We're now just about seven months into lockdown here in the u.s and worldwide and a lot of us
are still working from home while we may have settled into whatever our individual routines are
there's still a lot of room for companies to adapt whether it comes to you know building
out their own products or just deploying solutions to their teams so today we're
going to be discussing how some of these companies can adapt what gaps are missing
and what that means you know in the end for the everyday employee so stick around
hey everyone welcome back to today in tech i'm julia beauchamp and i'm here as always
with computer world executive editor ken mingus and macworld and pc world writer michael simon
so ken i'm going to throw it to you first since this is really you know a very computer worldly
kind of thing to discuss and there was a great article on i just interject with jokes and puns
every now and then yeah perfect that's why you're here michael yeah you can be the uh he's a comedic
relief i'm gonna play to the crowd so there was this great article on computer world from johnny
evans that was discussing how zoom has sort of been one of the runaway successes of lockdown it's
you know by far the most it's you know google became a verb zoom is now a verb when it comes
to talking about your work life and working from home and his article was comparing that to what
apple's face time could have been so could you go into a little bit more detail about that and
what apple's sort of enterprise work from home play has been if any okay yeah exactly and to
answer that question really quickly there hasn't been an apple work from home play uh
the the post that you're talking about uh johnny evans had written that for computer world talking
about how zoom which you know as you you make the point was already popular as a video conferencing
app before the pandemic and then because it offers the ease of use and you know a lot of flexibility
and features and it's free and it's free yeah well free is always good we like that um you know that
a lot of people gravitated toward it naturally and so johnny's you know his idea that the the piece
that he wrote was basically that zoom could have been or is what face time could have been you know
apple could have done something like this years ago because facetime's been around for a long time
you know in some ways it kind of what's that 10 years wow exactly okay so with a 10 year head
start you know when it comes to video conferencing uh you know with co-workers and and of course
friends after work you know people think about zoom first you know companies can can we have
found that companies are doing this in a variety of ways some of them are sort of letting uh their
workers sort of build their own stack they've got slack in one corner they've got outlook
over here they've got zoom in front of them and they kind of pull the information together you
know however it works best for them uh then you've got companies that have embraced sort of the whole
suite approach like they you know microsoft teams which kind of does everything in one you know
one fell swoop uh a lot of this you know i think a lot of people thought early on that we would
get the pandemic under control and that maybe by certainly this fall or certainly by the first of
the year you'd be seeing sort of a return of normalcy but clearly that doesn't seem to be
uh what's going to happen so now companies have to figure out okay we've done the triage we've gotten
everybody up and running on something you know but what do we do now you know how do we spend
the money now to keep everybody connected maybe for the indefinite future certainly into 2021.
uh but in terms of where apple is it's never been really a play for them to to do the enterprise
thing at least around video conferencing or video software uh they're much more about mobile
and mobile management when there's you know mobile basically managing all the iphones and ipads and
uh you know macs that are in the office now but when it comes to something like collaboration
working together i don't i haven't seen it michael tell me i'm wrong
i mean you're not wrong but what's interesting is that face time so we said it was it was 10 years
ago almost exactly no well june so over 10 years when they had the call between steve jobs and i
think it was johnny ive and it was it was it was mind-blowing at the time you couldn't do that on
on a on a cell phone it just it just didn't happen and along with the demonstration and
how cool it was on i think it was the iphone 4. correct me if i'm wrong i think that's right
yeah he said it's based on h.264 and aac and quote unquote um a whole alphabet of acronyms and we're
taking it all the way we are going to the the standards bodies tomorrow and we are going to make
this an open standard for everybody and everyone cheered and it was wonderful and it never happened
now there's no way to know exactly what happened there maybe it's a privacy thing and apple
couldn't get the the android and the pc and the web version to its liking with privacy stuff
there was also patent issues i forget the name of the company but there was a company
that they were fighting with back in 2010 2011 that claimed it owned patents and apple had to
change some stuff and facetime for it to work and not infringe on those patents so maybe it's
that but the bottom line is apple was so far ahead of the game just like you know we we've
talked about this with siri which came out a year later they were so far ahead of the game and then
they just i mean i'm not going to say they dropped the ball because face time is still great
but when this pandemic hit they could have been number one they could have been the zoom of of
you know of not just apple but of anything and this is kind of where its ecosystem
both helps and hurts so i'm sure if you look at the stats of facetime which we're not privy to
they are through the roof people who have iphones and ipads and max are using them constantly and
they're private and they're you know it's you know it's fantastic facetime and video and audio it's
it's a great video service is the best i've used it blows google duo out of the water it's it's
easy it's it's the quality is good but it's apple only you cannot call somebody else you gotta have
