MBW 812: Short-Fingered Vulgarians

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

11:45 mark - Alex saying WebEx was a disaster and basically disparaging the product was a low mark. I work for Cisco (full disclosure) and support WebEx. Every SaaS platform can have a bad day. But to say “Zoom is way better than WebEx” and “WebEx is a Horrible platform” as a general statement without any background is very irresponsible and unqualified. Zoom is still 2-3 year behind WebEx in many areas. I really don’t like hearing “experts” making claims like this.

Paging Ms. Streisand. Paging Ms. Streisand.

Okay, I’m not an expert, and my experience with Cisco products is I would rather use a pair of tin cans and some string. Is that better?

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Wow. That reply sounds as qualified as what Alex was saying. Just Cisco products in general? Seems legit.

You should know when to let it go. The more you interact around bad press, the more your bring it to people’s attention, and the more likely you are to hear from people who are not fans. It’s much more likely people who have had bad experiences will complain than it is that people who have had good experiences will drop in to be defenders.

So anyway, since you seemingly invited it, here’s my experience. Cisco routers had a hard coded back door, and at my location that was used to backdoor the network, install a RAT, and exfiltrate very important technical documentation to a foreign entity, who then used it to reverse engineer our product. Cisco was a major disaster for our company!

So there ya go, there’s your endorsement! Enjoy! For everyone else, stay well and truly away from Cisco products, save yourself some money on the exorbitant fees and last generation tech.

And yet no one has really responded to the real intent of my question regarding a SaaS conferencing application (that means software not hardware…not routers) and an unqualified opinion. Just lots of anti-Cisco hate based on your independent experiences…and an article from 4 years ago. I was just trying to voice an opinion on a contributor’s comments on a show I love and have watched for a long time. I didn’t realized the comments section was where facts go to die. But…it’s the Internet after all.

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I haven’t used WebEx for about 2 years. But the biggest problem used to be having to install the add-in.

I was always being called up by users, “we are going into a meeting and it wants to install something!” Having to install a custom application and people going into the meeting “punctually”, i.e. exactly to the minute that the meeting was supposed to start, then having to call the helpdesk in a panic to get the client software installed was a real pain - mostly this was for us being invited into meetings, we didn’t have a WebEx account.

We also used GoTo Meeting at the time, internally. This was a similar experience. But, at the time, it was the biggest put-off of both systems. When Teams and Zoom came along (I’ve only used the latter for 1 meeting, so can’t really talk about its quality), it was a breath of fresh air, that guests only had to click on a link and it started automatically in the browser.

As I said, I haven’t used WebEx for a couple of years, so I expect that they have now also switched to a client-less model. But I honestly hope they have, because that was the overriding impression of WebEx (and GoTo Meeting) for the casual user, it was overly complex and it required a custom application to be physically installed, both a total no-go for the user who goes into, or worse, presents 1 meeting every few weeks or months*.

Just from that aspect, Teams and Zoom are miles ahead of the WebEx I’ve used, in UX. Anything that causes the users to go into a panic before the meeting, because starting the meeting is so complex that they need to call the helpdesk, is failing.

(*) I was working for a software development company that started doing more and more international business, so they set up one meeting room with a dedicated PC with a dedicated GTM account. Even after learning WebEx and GTM, writing a brief instruction sheet and providing training, I was called in to get 80% of those meetings started, because the presenters didn’t use it regularly enough that it stuck and they needed help every time!

I’m at another company now, where we use Teams. I do the same sort of training as I did then, I wrote a similar handbook, but the big difference is the simplicity of starting a meeting or calling someone. From 10 GTM/WebEx users calling several times a week to get a meeting started, to over 300 users who call once every couple of months, because the microphone seems to have stopped working is a huge difference in the support load!

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Upset about recent political commentary on MBW

I retired from Apple 2 years ago and use Zoom and FaceTime for video calls now, mostly with friends and family! But for the 16 years I was with Apple, when we did videocons we used WebEx! It seemed to work well as I used it maybe 10-15 times per week! We occasionally had to help someone who didn’t use it often (as Big_D said) but it was solid! Zoom is simpler to use, but I never found WebEx difficult

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Apologize if this is the wrong episode - @Leo made a comment about Apple TV and gay relationships and I thought he said they do not push it. This IS NOT A COMPLAINT, just an observation since I know Leo does not watch most (if any) Apple shows. The shows I have watched that have gay relationships:
The Morning Show
Home Before Dark
Seek (and incest too)
Acapulco
Dickinson
Foundation
Invasion

Shows I don’t recall seeing a gay relationship: Ted Lasso (there were some “hints”), Servant…but I could be wrong.
FWIW…I like Apple’s shows. But then again, I also have an emotional hangover from the finale of 1883. Damn, that was brutal and beautiful at the same time. (and is Graham Greene ever looking old.)

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No kidding - 1883 was brutal. And I stand corrected. I haven’t watched any of those shows. I do have to say Slow Horses is outstanding. Can’t remember if there’s any gay characters in it, but I’m not really counting.

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