Over the last three weeks the Zoom business has been exploding and we're
gonna take a look in this video, why the zoom business is zooming? i'm Greg Raiz
and this is half ideas
videoconferencing isn't something new in fact we've had Skype, hangouts, FaceTime
Microsoft teams and many other video conferencing services for many years
there's a number of things that set Zoom apart and we're gonna take a look at
those. The first and arguably the most important is video and audio quality
when you look at the video and audio quality of zoom when you compare it with
some of the other products it's really night and day and in particular when you
get into meetings that have more than ten people there's really no comparison
in testing Skype, Hangouts, and Zoom together the quality of the Zoom
experience is really sharp and crisp you get much higher fidelity video and the
connection speed is really fast so you don't get a lot of that delay that you
may see in other products you also don't see a lot of pixelation or artifacts in
the video quality coming through and I think that makes a big difference in the
user experience of using these video products. Google Hangouts offers a
cleaner user experience in that you don't have to open up a separate
application it just opens in another tab and Skype that's been around for many
many years offers and was the first to offer many social features like contact
sharing and chat but when it comes to large meetings, try to get 10 to 20
people on a conference call and Zoom is really the clear winner. Why is this
after all Skype was the pioneer it was introduced in 2003 and has had almost a
decade head start. The Skype experience took advantage of high-speed Internet
when it was initially launched and this helped the adoption of Skype dominate
the field initially. Skype grewe quickly and was acquired by eBay three years after
launching and three years after that it was sold to a private equity firm. New
York Times is reporting that eBay may announce a deal to sell at Skype
internet phone unit as early as today The Times did not name a price but eBay
has previously said it wants two billion for Skype. EBay shares are rising in pre
market trading. Two years after that it was bought by Microsoft in 2011. "That's
exactly right, look Skype is a strategic buy from Microsoft they've kind of been
left behind. Their messenger service isn't that great. Google's got Google
Talk, Apple's got FaceTime. Microsoft has made a big acquisition. At
the time Microsoft had its own video product called
Microsoft Lync and Office Communicator. This caused a bunch of confusion but no
problem, Microsoft said we'll just rename link to be called Skype for business.
This actually caused even more confusion because Skype for business wasn't really
compatible with Skype since then Skype for business has been morphed into
Microsoft teams and that product is also now mostly incompatible with classic
Skype. While Skype was an early mover and one of the first to the market they
actually split the market and confused folks. They told business users to use
one product, personal users to use another product. So what zoom got right
is they allowed people to blend their use of personal zoom where they're
communicating with friends and family with some of their business use of zoom.
Making a really seamless user experience. The other thing that soon got right was
the underpinning of their technology. While Skype was first to market zoom
really took advantage of how the internet was changing and how the
internet speeds of a typical person were getting faster and faster. While Skype
was initially based on peer-to-peer technology Zoom really thought about the
underpinnings of their product in terms of what would work for large meetings
and so the core of the Zoom technologies oriented around how can lots of people
talk at once. When Skype was introduced Internet connectivity was rather slow
and the common approach to solving one-to-one communication was using
peer-to-peer connectivity the person talks to the server and the server sets
up the connection between two computers while this makes sense it has some
problems if one person has a bad connection the entire call can get
dropped and as you add more and more people the connections grow very quickly.
N squared minus N over 2, actually. With 10 people, you need to manage up to 45
connections. Zoom on the other hand uses a centralized server like a telephone
switchboard so those 10 users only really need 10 connections to the
switchboard to have a good conversation. We've seen Zoom be able to operate with
hundreds of millions of users and many simultaneous connections, hundreds of
people in a conversation without much lag or drop in quality of video. In
addition to the quality of the call and performance
with many people, Zoom is introducing a lot of under-the-hood features that are
making it easier for teachers tutors and businesses. In particular tutors are
using recurring meetings to make it easy to schedule meetings and keep people
coming back to the product, remote assistance is allowing people to use
zoom to help and assist with technical or computer support, and break off rooms
are allowing large meetings to break off into smaller working groups, whiteboards
are allowing people to collaborate visually and many more. These features
such as whiteboards and collaboration rooms are just not available in
products like Skype they're not available in Google Hangouts and some of
the other products I mentioned. This is really setting them apart from a
future perspective and allowing them to grow so much faster. In building a
successful business there's a lot of luck, a lot of timing, a lot of work put
into it but it's no coincidence that Zoom is zooming and off to the races doing
so well. Zoom's user experience the user interface is fairly intuitive there's
obviously things that they could improve. Putting the leave meeting button in the
same corner as resizing the window, maybe that's not the best place to put that
button and sometimes the interactions require some right-clicking or some not
necessarily the most intuitive interactions, and some of the toolbars
are a little bit inconsistent popping around from different configurations
depending on how you set up your screen. But overall the user experience
is pretty solid. Zoom has come under fire recently for some
privacy and security things and it's important to understand that sometimes
privacy and security are contrary to the user experience. While zoom tried to make
it so easy to join and sign up to a meeting, sometimes they made it too easy.
And so they're coming back a little bit with security and additional passwords
and additional levels to make the platform a little more secure. This is a
great sign that the product is maturing and really able to scale at hundreds of
millions of people using it regularly we've seen zoom grow over the past
couple weeks and I expect the zoom product will continue to grow and
prosper. Video communication is one of the most visual and engaging ways that's
how we as humans communicate so I'm excited to have
you join on this video. Till the next one I'm Greg Raiz.