an iphone you gotta have an ipad and yeah it's super private and and you know it is it is what
it is but when you get to something like zoom so you know you're not calling just your iphone
employees we're calling everybody and you're stuck you can't use an apple service to do that
and as you say i don't really see a world where that happens now apple's selling just as many
iphones and ipads and everything else as ever um and i don't know what the motivation would be now
to do that you know yeah there's more android phones out there but i don't think apple cares
um you know they have their little ecosystem and it's a little they have their ecosystem and
that's it they're content to let it be more of a person-to-person peer-to-peer network
than this like expansive enterprise meeting thing well you know i think you've made a really couple
couple of really good points first of all yes on siri that was the first thing i thought was a
technology that they had a jump start on that for whatever reason they've you know fallen behind you
know there are some signs with homepod mini and a couple of the things that came out with ios 14.1
that they're finally starting to take it a little bit more seriously but that's for another time we
can talk about it yeah no i agree julia write that down from when we have nothing else to talk about
like over the winter time uh no but you know you also make the point cross platform is key because
it it is the you know the walled garden and and i think that actually ties into the other point you
made about privacy you know it may very well be that apple you know could go cross-platform but
maybe can't do it in a way that protects privacy the way apple seems to want to protect privacy
therefore it's you know it's it's willing to let to step back and let let us do what we're doing on
a zoom call and yet at night you know if you want to call mom on the iphone you know using facetime
you can do that you know one thing to remember zoom has had some serious growing pain absolutely
you know i mean they weren't out for this there's a there's a reason that zoom bombing is also part
of the lexicon now you know and that's because basically you know they were not prepared
no one was really prepared for it but i mean they really weren't prepared for the exponential
growth they've seen they've made a lot of steps to try to tighten things down a lot of it was the
way you know preferences were set up in zoom that allowed people to sort of get into a call without
necessarily being you know authorized to be there and things like that have been locked down
never was a thing like what are you going to do is some some why would you want to drop into
somebody's wallet like you know paying attention to it now there's you know exponential more zoom
calls being made this is you know going back in march april and you know that's what happens when
and something popular somebody else wants to hack it that's happening it was just it was wide open
well it's interesting though you know just to look at this a little more broadly uh moving beyond
just apple per se uh you know zoom i think it was last week started talking about zaps zoom apps so
what what they're looking to do is start to build out you know we not uh use that name kit zapped
i'm okay you're what i'm opposed to it i don't like the combining of things yeah well that's
what they call them well you can call them whatever they want we'll call them zoom apps
all right the zoom apps yes okay yes i i want to be sensitive to your feelings there
zoom apps the point being though that that zoom which is obviously you know focused on video
conferencing is looking for ways to add hooks so that people can tie in third-party apps and
software which allows you to do more you know and you see you you launch zoom if you want to share a
document if you want to send a message whatever you can do that better you know microsoft teams
microsoft has been really uh responsive with teams this year i can't remember the exact uh
um whatever the feature it is but it allows you to sort of see everybody in your call as if they're
sitting in an auditorium you know or maybe a sports stadium but the whole point being that
they're looking for ways to make this video you know conferencing world that we live in now more
palatable because again we're seeing this is not going to be three months six months nine months
and back to normal i don't think we go back to normal after this yeah and you know for microsoft
and zoom i don't know zoom the company or zoom yeah yeah assumes the company okay so uh and also
google who who really got the ball rolling on me that wasn't that was nothing until the pandemic um
i mean that's the play software is the surface software is the ecosystem
apple has a completely different business model than all of those companies and if
they start giving away free meeting software no one's going to want to buy an ipad and and and
that's the that's the inherent issue i mean we talk about privacy and that might be part of it
money is the biggest part of it profitability i mean they don't if if you think about the
cross-platform applications they offer apple tv paid service apple music paid service itunes store
paid service they're they don't give stuff apple's not in the business of giving things away
we don't even have an icloud app on android they want you to stay on an apple product and that's it
we're lucky we have icloud.com for pcs where we can access our email because the the play is to
stay in the garden well the play then the play is to use the software to drive you to the hardware i
mean that that's i don't know if that works does it if let's say the software is that good what
do they say why buy the cow when you get the milk for free whatever that expression is you know if
if apple builds a killer conferencing app that everybody wants to use on anything they're on
why not just buy a galaxy s20 over an iphone or or a dell whatever over over a mac yeah that that's
actually you're making the same point which is basically you know if you want this killer app
you're going to have to buy the hardware you know i'm wondering too i mean we just talked a lot
about software and i think ken maybe like at the tail end of a video that we did i don't know maybe
two or three weeks ago now i think you sort of you know offhand perhaps the joke said you know is
