What rhymes with 'boom' and is veritably raking it in thanks to the coronavirus pandemic? The coronavirus pandemic has been kind to videoconferencing service Zoom, which has seen Q2 2021 revenues soar by 355 per cent year-on-year on the back of widespread adoption by business and personal users alike. It's also been kind to videoconf biz boss CEO Eric Yuan, who woke up $4.2bn richer this morning after shares rose …
*People* don't have money, all that fluffing is ultimately Fed-funny-money, this huge spike here:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm
The RobinHood day traders aren't buying stocks, they're buying options to get leverage (a contract to buy a stock at a future price on a future date), buying the option does not drive up the price of the stock.
There are some $600+ trillion of leveraged garbage like that. If anything it soaks up some of that Fed funny money. It also means that if Tesla's price collapses a lot of that garbage collapses with it, the Fed will open the magic spreadsheet and add some more zeroes to the end of the "dollars" cell, saying "too big to fail".
Flooding the US with money won't save the economy, but it does stop the GDP number from collapsing which is important for elections. Flooding it via handouts to billionaires is just downright stupid, they're not short of money, they cannot productively use the money they have now.
Republicans, you've given Billionaires tax cuts, so they don't pay tax, you've pumped up their assets, you've loaned them 'loans' that don't need to be repaid, 'free money'. How exactly does giving Billionaires free money grow the economy? Trickle down has never worked. It only trickles down to Fox News commenters, and to pay for abortions for their Playboy mistresses, their underage massage girls and pool boys and paying peeing hookers their NDA fees.
But really the bubble is the least of the problems, the underlying problem is still there, even if you don't test for the virus, its still spreading.
Chairman Mao killed ~3% of the population of China with incompetence and bravado, starving them to death, as he tried to fluff the economy with farm exports, as his people died of starvation.
Chairman Trump is expected to kill ~1% *per*strain* of Covid19. Because if you allow widespread infection, it mutates, China tracked 2 strains before it shut down C19, US is tracking 6, the 2 China ones and the 4 Trump ones.
If you don't get the virus under control, you won't have a vaccine, it will be like the Flu, you'll have a Flu shot with vaccines that are 12-18 months out of date, that give you immunity to the *old* strain, not the *new* strain. Each new Trump strain killing 1% of the population.
Evolution is real, you notice how the creationists are silent right now?
/rant, But not really a rant, because its all sadly true. That is where the US is now, a pitiful shell of a country.
Oh, but we're off topic, lets talk about Zoom, the latest video conf software that took over from Skype that took over from Microsoft 'Net Meeting'. Isn't it amazing how far we've come..... golly gosh technology is amazing!
A couple of months ago I emailed to my colleagues a compendium of articles outlining why I personally would not be using, recommending, or having anything to do with Zoom (my bottom line being that sure, they fixed the stuff they screwed up, but why trust someone who lied, doubled-down on the lies, and has generally proven to be a questionable, if not dubious, actor?), but people still use it with "it's easy to use" being the most-offered reason.
I've been using Jitsi for meetings (small, half-dozen participants) and it works fine (I can't imagine Zoom being easier, since Jitsi is pretty simple), no account creation needed, no cr-app to download/install. Mind, I'm still looking at other options (nothing against Jitsi, just would like a Plan B and C) and would appreciate any suggestions.
Some will say Zoom is "easy" but others would point at Cisco & MS offering and say "sucks donkey balls".
Why is it so hard for these multi-billion dollar companies to make something that just works, and just works on the majority of browsers?
No crap packages to try and install when the meeting starts and you find you don't have admin rights. No issues of not working on any browser other than Chrome (looking at you MS - as Edge is now a Chrome clone), So crap of having to create an account simple to join a meeting organised by someone else.
Zoom has a lot of flaws and I can't really say it is secure without wetting myself laughing, but the UK gov ended up using it. Not that they can rum more than 2 brain cells together, of course.
Zoom works with little trouble, why can't others do the same?!
