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How Zoom became the most important company in the era of coronavirus


Eric Yuan, founder of Zoom, during the company's IPO last year,

Coronavirus hit the global economy hard. Shares of Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet jointly lost more than $ 1 trillion per month. But there are those whom the crisis has brought to new heights. One of the most important and well-known companies in the world suddenly became Zoom, a video conferencing service.

Before the pandemic, it was one of the successful and brisk startups of Silicon Valley, a rare "unicorn" that managed to reach profit even before the IPO. It was distinguished from similar solutions by Microsoft, Google and Cisco except for its ease of use and low latency. Now the company, which entered the IPO in April last year, costs $ 43 billion. This is more than all the major US airlines. The whole industry ($ 27 billion).

Figures that are impressive


In the first two months of 2020, Zoom attracted more new users than in the whole of 2019. In March, 300 thousand new people joined the service every day, and this is only in the USA.


Teachers in New England attend continuing education classes through Zoom. Zoom

now has 14 million monthly active users. And more than 100 thousand corporate clients, including Samsung, Uber, Slack and Walmart. With Zoom, doctors in China attend meetings and give counseling, instructors in the United States teach yoga and martial arts classes, and Harvard students work with teachers. In conditions of social distance, parties and concerts are organized at Zuma, and even blind dates are held.. By the way, unlike Tinder and Bumble, girls go to them more often than guys.

In America, they joke that Generation Z finally found out what kind of “Z” it was. And students complain that they all now go to Zoom University - the same institution, but for some reason with very different prices.

Zoom shares have more than doubled in price since the start of the coronavirus. The number of paid users increased by 48%, free - twice. Eric Yuan, the founder of the company, believes that the effect is long-term:
I think that after this crisis has passed, people will realize that working from home is not so bad.

In order not to be considered the main "supporter" of the crisis, the company helps as best it can. She removed the time limit for all users in China (previously there were no more than 40 minutes per call). And offers its services to schools and universities for free. Maybe that's why Zoom was able to so quickly become a part of youth culture.



In 2019, the company earned about $ 600 million. This year, revenues should reach one billion. Not bad for a company with 2,000 employees, which started with $ 250,000 in a market where popular solutions from Google, Cisco and Microsoft already existed.

Why Zoom and not Skype?


Remember when everyone “skyped”? All HRs interviewed on Skype, there were meetings and calls between friends. What happened

Skype had every chance. He started earlier for 8 years. He had eBay support (and then Microsoft). And a ready-made user base, which was important not to lose.

The main advantage of Zoom is simplicity. This utility is for those who want the program to have one button, and even clicked for them. It is enough to download the application and get a link to enter the call. All. Set up your profile, add photos, get rid of ads, send your contact details, search for users - all this is unnecessary.

Therefore, the service has become popular not only among techies, but also among the "Muggles." It is very easy to connect to it, it is enough to know about its existence. Having an e-mail is a more complicated and dreary task.


Comparison of videoconferencing services from Process.st

The second reason for the fall of Skype and the growth of Zoom are bugs! Both in the desktop and in the mobile version of Skype, you come across them regularly (which is not surprising, given the number of updates and the number of various additional functions that no one requested). Each update adds new features and new problems. And also in Skype, unfortunately, there is a lot of spam, through which sometimes you have to wade.

However, both Skype, and Google Hangouts, and Facebook Messenger, and Apple FaceTime - all of them got a good boost in terms of users. But only Zoom in two months has become a cultural sensation.

One of the main reasons is that it is now used by many schools and universities. This is a convenient way to quickly connect 20-30 people at once, and speak simultaneously with many. And from a young audience - memes (the Facebook group has already gained 450 thousand users), viral advertising, social significance and natural popularity.

The young audience also appreciates Zoom for some features reminiscent of social media applications. For example, the “Correct my appearance” button in the video settings smoothes the skin of a person’s face, like a filter in Instagram. If you suddenly woke up with a pimple on your forehead - you can not be so stressed if you have a call today. A "Virtual Background" will successfully hide an uncleaned room.

