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Zoom's massive 'overnight success' actually took nine years
By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business
When you think of a social network, you probably imagine news feeds, birthday reminders and baby photos. But
the social network of the moment -- the one that's currently getting more app downloads than either Snapchat or
TikTok -- looks a little different: It's a videoconferencing service called Zoom, where many peoples' work and social
lives now unfold.
[5] As the coronavirus pandemic has forced millions around the world to stay in their homes, the 9-year-old platform
has emerged as the go-to service for not only virtual meetings and classroom lessons but happy hours, costume
parties, church services, brunches, book clubs and romantic dates. Like Facebook and Twitter, it's also become a
key part of internet culture: The Facebook Group "Zoom Memes for Self Quarantines," with nearly 395,000
members, offers a steady stream of jokes, ranging from a video of a student pretending Zoom is glitchy to get out
[10] of a homework assignment to a professor starting a lesson with cameos from stuffed animals.
From the start, Zoom aspired to stand out in a market of products that were probably more hated than loved. In
a letter to shareholders included with its paperwork for going public a year ago, founder and CEO Eric Yuan talked
about "how unhappy" people were with the videoconference tools on the market. But that was before the pandemic.
Now video conferencing tools have gone from the punchline of a dry office joke to a vital social lifeline - and perhaps
[15] none more so than Zoom.
Zoom's free version can host up 100 video participants at once - Microsoft (MSFT- owned Skype's free model allows
for 50 - and features personalized tools, including the ability to pick from different backgrounds (whether it be the
Golden Gate Bridge option or a picture you upload), change the camera angles, hold encrypted private calls, send
direct messages and record sessions. In recent weeks, Zoom has emerged as the most downloaded app on the
[20] Apple App Store, repeatedly breaking its download records.
The company launched in 2011 when Yuan left Cisco as a founding engineer on its WebEx video platform, one
of Zoom's rivals. In April 2019, Zoom went public and fared better than splashier tech companies such as Lyft and
Uber, which held their IPOs around the same time. Zoom shares surged 72% on its first day of trading, giving it
a market valuation of 16billion.AsofFriday,Zoomwasvaluedatmorethan40 billion, or roughly as much
[25] as Uber. (Unlike Uber, Zoom is actually profitable.)
From the start of its life as a publicly traded company, investors seemed to ________ Yuan's vision, as laid out his
letter to shareholders: "video is the future of communications." But it looks like that future came much faster and
more abruptly than anyone could have expected. "This is a very critical moment," Yuan said on a conference call
with analysts earlier this month. "Overnight almost everybody read and understood they needed a tool like this." At
[30] the same time, Zoom must work to keep its service up and running amid surging demand for online communication
tools and social networks that has strained far bigger platforms.
Retrieved and adapted from: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/27/tech/zoom-appcoronavirus/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0IPLspbqiLTY7Eo4wLLSSk8O4pzWPW8z2yUhdk86WqIFOCnae7grLpQ. Access on April 05, 2020.
Concerning the latest videoconferencing tool, Zoom, we can assume