AC obviously, given I'm posting on El Reg - but why do we insist on promoting weird non-functional complicated niche solutions? I remember life BZ (Before Zoom) when every single VC required a 'buffer' of about half an hour to get the tech vaguely working - on a system that IT had mandated but was only used in 2 enterprises across the whole world, and wouldn't work on half your hardware, and would no way survive a mild patch Tuesday. I have regular meetings with someone who is desperate to hate Zoom and each time we meet he has something new - and each time it's not as good and just annoys everyone who now has to download, log in - remember another password etc etc.
Before the lets knock Zoom fest we have had the 'Dropbox is evil' decade - where any request for simple file sharing that just works was met by an edict to use some weird technology that 'is really simple' but turns out to involve downloading some ghastly plug-in that would get blocked by any sane firewall, and has an interface dreamed up by someone who thinks that everyone is more efficient using vi.
Zoom - VC that does what it says on the tin!
Pretty good - given the number of places where ssh gets filtered at the firewall Put the server in a really dodgy domain - I suggest something like *.hack.ru. to maximise the chance that it gets blocked. But don't use a standard ssh client - you should use a tweaked corporate version that is distributed as .dll's. That way you can almost certainly create a dependency on a .dll that you assume that your users have - I suggest an already redundant version of Microsoft Office - some element of Access 2007 is always a good shout.
Zoom is also a weird niche solution in that it requires custom software installed. Both Jitsi and gotomeet will work from a browser (typically Chrome) and work well. Heck, I know of one library service that is now doing its streaming story-time (for pre-school children) via Zoom because that's been mandated from on-high, rather than facebook which is, you know, facebook, but does have the advantage of viewers not needing to install special software and is actually more appropriate to what they're doing. Our entire organisation has access to teams, which works absolutely fine (including giving you access to meeting notes and slides), just doesn't have the 'fun' party view for panopticon enthusiasts. Zoom seems to be one of those services that is popular because you can set up an account easily if you have access to a credit card, thus it's easy to look proactive and cutting edge, especially with a cool name, Zoom. Zoom. Zoom Zoom. Pity they didn't call it Zoomer.
That said we now have an institutional subscription to zoom too, because apparently it's the most reliable way for students in China to connect. Make of that what you will.
Analysts work on a different cycle to developers. They invest in things that (they hope) will be big, not things that are already big.
If your business isn’t planning to grow, or it is already self sustaining, then it’s unlikely to be looking for investment... and if it does need investment it’ll be at a low return (or worse, in trouble)
Growth is a Wall Street mandate. If you do not grow, you stagnate and die. That is the Capitalist bible.
That is also why marketing people are always changing company. They go into a new company with a target they can meet, work to attain and exceed it to get valuable bonuses, then are saddled with a bigger target year after year.
Inevitably, there comes a point when they can't meet the target. Then they change company and the cycle starts over.
Find it odd article was bigging up Teams. It uses up a mass of CPU just doing chat and voice calls, as well as using lots of bandwidth even when nothing is happening (far more than a reasonable person would expect from just background checking if any new messages etc).
HAte to imagine what happens with Teams on video (fortunately not had to do video on Teams).
Plenty of people I know have been forced onto Teams with COVID and absolutely hate it
"It's uncertain how long Zoom's stratospheric growth can last."
It's finished already. Zoom grew quickly because lots of people who had never needed videoconferencing suddenly did need it. After over 5 months of being forced to work from home, everyone who actually needs it now has it. Where would any further growth come from? Maybe they can nibble away at market share, since Zoom is certainly easier to use than most similar services. Not that that's difficult, given that they could deliver an angry tiger to maul you through the whole call and it would still be less painful than trying to use WebEx. But the market as a whole is as big as it's going to get, and is only likely to shrink in the near future as at least some people go back to physical meetings instead.
> Where would any further growth come from?
It's like the smartphone and tablet market, which was expected to grow indefinitely (I guess till the layer of smartphones on the earth's surface grows beyond the atmosphere and people start dying).
Remember the big panic when the sales started to stagnate? "OMG! We sold less units than last year, let's rise the prices!"
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