden . Videoconferencing is a huge con that we can and should just shut down. It does no good, the industry has utterly disqualified itself from being taken seriously, nobody wanted it, nobody likes it, and nobody understands why they do it. And yet we do.
I blame science fiction. From the 1930s to the turn of the century, fictional spacepeople talking to each other over video screens was a cheap and a reliable market of The Future. No matter that when the technology got close enough to actually do it, from the [2]Bell PicturePhone of 1964 to the (Linux powered! Spectrum compatible!) [3]Amstrad E3 Superphone of 2004 and the [4]BT Videophone of 2007, the punters stayed away in droves.
The excuses each time was that the quality was too poor – which it was – and the services too expensive – which they were. Bell dropped half a billion 1960s dollars on its system and tried to get it back with hundred-dollar monthly rentals and hundred-dollar phone calls for a flickery low-res black and white image. Yeah. Nope.
Those excuses no longer hold. The cheapest laptop can do HD internet video calling at full frame rates for free. The pandemic has pushed business with its meeting addiction and education with its face-to-face lecture model online, and as a result videoconferencing usage looks incredibly healthy, with most of us spending many hours a week staring at each other's badly lit two-dimensional faces, wondering if our hangovers are obvious.
The experience of getting it going can be infinitely worse. VC software is dire, there's far too much of it, and it's undercooked to the point that salmonella breeds in the binaries. My epiphany of revulsion happened when I had to configure two new services in as many days to talk to two new companies, and neither worked properly.
This experience never goes away, because there are so many to choose from. You'll know Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Skype, Facetime. You may know BlueJeans, WebEx, Jitsi, and Chime, and you may include things like WhatsApp. But how about Houseparty, Yeecall, Big Blue Button, Face Flow, Talky, Nexmo, imo, Whereby, Tox, Linkello, and Airtime? Even gamers' favourite Twitch has a video-calling feature on its desktop app. This isn't an exhaustive list.
They are, as far as makes any sense, mutually incompatible. They all want to install apps, some want registration, some have in-browser options of indifferent quality, all have different UIs, and all are impossible to diagnose when they go wrong because how do you even do that by yourself?
There are so many bad VC services because of corporate ego. No self-respecting big tech company can bear the thought of its users spending time in someone else's service – the [5]Apple Maps syndrome – and yet because there's no money in VC the bare minimum of development time is put in. And because the whole point isn't to provide a useful, pleasant service but to lock the marks into an ecosystem, interoperability is verboten. I can phone any phone on the planet and just talk. Imagine that with VC.
And the reason that there's been no real drive to interoperability is that there's no actual market there. Nobody wants to use this stuff. It's dehumanising. You can't maintain eye contact like humans do, you can't pick your nose like humans do. Just talk to each other and be free, man. Voice only leaves your brain free to think instead of processing broken visual social cues. It really is a better experience if you switch off the cam.
The only justification for video on a conference call is so that people can raise their hands to speak – you know, like being a seven-year-old needing to pee during maths. That could be replaced by an on-screen button, and already is on some platforms. Sharing documents, screens, all that stuff – sure, but none of that needs to cut back to Yoshi from Seattle's gurning mug.
Comrades, revolt. Just say no. If you can't say no, then do what my pals do – say there's not enough bandwidth and you need the camera off for good audio quality. Or that your camera's broken. Or that you're getting this weird error message. Or you mistakenly denied permissions one time to bar the camera and now you can't turn it back on.
Freedom is ours for the taking. You get the picture – or, rather, you don't. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/07/us_presidential_campaign/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzdCKBZP4Jo
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj8EHWzvqcs&ab_channel=backofficeshow
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR3maxh2Wlg
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2012/09/20/apple_fans_slam_ios_6_map_app/
[6] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
I would tend to agree to the point of the article: conferencing is very useful, video-conferencing is not. I guess most of people I communicate with each day through numerous VC systems agree, because most of them do not share their video. Sharing desktops, apps and docs is useful, but what the point of looking at somebody wearing the same mask as I do anyway?
Witnessing about different systems quality, I favor Webex over Teams and Skype for now.
Yes, but no, but ....
Start with my gut feeling and you can decide to read further, or not. The article feels technofobia-esq..... Video is part of the interaction, we don't talk to each other f2f with our eyes closed why when we are virtual would we do the same?
First the Yes: I agree, interoperability should be there and the likes of Synergy Sky are addressing this, at least on an enterprise scale.
But: for telephone numbers we have the e164 plan, and internationally agreed scheme, and governed by various organisations globally to keep telcos in check. Video is usually your email address and although these are governed at a domain level to an extent, they are in no way comparable to e164 numbering.
No: Video has a place, interoperability aside. It can not replace F2F or physical social interactions but it can and does augment conversations. This I believe is split into two camps, work and play.
Work: When you are on an audio only call, you go on mute, cut the grass, go shopping etc; you are not paying attention to the call, especially if like me you can only really do one thing at a time. Video helps the end user to concentrate on the task at hand. Video also provides an insight into body language that you can only hear from audible sighs in an audio conference, where as eye rolls, frowns, shrugs are all automatic reactions that video allows us to see and react to. If I am presenting to a large audience, I can change the talk track form this body language, I cna also gain interest from where my audience is looking.
Play: If I judge this by the number of idiots I see walking around supermarkets on facetime with the speaker on (No ear phones) I think you are in the minority; people want the video. Conversations with the new work force, gen Z is generally limited to 30-60 seconds; they don't have the staying power for a long conversation, so you receive blitzed short full immersion conversations. Video is required for this, look at their utilisation of snap, they send audio clips to each other instead of typing a response... Video is here to stay.
Finally, there is a market for video, it is in the meetings and conferencing space, just like YouTube, video adds more than just a flat written document, or recorded narration. Lighting and appearance is being understood and VC is evolving; look at Amazon and the face lights, ring lights, back drops etc, the market is supporting and growing to increase not reduce VC usage.
"Dr. Emmett Brown : [holding Marty's video camera] No wonder your president has to be an actor. He's gotta look good on television." - We are all in this position now, our presence helps support and promote attention and whatever it is we are trying to communicate.
I agree about the lack of interoperability - the many years of standards development seem to have been swept away for walled gardens. Hopefully consumer pressure might help tackle that once the major players are pretty much on a level playing field of features.
However I do disagree about the need for video conferencing in general. It means I can attend meetings, chat with my colleagues and sit in on workshops in the USA without moving from my lounge. That's a win as far as I'm concerned. I've been trying to do, and get others to do, video conferencing instead of having to spent hours travelling about for decades. The first time we used it in anger was with the MBONE (remember that?) back in the mid/late-1990s to virtually attend an EU funded meeting for a couple of hours without having to spend two days either side travelling. I'm amazed in a way its taken two decades and a global pandemic to get more people to catch up with that and realise its value.