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As a neurodivergent person, working in an office setting has almost always created high levels of anxiety and stress for me. I can count on one hand the few times where I have really enjoyed my co-workers and we clicked, and that was many, many years ago (I’m in my mid-50s now).
In my experience, working at the office primarily benefits those who can play the work political game. Not that there isn’t that serendipity of casual talk that can result in something, but those tend to be outliers in what is otherwise a poor experience for people like me. Working from home lets me be casual and comfortable. I can shut off my office phone during lunch or breaks, and mentally recharge. And I hate fluorescent lights, which is what our on-prem offices have in excess. They make my eyes twitch.
And then there’s the commute. I work in state government, and we are not (contrary to popular opinion) swimming in cash like Scrooge McDuck, so any money I can save by not driving into work is a good thing (on top of the environmental benefits).
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Regarding AI, Alexa and Siri, I’d rather wait for Siri to work properly, rather than some rushed to market disappointment, like most of the AI companies out there.
At the moment the likes of OpenAI and co. are rushing out alpha version after alpha version and for me, they all disappoint very quickly after starting to use them.
AI to me is currently in the same space as personalised advertising. PA is just taking a look at what big ticket one off purchases you have made and offering you further examples of that one off item that you have already purchased. AI is similar, it promises a lot, but as soon as you start to really use it, it disappoints due to the numbers of errors It makes. Calling the errors hallucinations doesn’t change the fact that they are basic errors in the system.
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I like working in the office, the separation of work and home is good for me, I can use the ride home to turn off.
There is no real politics in our company, it is a great place to work and the coworkers are great, so I really look forward to going to office in the morning.
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That may b
I envy that reality. That would seem to be the exception rather than the rule, but it also could be a cultural thing.
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Regarding Zoom/Skype, Paul Thurrott has a great retrospective article on Skype.
Here’s one salient paragraph:
Nobody knew it at the time, but Skype’s fate was sealed in 2013 when a tiny company called Tiny Speck, created by a Flickr co-founder, launched what it called “a real-time collaboration platform” after its initially offering, a videogame, had failed. That platform was called Slack, and Tiny Speck was renamed to Slack as well
Paul doesn’t mention this, but I also think that the prevalence of Facetime in iPhones contributed to the downfall of Skype. People could just call each other natively from within that platform. And the Google added their own video calling function.
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There are apparently huge issues with the CLOUD act.
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The Verge scrolling sometimes doesn’t work on Firefox. I have to use Chrome for The Verge most of the time. It’s some weird javascript bullshit. The Verge walked back on their paywall idea for the news.
They do have a paywall for things they consider big features / deep dives (I’ll never pay for a site like The Verge)
I love Sum 41 & Avril Lavigne. Shout out to Canadian artists
I remember when Skype was P2P because they had an outage one winter while I was in Florida with my parents. Maybe it was 2010 or 2011.
I’ve never used Slack. When the pandemic hit, we were looking for a solution, but we already had just rolled out Office 365 for the Office part of the equation, nothing else. But Teams offered more than Slack and Zoom combined, so we went with Teams.
I think one of our suppliers uses Slack, but I have yet to be added into their Slack for discussions.
Regarding FaceTime, it didn’t really take off, here in Europe, especially Germany. At its height, WindowsPhone had a bigger market share than iPhone, so FaceTime and iMessage never really caught on that much, but people were using WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram instead of Skype, because they were easier to use, more powerful, especially with group chats and more efficient.
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This has been a problem since the beginning. The CLOUD Act gives the US extra-territorial control over any business that has a presence in the USA (not a Headquarters, just a branch office or a remote worker).
This means that, even with a EU based datacenter, Microsoft must still comply with US law for all of that EU data, thus breaking EU law…
This has been known for years and it is one of the reasons why many companies have been slow to use any US based cloud service. Companies that already have a presence in the USA find fewer arguments, because they already fall under the CLOUD Act, but EU based companies with no presence in the USA have a huge problem justifying the use of a US based cloud service, or an EU based cloud service that also has a presence in the USA…
And the ICC has just shown what sanctions can do… Trump put sanction on the Court and, because most of their data and processes now run in Azure, they can’t access their own information any more.
The macOS app Stop The Madness is great for selectively turning off all sorts of javascript crap. You can take actions (interventions?) on a per-website basis. I knew about StM with Safari; I didn’t realize they included plugins for Firefox Chrome and Chromium until I looked it up. One really outstanding feature of StM is that it also works for iOS and iPadOS on their all-in-one license. It’s certainly worth seeing if it can address your problems on that website with a free trial. Jason Snell reviewed in MBW 942. You could look up what he has to say, too.
HTH.
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Regarding Teams and Zoom, I like Teams, we use it every day and it just works. Zoom I find less easy to use, probably because I have to use it once or twice a year, I guess it is what you get used to.
I think I have had half a dozen Zoom calls since the beginning of the pandemic, I have had 2 Google Meets, both of those in the last month and Amazon Chime once, when our Amazon rep wanted to talk to us, all other external calls have been in Teams.
My very first Zoom meeting was with Ant for the TWiT fireside chat.
The question of “why did Zoom win?” is a little more obvious than folks like us in tech circles realize; the interface on all the other video conferencing apps was horrible, and Zoom was so simple your grandma could figure it out.
That’s literally it. That’s the only reason. It wasn’t technologically better, it wasn’t more secure, it was just easy and was cross-platform. And it was also because Zoom took all the (justified) criticisms from those early versions and fixed everything. Zoom was a disaster at the start of COVID, but they knew they were on the cusp of total domination and they didn’t waste the opportunity. They’d be crushing Teams right now if Microsoft couldn’t bundle it in and force it on everyone.
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FaceTime and iMessage are primarily used in US . In the rest of the world you can do the same with WhatsApp or Viber.
Strangely Viber is the most prominent solution used in Greece with adoption by companies banks etc. they use it as primary means of communication to deliver rider updates and such.
It’s a matter of habit these days. Both Teams and Zoom have equivalent quality of audio and video with Zoom being slightly better.
The zoom interface is cleaner and more streamlined because it does not try to do everything at the same time, but teams can be more functional for corporate people who use it for chat and calendaring etc.
Zoom is easier for regular people who just want to jump on a call with their mom.
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Interesting, I have family in the UK and I live in Germany, I’ve never come across Viber.
Yeah it’s not common in the UK. It was purchased a while back by Rakuten a Japanese company and for some reason it has success in the business world in Greece. It’s not bad as a service and it also allows you to place calls to landlines similar to Skype out by buying some credits.
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