Behind Zoom’s happy troubles, the trouble is indeed not small.
Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account “Digital Work” (ID: workhacker) .
Author | DONG
Edit | XUGUOGUO
Google Meet upgrade free policy, Missed the opportunity to acquire Zoom in 2018
Online video conferencing battles continue to escalate, and last week Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) expanded its free service coverage.
Google will now offer free “Meet” products to all users who have Gmail email addresses-regardless of whether they are subscribers to the Google Productivity Software G Suite.
Since the outbreak of New Coronary Pneumonia Covid-19, the use of Teams in the video conferencing field like Zoom (NASDAQ: ZM) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has welcomed a large number of new users, and Google is no exception.
The latest data released by Google at present is: Since January, the peak daily usage of Google Meet has increased by 30 times, generating 3 billion minutes of video conferencing time per day, increasing 3 million users per day. In April, it exceeded 100 million people. Google also specifically emphasized its extensive security features in its external publicity, which is clearly aimed at Zoom, which was previously in the midst of security public opinion storms.
In addition, 100 million students and teachers worldwide are using the Google Classroom app, which is twice the number in early March. In this process, schools and enterprises will also enable Google’s video conferencing platform Meet. The synergy effect is expected to continue to strengthen.
As part of G Suite, Google Meet continues to add new features to better compete with competitors such as Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.
From the overall perspective of the G Suite suite tools, Google currently has more than 6 million paying G Suite customers. Like NetfliInternet companies such as x, Twitter and Shopify all use Meet as the main tool for remote work or external meetings in the company.
In addition, while Google Meet is constantly struggling to compete with Zoom, etc., an old news broke out that as early as 2018, someone inside Google proposed to buy Zoom.
It is reported that Zoom products became popular within Google at the latest by 2018, when at least thousands of employees were using Zoom instead of Google ’s own products (Hangout Hangouts).
Based on the culture of engineers, Google internally launched a series of calculations on the economics of the unit that acquired Zoom and ran it on Google servers. Purely mathematical calculations are likely to be positive and positive. But from the company’s decision-making level, the relevant discussions did not take too long. The conclusion is that Google continues to develop its own products instead of acquiring Zoom.
Now it seems that in the next two years, Google ’s Hangout Hangout product clearly failed in the showdown with Zoom. Otherwise, there is no need to continue to use various methods to seize the market with the background of the epidemic.
Facebook will include free users or will it save Zoom?
After Facebook joined the online video conference competition, it is attracting more attention from users. Recently, its strategy is also very obvious, that is to improve the video call function in all of its product portfolios.
From the interface, Facebook ’s newly launched Messenger Rooms are obviously similar to the Zoom interface.
Messenger Rooms allows users to create rooms from Facebook or Messenger. Up to 50 people can join the video call (people who do not use Facebook can also join). Most importantly, there is no time limit for group calls. In contrast, ZoomBasic users only have 40 minutes of free meeting time.
Considering that Facebook has more than 1 billion daily active users, Messenger Rooms ’growth in the next few weeks deserves continued attention.
In addition to Messenger Rooms, WhatsApp will also launch a group video call function, allowing up to 8 people to join the call. Instagram will also launch similar features in the coming weeks.
Analysis believes that these Facebook actions are likely to result in a dramatic reduction in the number of Zoom users. However, there are also views that this decline in free users is not necessarily a good thing for Zoom.
Overall, for any company, scale-up is important, but things should not get out of control. For example, what happened to Zoom in the past few weeks is well worth reviewing. A big potential crisis is that the pressure (stability, security and brand) brought by the large number of free users will seriously affect the experience of paying users.
The surge in users caused by the epidemic in 2020 is actually a bit confusing inside Zoom, and even management is not sure how to respond to this surge in demand.
Zoom Chief Financial Officer Kelly Steckelberg believes that because the company is forced to make a large amount of investment to support the exponential growth of users, the profit margin may decline in the next few quarters. The worst part is that no one knows whether such an investment will achieve the desired results in the next few years, because free users have little added value to the company’s revenue.
