This is great. It really is. Next, screen sharing and live file collaboration. Then we finally get back to an iChat equivalent.
Had another failed Skype for Business meeting just yesterday. The IT department insists we use it (MS product of course). On one of our externally funded projects we have purchased a licence for Zoom. So much more reliable than Skype, better bandwidth and sound management, let alone visual clarity.
edit:typo
I had a different experience with Skype for Business in a meeting I had recently. We were +30 people from +7 countries with video and screen sharing. No issues at all.
32 people sounds like Apple will be moving toward supporting businesses and schools with this feature.
Without screen sharing like Zoom and the lack of cross-platform availability I doubt business will consider using it. This is clearly for consumers.
Define business. For small dev shops running macOS, this fits a need.
Unfortunately the Apple-only shops are extremely few, and there are several really potent cross-platform solutions. I'm afraid Apple's refusal to accept that there are other usable platforms limits their great software. Microsoft just recently accepted this fact and has delivered some surprisingly good apps lately.
Apple isn't worried about being all things to all people. I know lots of small companies that are Mac-based (most devs I know prefer MBPs due to macOS, and UNIX) and like I said this is a great tool for those customers. The question is whether *this* use case is useful. Obviously, it is. If you want to ask whether it's relevant to *other* use cases, we could really go off the deep end -- "This is useless to my Linux friends!" Uhh yeah, so what.
And your hand-wringing is misplaced. The entire iLife suite is available via a web browser now, so there goes your theory that they only care about Macs.
I would think 5-10 people MAX would have made most people more than happy. 32, WOW, that's even more than Skype I think. I don't know, 32 people and just having a few talking I would think would get confusing. This has been a very long requested ability, since Facetime first came out.
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And your hand-wringing is misplaced. The entire iLife suite is available via a web browser now, so there goes your theory that they only care about Macs.