Zoom records another bumper quarter as pandemic rumbles on, but Wall Street types quiz execs on how long it can last

Lockdown luvvie Zoom has reported a bumper set of Q3 financials – although a rise in the number of free users dampened gross profit margins. Revenues for the videoconferencing service hit $777.2m in the quarter ended 31 October, up 367 per cent year-on-year. That's not a typo, and mirrors the strong trading in H1, where …

[BigAndos]

Zoom has successfully made video conferencing easy(ish) and it has proven reliable under massively increased load so I suspect it will be here to stay. Most large companies are looking to permanently increase homeworking for suitable roles. Even if many or most people will not be at home full time, they will need to communicate with people who are at home. E.g. If I'm in the office 3 days i week i will still need to talk to people who might be at home on those 3 days.

So the number of meetings might drop, but I don't think many large companies will get rid of video conferencing tools once the pandemic is over. Looking at the competition,we used cisco webex for years but that was comparatively hard to use with a desktop app that crashed all the time and it would die in a heap if you tried to use video. Then when the pandemic hit it completely died as it obviously couldn't scale! We have google meet, which is much easier to use even than zoom but has pants video quality and limited features. Not tried teams, but zoom is certainly well placed against those two services.

[AlanSh]

I've used Teams and Zoom and Zoom is by far the easier to manage and work with.

Alan

[eldoc]

One big annoyance of Teams is that certain client functionality is not available unless you create an account and you are logged in. A well-designed client should not require that.

[The Count Is Dead]

The reason for that is

The only people who should have access to your video and/or audio conferences are the people who have accounts created by your IT dept. and are logged in with verified credentials. Do you want just any old random Joe Shmoe attending your meetings where private IP is being discussed? Your "well designed client" would allow that. Not very smart.

[eldoc]

Re: The reason for that is

"The only people who should have access to your video and/or audio conferences are the people who have accounts created by your IT dept"

Really? Have you ever worked in a sales or a support function for example? Would you really expect your organisation's IT department to have to create an account for every support contact, customer and prospect you might ever interact with?

Furthermore, to get the missing functionality, you don't need an account with an IT department. An account set up with any random hotmal or gmail address does the same job in terms of enabling the missing bits.

Zoom manages this perfectly well with the likes of meeting registration, passwords, waiting rooms and the ability to boot people out and ban them. To improve the usability of teams, MS needs to look at some of its competition and what they currently do better.

[Roland6]

Re: The reason for that is

>The only people who should have access to your video and/or audio conferences are the people who have accounts created by your IT dept. and are logged in with verified credentials.

Got some bad news for you, if you are eligible!, you may be invited to attend a National Speed Awareness Course, which is conduct online via Zoom. Zoom's waiting room functionality allows for the screening of attendees and the verification of their credentials. Given that the courses are for "any old random Joe Shmoe" who has accepted the 'invite', Zoom actually does alot better than Teams...

Being a little more serious, whilst you may have a point about company internal meetings of the sort that have been prepared, Zoom better suits the ad-hoc and richer social gathering of people, as witnessed by its use during lockdown. I've not seen any other platform used in the same way to bring disparate people together, many of whom had very little to do with tech before the lockdown...

Yes Teams does have a place, but I expect it is more of a collaborative work space ie to be used once we have agreed to work together on something; however, it needs to be a easy as Zoom to allow end users to easily set up collaborations across multiple organisations . (ie. I should only need to enter a person's phone number/email address to get them set up on my "teams" area of Teams). However, currently, we are finding that Dropbox is providing better sharing of documents than Teams with in consortiums consisting of people from several different enterprises and where each business will add and subtract personnel according to need...

I suggest you need to be more of a policeman than a gatekeeper in your thinking.