Six weeks into this and my calendar is just a wall of little blue camera icons. Standup, the kids' "virtual show and tell" their teacher insists on, my sister's Sunday check-in that somehow always runs 40 minutes over. All Zoom. So I noticed pretty fast when the story broke this week that Google told its own employees to knock it off.
The memo went out to Google staff saying Zoom would stop working on their company-issued laptops, citing security holes in the desktop client, and pointing people back to Google's own video tools instead (Hangouts Meet, obviously, because of course they'd rather you use theirs). It's not a huge shock given the last month Zoom's had, but there's something almost funny about the company that built the video chat software half the planet suddenly depends on getting told by one of the largest employers in tech, sorry, not on our machines.
And Google's not even first. SpaceX did basically the same thing to its employees a week or so back, banning Zoom outright and pushing people to email, phone calls, or Microsoft Teams instead. When a rocket company and a search engine company independently decide their own staff can't touch a video app, that's not a great sign for whoever's running security over there.
I don't think this means Zoom's doomed, to be clear. My kid's entire school district is on it. My book club is on it (we did The Overstory in March, would not recommend trying to discuss 500 pages of tree metaphors over a call where three people are frozen mid-sentence). It's just strange to watch a tool get adopted at this speed, by literally everyone I know including my 71-year-old father-in-law who could not previously operate a DVR, while the companies with actual security teams are quietly telling their own people to stay away from it.
Some of this I get. The whole "random strangers dropping into unlocked meetings" thing (people are calling it zoombombing now, which is a genuinely good name for a bad thing) is a real problem when your login is just a URL with a meeting number in it. New York City told its schools last week to stop using Zoom entirely and move to Microsoft Teams, which is a pretty big vote of no confidence from a school system that size. I don't envy whoever has to retrain a few hundred thousand teachers on a different video app in the middle of a pandemic, by the way. That sounds like a nightmare regardless of which app wins.
Here's my actual small opinion on this, since apparently I have one: I think the desktop client is the real issue, not video chat as a concept, and Google banning it from laptops rather than blocking the whole service tells you the same thing. It's an install-something-on-your-machine problem, not a Zoom-is-inherently-broken problem. The browser version of Zoom has always felt clunkier and more limited to me (screen share is worse, in my experience), which is probably exactly why nobody uses it and everyone downloads the app instead, which is exactly the thing security people are nervous about.
Anyway. My family's Easter call is still on Zoom on Sunday because nobody wants to be the one who suggests switching apps three days before the actual call, and I am not going to be that person. If Google engineers can't run it on their laptops I guess the rest of us peasants will keep passing around a link and hoping for the best. My father-in-law already has the meeting ID written on a Post-it stuck to his monitor, so it's happening no matter what any security researcher has to say about it.