Zoom chops president it hired less than a year ago Pandemic work communications darling Zoom has unceremoniously axed the president it hired less than a year ago "without cause," the company has confirmed in a regulatory filing. Greg Tomb was hired as Zoom's president in June 2022; prior to joining Zoom he was VP of sales for Google Workspace, Security and Geo Enterprise, and …
For us, Zoom is far more useful than the abomination that Teams has become. MS took Skype and Foobar'd it in quick time. Then we get Teams foisted on us. We tried. We really did but it is a POS. Zoom works for us as a distributed team (US, UK and Bahrain).
I'm sure that MS will see this and make Teams even more part of Windoze. Another bit that can't be removed and if it is, it will come back when the next update is applied.
> There are swaths of 3rd party videoconferencing tools now though
Expect them to break with an upcoming W11 update with MS giving the following explanation:
"These third-party apps might cause errors with explorer.exe that might repeat multiple times in a loop. These types of apps often use unsupported methods to achieve their customization and as a result can have unintended results on your Windows device."
Expect them to break with an upcoming W11 update
Of course. Especially those based on Open Standards such as WebRTC where MS was a participant, and we all know Microsoft mainly participates in Open Standards for (a) FOMO and (b) preferrably creating a proprietary variant. It did that with Microsoft Authenticator too.
"You were useful, once. Then the world recovered."
The rather sad truth is that Microsoft gave Teams for business free and swallowed losses until it was big enough to charge. Very very blatant anti-trust, but the US is weak on antitrust and looses good companies as result. Initial free offering is so common that US citizens don't even see it as anti-trust.
Easy to forget that Microsoft didn't have Teams in a workable state at the start of covid. It had Skype for business which is now dead.
I hated Zoom parties as mush as the next man, but their dimise is indicative of the sad state of anti-trust in the US and its a huge waste of resources to support a boomb bust cycle where everyone, looses except mega corps.
I have a sneaking suspicion that they don't think about much. They will have one interest, improving on previous figures.
The fact that they benefitted from something that had never happened before is meaningless. Doing business in the USA is even less attractive than it would be here!
They make one product, that Microsoft essentially gives away for "free" to the same market audience..
I'd say 7% post COVID growth against something already bundled in by your biggest compitior is fairly decent.
But I'm sure they want to grow by COVID numbers again, and that just ain't going to happen.
Yes, I'd say it's Netscape all over again. Now the competition is all but gone, guess what? In a new and totally not expected move, Microsoft now will start to charge for it.
Them old monopoly abuse tricks are still the best. Regulation is avoided by but a nice expensive dinner and a board position.
Given that we like to use video without a risk of intercept we switched to Jitsi fairly early on. It does the job, and WE are in control.
That's what I was told years ago because I'd been working for the company and always fixing their customers problems, not telling them that they needed to buy a new system. Corporate management actions are to benefit profits, not users.
OK, so Google is not perfect but they always worked initially to both make money and support users.
But did has he been able to collect all of the picture cards to complete the Thunderbirds poster?[1]
[1] I think I got about 1/2 of the blanks filled in on the poster; maybe I was meant to eat Fab lollies (yuck, girlie) to get the rest?
One of the biggest things that fed Zoom's growth during the pandemic was the ignorant news media. I lost count of the number of times that news stories referred to something as a "Zoom meeting" when their own video or photographs showed a different product in use. And that doesn't count the times where no visual evidence was available, how many of these cases was where Zoom was referenced was another product in use?
I recall one particular news story that referenced a "Zoom conference" when the video clearly showed somebody on a FaceTime call. Which is odd because it's very unlike the mainstream news media not to take an opportunity to promote Apple.
What was happening here was free advertising that Zoom hadn't even asked for. The result of course being that people wanting to hold a video conference or even a ones to one video call thought they needed Zoom to do it. My employer uses Teams as their UC platform and yet one idiot who wanted to hold an online team meeting during lockdown asked the IT department if they could setup Zoom to hold the meeting. The IT department patiently asked why Teams couldn't be used. The idiot replied that Teams was no good "because I need to have a Zoom meeting." IT had to explain carefully how those particular manager could set up a teams video call with their five team members.
All of this sort of nonsense massively helped Zoom's growth, but is probably making it difficult for them now. Investors expect you to keep up your growth rate and there's simply no way that growth rate was ever going to be sustainable.
I think it was more the Netscape effect: Microsoft not just providing an alternative for free but actively ramming it down your throat by only allowing you to disable it auto-starting AFTER it had started for the first time (I had to image a lot of machines, and tell me, that resource hogging sh*t becomes unfunny pretty fast).
To further prove it's Netscape all over again, they now start charging for it by calling the current version "classic" and forcing you to "upgrade" so that the business variant is no longer available after April 12th this year. So now they've killed off the competition they are about to start cashing in.
Also, do yourself a favour and look at the network traffic this rubbish produces. Not good.
The worst part is that I've seen companies abandon their phone network in favour of this rubbish. Given that it's part of Office not-quite-365, that means all comms will be down if someone in Redmond as much as sneezes, and they don't exactly produce the most stable and resilient software to start with. We now like to highlight this when we work on Business Contuity Management as it's a MASSIVE weakness. On prem is then slightly better, but leaving some separate comms in place is best, even if that involves a few more mobile phones.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
