Zoom Video Communications, Inc.
(stylized as zoom or simply Zoom) is an American communications technology
company headquartered in San Jose, California. It provides video telephony and
online chat services through a cloud-based peer-to-peer software platform and
is used for teleconferencing, telecommuting, distance education, and social
relations.
If video conferencing is the gold
rush of the COVID pandemic, then Zoom is David to Google and Cisco's Goliath.
Google has 120,000 employees. Microsoft has over 150,000 workers. Zoom has just
a few thousand, yet its mobile app has been downloaded 485 million times, more
than any of its competitors. Zoom should have never won this fight, so how did
it do it?
What Zoom did right was something really simple. It focused on
delivering happiness. Eric Yuan used to work at Cisco WebEx, one of Zoom's main
competitors. While there, he says he did not see a single happy customer. So
when he left and founded his own company, Zoom, he made happiness a mission.
And now the company's filters, from pig noses to fake moustaches sometimes
become news headlines themselves.
A year after becoming an integral part of daily life under COVID,
Zoom is still competing with tech giants. It's had problems with security, not
to mention the fatigue users experience after back-to-back meetings. But the
upside is apparent and likely(?) here to stay. For now, it's made people's
lives during the pandemic a bit easier and shall we say, happier?