I'm actually exploring this idea right now. It's been an issue I've been facing in my day job and think it is only going to become more pervasive as more teams start to work remotely.
If anyone is currently experiencing this issue, I would absolutely love to talk to you! I only have a really rudimentary site up right now at http://hallwayapp.com if anyone is even remotely curious (no pun intended).
I was a little vague in my original statement because I think there's a lot of areas of improvement across the board, but I was specifically thinking of the virtual meeting when I wrote that answer.
There's no denying that something gets lost on a Zoom/WebEx/other conference call - attendees are distracted, miscommunications happen, and people have to be assertive to get their message across. This can be overcome by a small team that is 110% driven in their goal, but it's a model that can't be adapted by all industries/sizes/cultures.
I'm still not sure what the solution to this is, but I think there will be a dramatic paradigm shift. Maybe the trigger will be VR or some disruptor we already see coming, but it may be something more approachable.
All of those tools you listed are CRUD-based. I think the space would benefit from something more reactive, where multiple people can "play" on the same screen.
Without going full VR I still think a dedicated piece of hardware might be the way to go to normalize across everyone's setups and preferences. Maybe a big ass tablet (or around the size of the Surface Studio) with networked persistent whiteboarding / kanban boarding / alert-messaging software could be an MVP. Those are the main things that I wish were improved after ~4 years working with distributed teams. Informational meetings per se I haven't really had problems with, google hangouts/meet or GoToMeeting have worked out well enough. I'm not sure how we'll ever solve the "conversations that only happen because your desk is next to mine" problem without VR though.
> "conversations that only happen because your desk is next to mine" problem
I think part of a solution to that problem is more deliberate communication. Water cooler talk, informal office conversations, whatever you want to call those, while occasionally helpful they can also lead to the creation of information silos between the people participating in these conversations.
The constraint of not having the opportunity to engage in this kind of conversations might actually be beneficial. Distributed teams force you to communicate more efficiently and more purposefully.
We find ourselves gravitating more and more toward https://realtimeboard.com/ for distributed planning and brainstorming. It's replaced whiteboards for some in-person planning meetings as well. In almost every case where I've said "I wonder if...", it's worked exactly how I wanted. ("I wonder if I can resize a group of sticky notes," "I wonder if I can add a comment and indicate reinforcement/critique," "I wonder if there's a timer plugin," etc.)
It can get a little slow for larger boards – we did multiple weeks of branding iteration in a single board with hundreds of images and sticky notes – but overall I'd highly recommend it.
