I've got one specific example, where I know the quality has changed. I've bought the same modelf of sofa about 10 years apart. Ikea has done some serious value engineering. Both sofas look very similar from outside, but they are in fact very different. The newer frame appears to be somehwhat lighter, yet sturdier at the same time. The cushions however are now lighter and far less comfortable. They obviously spend a lot of effort into making everything more efficient and cost effective - some of it at a slight cost in perceived quality.
I should have written that the overall quality hasn’t changed. A lot of products have changed, in one way or another, but the overall quality isn’t worse than it used to be.
I don't know of a website that compares audio quality specifically, but I feel this still is the greatest impediment when it comes to ANY video or audio conference system. I get the impression that there is no system out there that allows for decent 'full duplex' audio, equivalent to a normal conversation where both sides might interrupt each other at times. I think this comes down to
a) background noise reduction
b) echo/feedback cancellation
c) input latency
I assume input latency may not be such a big issue anymore, with ultra low latency codecs (presumably) being widespread now.
Feedback cancellation is a problem if any side of the conversation is using speakers, rather than headphones. I guess chat services meet at the lowest common denominator, making fairly conservative assumptions and often cutting audio aggressively.
My personal list, best to worst, in respect to my requirements above:
I haven't tried Jitsi, and WhatsApp seems to work pretty well even for video calls, but I don't think it scales for normal use in a company. In my experience Zoom beats Hangouts and Skype every time.
Software aside, when some attendees will often be in the same location consider using https://www.owllabs.com/meeting-owl. It certainly improves the experience for the remote attendees.
I think zoom is the best for 1:1 and group chats after trying a number of such services. But there's still moments of dropped packets and confusion. You can't blame Zoom for every dropped packet, but what it doesn't do well is tell you when packets are dropped.
I wish video-chat services/clients would be totally up-front about the real-time quality of the connection. There are natural pauses in any conversation, and if you're always wondering whether the pause is natural or a result of a few dropped packets, it makes for a very un-natural conversation. This could be as simple as "last transmission received N ms ago" indicator or something, but I'm sure there are more clever solutions.
I don't think this is an "easy" problem to solve, but it's one that I think most video chat services seem to pretend doesn't exist. Or they implicitly blame outside factors ("we can't fix the network") rather than helping customers live with the realities of the internet ("we show you immediately and in real-time when the network isn't what you expect").
(I've not put Jitsi through its paces - would love to know how Jitsi handles the UX around dropped packets.)
Very granularly: simple tools like the Windows Task Manager Performance tab's Ethernet Throughput graph can provide enough of a clue that a network connection is suffering.
There are many utilities that show this info in useful form in the system tray; perhaps some would be able to superimpose it on top of the video conferencing software (like OnTopReplica).
I often have such OS-level tooling open during VC chats, but it's not natural to have to keep an eye on another tool, especially when you want the "last seen"/latency figure nearly instantaneously so you know the context for lack of signal (human vs machine).
Dorico is clearly the future given Avid's shabby treatment of Sibelius users, but I'm not sure it's the present. It might just be inertia or switching costs, but Dorico hasn't been adopted by many composers yet. I haven't yet used the v1.1 update, but v1.0 was missing a lot of important features.
I also use a Unique-per-service email address with Paypal, and I noticed that Paypal actually passes on that email address to the retailer when I pay with Paypal.
I receive order confirmation emails (from those retailers) and quite a few unwanted newsletters to my unique paypal address now.
I have no idea what Paypal is trying to achieve by passing on this fairly personal piece of data. I always have to enter a separate email address with the retailer anyway, and because of this scheme, those two of course never match.
Paypal is great at that kind of unintentional disclosure. Six or eight years back, because I liked what she had to say, I used it to donate to someone who was then speaking under a pseudonym as a result of some fairly credible threats. Imagine my surprise when, in the process of transferring funds, Paypal showed me her full legal name and domicile address in the UI!
Of course I let her know about it, and I seem to recall her saying she'd addressed it successfully, but if she described how, I no longer remember. It quite astonished me that this was even a thing that could happen, though. One hopes it no longer does.
It's been a while, so that might be true and I just don't remember, but it would be a surprising mistake to make for someone with a great deal of professional experience in operational security.
>>>I have no idea what Paypal is trying to achieve by passing on this fairly personal piece of data.
For years the Paypal API sucked, and even today their are many companies that do not have full integration with paypal, so this is a way to match payment records as for 99% of shoppers the email address for the order/account will match the paypal email address.
I was wondering that. There is more to retaining talent than just fixing the review system. If the company changes their product strategy dramatically and engineers aren't happy with that, money won't help. Surely the whole idea how Adobe implements CC is flawed. It'll discourage product innovation (customers already locked in anyway), dripfeeding features does suffice. Buying other products and companies to increase potential market and customers is the only way left to increase revenue. Which engineer wants that?
Just looking at Lightroom (because I'm a customer), there appears to have been a lot of change over the years. Highly visible engineers and managers lost to do their own thing, Spotify and other companies.
The about screen lists engineers involved, that has changed dramatically as well. I don't know how engineering is set up at Adobe, but it certainly looks like they have outsourced quite a bit of that product.
It will probably take several years for Adobe to realise that their license rental scheme was a shot in the foot...
Another simple fix: tell us who you are. The contact page is woefully generic and anonymous. Glasswire appears to be a company, more than one person. Where are you based? What's your background? Funding?
Is there some functionality to save and resume later (from end-customer perspective)? Would be nice if I could give out unique URLs to a form, which then autosave anything entered there.