apple or any other sort of um hardware company or hardware first company that you think of you know
the samsungs and apples of the world going to now get into you know webcams because they're such an
appetite for them i think that's a i'm wondering if that's just like if that's ever going to happen
it kind of seems probably not but if anyone's going to do what samsung will yeah i can see
samsung well you know the reason i said that i i think it was uh i can't remember now what hardware
apple had announced but they had finally included a a video camera that was beyond seven that was
the the latest imac yeah it was the new imac that's right and it has it finally has a 1080p
camera you know and again 2016 called and wants its webcam right yeah they finally did and i to me
that felt like at least a tacit acknowledgement that we're going to be sitting in front of our
max and imax uh our computers in general looking at these cameras for a long time you know yeah and
so at least sorry kenneth no no no go ahead uh you know samsung and apple and uh they both they
make phones they make tablets all of which have cameras um so you know they are there
the idea of like the webcam it's it's very much uh as you guys say enterprise thing like
my parents aren't buying webcams you know kids aren't buying webcams they use their phones they
use their computer they use whatever is readily available uh what is what apple apple needs to
needs to really increase the the quality of their webcams and i think they will once these new
uh apple silicon max come out i think that'll be a priority because it's it's laughably bad now i
have a webcam here because i can't use the camera because you guys wouldn't be able to see me it was
terrible i know that would be horrifying 720 is certainly you know 1080p is sort of like the the
best that's the baseline but do you really need you don't need a 4k no if you're sitting there
universal wait a minute it wouldn't be that bad you know
yeah no one needs high quality of me sitting at home when i'm not in the office
in yeah my full matching sweatsuit so i think 1080 is maybe okay that's probably as good as
we want to go but i mean you know to get back to your original point and you know
apple's not making a play for enterprise uh collaboration a lot of companies are uh
companies you know trying to figure out how best to proceed now have at least some experience under
the belts as it were they can tell you know what apps their employees are using which has been the
most trouble prone when it comes to getting them set up or which is the most insecure if you're
a company that's in an industry like financial services or healthcare and privacy is an issue
you know you might want to rethink that whole zoom video conferencing and until end-to-end
encryption is in place uh you know so there's this is never gonna happen i don't even know i
mean i'm not that's beyond my pay grade but i don't even know if it really can without some
serious overhaul of their back end which i don't know if they're willing to put the time effort
and money into especially when millions of people are using it happily without it well and that's
that's where you see something like you know maybe microsoft teams which comes along and says we can
you know we can protect your security and safety and your data in a way that you know these other
other companies may not be able to again that's we'll see how that unfolds in 2021 companies have
some experience now it'll be i'll be curious to see uh you know where we see growth in the next
three to six months in terms of who's using these apps and which ones whether it's the suite or the
you know the the buffet table of everything you want you know yeah did did zoom announce like a
camera or teams didn't one of them announced like they were selling a product of some sort they
announced a screen it was like a 27 inch monitor you know and i'm like well why would you know
why would zoom i don't know it looked like it was some sort of weird hardware play that was fairly
uh well ridiculed pretty early on because it's like why do i want just a a screen that does
one thing you know uh i've i've got an imac i've got a pc i've got a big monitor i don't need the
zoom branded 25 inch or 27 inch whatever it was so i don't think that's going to get a lot of
traction i don't think it has and i don't think it will sure so the hardware play may be not relevant
not something they should stick to software and working on security yeah i mean there's always
you know the logitech's out there that sell you know great cameras for affordable prices people
trust them they know them those are the ones that are going to sell always yeah i mean i
i wouldn't mind seeing what apple can do with the webcam but i just don't think it's going to happen
fair enough and also worth mentioning before we wrap up i am pretty certain that zoom has plans to
roll out end-to-end encryption sometimes i think they had they announced plans at um zoomtopia so
i'm sure um i'm sorry are we making more words again i'm good at zaps zaps i'm gonna that's
your trigger word michael i'm gonna remember that we can't just put z in front of that i can make
it a things i think they can zen zen encryption and okay and we're done and i think it's a wrap
now so thank you both so much for joining me this week i really appreciate it and like you mentioned
ken there's gonna be a lot of room to adapt over the next three to six months especially as we near
sort of the one year mark of lockdown i think companies are being pretty realistic about the
fact that a lot of employees are probably not going to return to work in full-time full-time
in office capacity anytime soon if ever so it'll be interesting to see what happens so thank you
both so much once again and thank you all so much for watching this episode of today in tech if you
like this video be sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel if you know you have
high huge hopes for apple facetime and you really wish you could use it at work let us know in the
comments below or if you think it's irrelevant if we missed some collaboration hardware or software
device or application that you feel like you need to talk about
once again let me know in the comments thanks again for watching and i'll see you next time