I’m pretty sure that corporate clients, like my employer, pay for the software.
Yes. You can make short meetings, or 1-on-1 calls of any length, for free. But if you want to invite a bunch of people to a meeting that might run more than 40 minutes, you need a paid account. (I got a paid account when we hosted a memorial service for my MIL, for instance.)
Individual accounts are kind of pricey for what it is. I assume corporations get some sort of a group deal, but they are paying, too.
My company has used WebEx for years and is increasingly using Teams. A non-profit that I’m involved with switched to Zoom a couple years ago. I much prefer it to WebEx, which is now in catchup mode trying to match Zoom’s features.
Teams also has a web version. You’re right about the number of windows. I think it’s only 9 but that’s right about the number of people in our department so it works well for us.
It’s probably my imagination but the video call quality seems better on Teams than Zoom.
All I know is that I created a meeting and invited my husband to it, and he had to do more than click on a link and then say, “okay” to join. I decided that wasn’t viable to set up a high-stakes meeting with a stranger.
So I used zoom.
I think teams has better video quality, and better synchronization of sound and picture. But “easy to join” is more important for a lot of purposes.
My Wife’s university IT department started with the position “anything but Microsoft”, moved through “Google only if we have to” and “how much does it cost” and “does it work?” to settle on Zoom. So now all the staff, and all the students, use Zoom every week.
So when they want something for their off time, what they gonna use?
Ditto what a lot of folks have said.
And really, the fact that I can send a link out to a bunch of people, and all they have to do is click on it (no registering, no logging in, no install process) and it just works is enough to have propelled zoom to the top of the teleconferencing pyramid.
This seems to be the up-and-coming 21st century business model: Let the whole world use your product for free so they can see how it really is truly great, and then enable a few extra perks for those who are willing to pay for them.
(I used to call this the “Google Business Model” because of Google Maps. The incredible detail and wealth of information that we get for free can’t be cheap for Google to produce. They must recoup it somehow. One of my guesses is that they sell those photos to the tv weather and traffic reports. Sorry for the hijack.)
That business model is called freemium and has been around for a while.
Ignorance fought! Thank you!
Great question OP. I’ve had the exact same feeling, that is, “What the heck is zoom and why is it suddenly the ‘Kleenex’ or ‘Xerox’ of teleconferencing?”
I too have used various tools over the last decade or more, including Webex, GoToMeeting, etc. etc.
As for my experience with zoom, my feeling is that it has a couple of cool features, such as breakout rooms, but my difficulty in actually using zoom (yes) outweighs the positive. Cases in point:
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The visual language of zoom is different from the other products I have tried. Sometimes it takes me several seconds to be able to find the control to view the main screen, because unlike other Windows apps, this button is in the tiny, minimized screen that is default black in color and really disappears.
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Logins have been a disaster. During this summer I was an instructor at my university, where this one class I taught (of two total) was managed over zoom. The person setting permissions made it such that I had to login using another instructor’s credentials, for some unknown reason. Thus every time I tried to login as myself I could not. Those credentials stuck, and forever more, when logging into a zoom meeting, even one put on by my (older) parents for all the kids, I appear as someone with a name radically different from my own. I’ve not bothered to fix this as I just avoid zoom nowadays.
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About those family meetings…the first 1/2 hour each time is dealing with who has login permissions, etc. as nobody is able to make it work. Heck, my brother, who is a computer expert and does IT management for a living, took 30 minutes, spread over two attempts, to get logged in! I asked him if he were having internet issues, and he got mad…so, no.
I use Webex a lot for my current class, even for proctoring remote exams. Works great for everything I want to do, and there are never any difficulties of the type I described above.
So, yeah, I still wonder at why Zoom has “zoomed to the top” in terms of user mind-share. I guess my experience must be relatively rare. Oh, and all students get to use webex for free.
Skype for Business, which is the equivalent of Zoom, doesn’t require an account either. You send an invitation link, they click it and join the conference, and can type their name. You don’t even need to install a client, it runs in the browser, just like Zoom. That’s how it has worked for years, Zoom is just imitating it. Nothing revolutionary there.
However, as someone who has supported Skype for Business professionally for 6+ years and has recently started supporting Zoom, I will say that Zoom works better. There are fewer technical glitches, it seems to scale better, and the interface is more intuitive. It has definitely been easier to get people to adopt it.
Is Skype for Business free? We used to have it at work, but switched to WebEx Teams and Meetings.
With Skype for Business you have to pay to maintain a server. Someone is paying the bills to run the system that people connect to. But you can invite anyone to join a meeting from an account registered to the server, and the people you invite don’t have to pay a dime. In my experience, WebEx works that way as well.
Teams offers Large Gallery which has a maximum of 49 people. This has only been added in the last few months, as Teams has had to catch up. It is still very weak for breakout rooms, which I think Zoom handles quite nicely.
I’ve also noticed that with Zoom I can click “tell user to turn on camera”, which I haven’t noticed on Teams. This is rather useful with my dad, who keeps forgetting to turn on his camera. Trying to instruct someone how to use software when you can’t see their screen is rather challenging, but my parents, and many of their friends, can use it quite well.
So, I think Zoom has dominated because it’s free for all users, at least for many calls. They did the best job of free (like Hangouts or regular Skype) and just click on a link to join (like Meetings and new Hangouts) without needing an account.
If you click on your name in the participant list, you can change what appears. The option is rather obviously called “Rename.”
My daughter uses Zoom at the university where she teaches, and finds Zoom Rooms pretty useful, and has had no problems. And like I said, a bunch of not computer literate 80 year olds use the Zoom I administer with minimal problems.
It also starts up way faster than WebEx.
Not as fast as Google meetings, though, which seems optimized for Chrome and is real fast for the meetings I’ve participated in.
For our Christmas dinner we did some testing (Meet, Teams, Zoom and Jitsi): Jitsi is the winner on sound and flexibility.Teams is too focussed on an microsoft account, Meet is too focussed on a google account, Zoom wants you to pay for an account if the meeting is longer than 20mins?
With jitsi you can pick up any device with a camera and a browser, open the link and you are off. Sound is by far the best on Jitsi (the competition cannot handle feedback at all)
This was the shareware model 25 years ago in the early days of PCs
I’d say, rather, that it’s a subset of shareware. In a lot of shareware, the paid version didn’t even include any extra features at all: The business model was more analogous to a tip jar.
Meanwhile, back on topic, there’s another dynamic for communications platforms, in that the more popular ones tend to remain popular, because a communication platform is useless without anyone to communicate with. This naturally tends towards one product dominating a market, or maybe two, if a competitor has enough backing from a major company like Google. Back before COVID, none of the teleconferencing softwares really had a chance to be dominant, because the field was so small that even the biggest player was still pretty small, and the consumers were companies, not individuals. When all of a sudden there was demand for teleconferencing for everyone for everything, it was inevitable that one would rise to first place. There may have been some reasons for the particular one that did, but it may just as well have been the equivalent of drawing a card from a shuffled deck and then asking why, out of all of the 52 possibilities, it happened to be the ten of diamonds.