Zoom: Its Rise During the Pandemic and How it Dominated Video Chats

According to Bernstein Research and Apptopia, the Zoom app has seen a 30x growth in daily downloads over the past two years. According to Zoom, daily users increased from 10 million in December 2019 to 200 million in March 2020.

Eric Yuan, who left Cisco’s Webex division to concentrate on mobile-friendly video conferencing, founded Zoom. Before Zoom overtook them, Webex was the leading player in video conferences.

In April 2019, Zoom began trading on the stock market. A newly public IT business that really made money at the time was regarded as a rarity. The world was on lockdown a year later due to the coronavirus pandemic. Zoom went from being a specialized business application used by computer firms to becoming the norm for practically everything.

Zoom’s role during the rise of COVID-19

Zoom’s primary focus is on businesses. However, many families have been split apart and unable to communicate with one another as before since the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, Zoom has a sizable user base that includes both corporate users and people who just use Zoom to communicate with family and friends.

Many people have come up with inventive ways to digitally stay social during the millions of people who have been compelled to stay at home to stop the spread of COVID-19. These include happy hours, trivia evenings, and birthday parties. And Zoom, one of the numerous video conferencing services, has become the industry leader as a result of stringent social segregation policies and a strong resonance inside this new culture of social segregation.

What makes Zoom stand out exactly?

Zoom was competing with well-known video programs like Webex and GoToMeeting, such as those from IT behemoths Google and Microsoft.

According to Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp, which develops software to support employee collaboration even when they are not in the same workplace, “The real reason is: It was just simply way easier.”

According to Fried, Zoom made sharing a meeting link as simple as doing so with a YouTube video. A significant distinction from rival offerings is that participants in Zoom meetings do not need to log in or download any software. Even though Zoom had intended its software for commercial usage, it was incredibly simple for everyone else to use thanks to high-quality video and dependable connectivity.

“You open a room, you get a URL, you send the URL around to people. That’s it,” he said.

Then come along the downsides

However, such rapid expansion and the increased attention that comes with it have drawbacks. Similar to more conventional social networks, Zoom is now subject to privacy and cyberbullying worries. The term “Zoombombing” has already been coined to describe the act of trolls and hackers taking over public video chats and disrupting the conversation with offensive content or racist remarks. For instance, Chipotle revealed to CNN Business that a Zoom participant exposed pornography to all guests during its new public video chat series, Chiptole Together. Since then, the company has changed platforms. The New York Times broke the news of the incident first.

Farshad Hashmatulla, a spokesperson for Zoom, told CNN Business that the company relies on its 17 data centers across the world to handle this spike, directing both audio and video traffic to these facilities. Before the health crisis, he claimed, the company had a policy of ensuring it could accommodate double its daily average peak traffic and have the capacity to deploy tens of thousands of more servers in a matter of hours.

“We remain confident that our architecture is built to handle these growing levels of activity,” Hashmatulla stated.

The Zoom lesson

Despite a few technical hiccups, what has elevated Zoom to rockstar status is its capacity to address the needs of those who work remotely and act as a pleasant socializing tool.

Eric Yuan allowed the company’s efforts to be guided by one principle: to make video conferencing as simple as possible for everyone. cut down on user effort. Reduce complexity.