Convenience and reliability of the service made it the “standard” in business videoconferencing. And for students and schoolchildren it seems that using Zoom is cool. This is a “hot” brand that keeps up to date. While Skype among the generation of "zoomers" is regarded as a "passed stage."

5 reasons to use Zoom


We at Rubrain.com have been using Zoom for our daily work for several years. Among managers, on average, about five times per hour. For programmers, once or twice a day. Here are all the meetings, all the analysis of projects (design, programming, documents). Managers give and discuss tasks, developers report progress for the day.

Here are a few reasons why we chose this service:

1. It’s easy. This is the

whole point of the service.

Eric Yuan, founder of Zoom, was the head of Webex. He was engaged in the development of software for video conferencing. However, by 2010, he was disappointed in working for Cisco. According to the entrepreneur, the problem was that the Webex service was not good enough. Each time when Webex users logged in to start a conference, the system first determined the version of the program being launched (iOS, Android, PC or Mac). This significantly slowed down the work.

Talking to Bill Tye, a venture investor who was one of the first to invest in Zoom, Eric Yuan said: “One day someone will create a cloud-based video conferencing service, and I will come to an end.”

For a year, the entrepreneur tried to convince Cisco management that the Webex service needs to be redone. In 2011, when all his attempts were unsuccessful, he decided to leave the company.

Now his Zoom project is the easiest to use. Click on the invitation link, and that's it, your conference has started. If the application is not installed, the same link suggests downloading it. Guests of the call do not even have to create an account, it is enough that the host has it.

2. It is available

Zoom works on any device. Smartphone, tablet, laptop, pc. You can join the conference from anywhere, even on a trolleybus, even on an airplane. The service also does not require a particularly fast Internet connection, it knows how to accurately reduce the quality of the video call. Only audio communication is also available.



3. It's free

Even for medium and large companies, if you approach wisely, the service is now completely free :) Not only for joining conferences, but also for creating them. All functions are available completely freely.

The free version of Zoom offers:

  • up to 40 minutes of the conference;
  • up to 100 participants;
  • up to 40 minutes of recording;
  • Customer Support.

In our experience, even large companies, with several thousand employees, DO NOT buy the paid version. And just reboot after 40 minutes. Of those paying in Russia, we only know that Mail.ru and several others who do this more for the sake of image.

4. It is reliable.

Even with a crazy influx of new users (up to 600 thousand people on peak Saturday, March 21), the service holds the load well. Bugs and crashes are not observed, which is simply unheard of, given the amount of traffic needed to process video meetings in real time.

True, there are scandals that Zoom sends your data to someone (Skype with Microsoft, however, they also regularly). There are a couple of vulnerabilities. More recently, there was a noise that some information in the Zoom iOS application (city, time zone) was sent to Facebook. But the company quickly eliminated this in the latest update. The problem was using the Facebook SDK for iOS. No user data Zoom, as far as we can see, is not yet trading.

5. It's fun.

Well, in general, Zoom is pretty funny. No wonder there are so many memes and compilations about him. Instead of a meeting where everyone is looking at you in your kitchen, you can add your own background and communicate as if you are in space or on the beach. Or in the Arctic with penguins. And students, for example, like to add backgrounds with classrooms, as if they still go to university. There are a lot of free backgrounds on the Internet, let's say, here and here . In the days of social isolation, that is what is needed.



In general, if you feel that communicating on Skype is something not right, if you recently switched to remote work, we strongly recommend it. Zoom did not pay for this article, but we at Rubrain use it ourselves, and it successfully solves all our problems that we encountered in solutions from Google, Microsoft and Cisco. If you suddenly suddenly switched to remote work, this is one of those tools that can help. As an alternative - at Habré recently recommended the open-source Atitsian Jitsi Meet.

Who knows what will happen in a few years. Maybe something better and more fun will appear, or Zoom is hung with advertising and "buns", beyond which even the interlocutor will not be visible. But for now, there is trust in Eric Yuan, and the way he leads his company during the current crisis is worthy of respect.

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