The sudden increase in the number of users has caused a significant delay in responding to queries from paying users, which is also a very serious problem.
From the perspective of business users, they are unlikely to enable Facebook as an official video conferencing platform in the future. The target customers of Zoom are small and medium-sized enterprises seeking seamless connection platforms. On the other hand, Messenger Rooms is the ideal solution for Zoom Basic users who have never planned to pay for premium plans.
In the next few weeks, Zoom ’s daily active users may be greatly reduced, and the absolute majority of these users will not be the core target users of Zoom. They come with the wind, and they will go with the wind. Investors who just want to zoom in should hold on, but of course it may be a big opportunity for those who sell Zoom.
With Messenger Rooms becoming the first choice for free users, Zoom ’s previous security concerns will gradually subside. Combined with security improvements, Zoom “Happy Troubles” is best resolved as soon as possible.
Zoom: 300 million meeting participants are not “DAU”
Zoom has been in a state of “resting” in recent weeks, and the feeling of being stared at by a microscope with the outside world is not so good.
In addition to continuing to address security issues last week, Zoom corrected its previously released number of users, saying that it has 300 million Zoom meeting participants per day instead of 300 million daily active users.
The difference between these two statements is that a single user can count as a meeting participant multiple times, once for each meeting. The statistical caliber is still very different.
In addition, due to the pressure of the surge in users, Zoom chose Oracle as its cloud partner in addition to the original Amazon AWS and Microsoft Smart Cloud.
Zoom said that Zoom started working with Oracle about six weeks ago, and now there are tens of thousands of meeting participants and about 7 million gigabytes of data being transferred through Oracle every day.
For Oracle, this deal is a major win. In the cloud computing market, Oracle’s progress in recent years has been very weak, and its market share has been lower than AWS and Azure.
Microsoft Teams has more than 75 million daily activities
Microsoft released the latest data on its Teams daily active users last week-more than 75 million. Compared with the 44 million daily activities on March 19, it has increased by more than 70%.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced this new number on the earnings call last week.
Analysis believes that this increase not only shows that remote work is changing the way people use technology, but also explains why Microsoft’s revenue and profits rose in the March quarter.
According to Microsoft’s financial report, the revenue of the productivity and business process departments including Teams increased by 15% to US $ 11.7 billion.
Jared Spataro, vice president of Microsoft 365, said in a blog post that during the epidemic, some practices in people ’s lives may be short-lived, but some practices at work may affectThe sound is profound, “We believe that the habits we see in Teams are more durable and will continue to exist after the current crisis.”
Teams products are included in the enterprise ’s Microsoft 365 product suite subscription, but enterprise users need to upgrade to a higher version to unlock more advanced features, such as video calling. Microsoft has also introduced a Teams version for personal and home use.
Citrix old tree sprouts
Under the epidemic, in addition to the attention of rookies like Zoom (ZM), traditional software companies like Citrix Systems also ushered in the second spring.
Last week, Citrix announced that revenue in the first quarter greatly exceeded its own expectations, and revenue increased by 20% year-on-year. So far, the stock price has risen by nearly 30%.
Previously, Citrix, as a traditional software company, was mainly promoting a virtualization technology. In recent years, his revenue growth has encountered a bottleneck because he wants to convert his customers to a SaaS model of cloud computing.
But now, as offices around the world are reconfigured to meet the needs of remote offices, Citrix seems to have received orders from more customers.
However, in the financial report, Citrix remained cautiously optimistic about this situation. They said: We provide a more flexible and shorter-term product at a discounted price, which is provided in the form of local regular subscriptions with limited use. Since many of our existing customers have large local deployments, the fastest way to deploy more seats is to expand local regular subscription licenses or obtain more seats through permanent licenses.
Specifically, the $ 111 million (actually the vast majority of revenue) of Citrix ’s revenue for the quarter came mainly from the “business continuity” solution that was temporarily sold to Citrix customers through the use of short-term licenses. In other words, this is not a SaaS model that can generate stable long-term revenue. This revenue growth will be short-lived or even one-off. If customers request to switch to true cloud computing products, it may still be a question of whether Citrix can meet them in time.