Zoom has become, it is fair to say, synonymous with video conferencing in this work from home era. Wired looked at how it beat Skype to become so dominant.
Not that people are using either as much as Zoom, which benefited both from being free to download and more reliable than its competitors. (Eric Yuan, Zoom’s founder, has been working on web conferencing software since he arrived in the US in 1997 from China to work for WebEx). An April 2020 survey of 1,110 US companies by Creative Strategies showed that 27 per cent of businesses primarily used Zoom for video calls and meetings, compared to 18 per cent that used Teams, and 15 per cent that used Skype. Many companies had quietly moved over from Skype to Zoom in the intervening years as Skype added more and more features that didn’t fit the core functionality of the service: producing decent quality video calls. And so when coronavirus hit, what in the first half of 2017 would have been a call to download Skype to keep in touch instead became a demand to download Zoom.
Check It Out: How Did Zoom Beat Skype?
Zoom handles far more concurrent members of a call than Skype, despite its ‘issues’ Zoom is faster, better quality audio and video. It just works and scales to many hundreds on a single call. Skype won’t do more than about 150. The organisation for whom I work has about a 1000 in one geographically spread out unit alone. So despite having Skype, we use Zoom, and there is a limit in Teams which means that’s out at well.
Skype lost this battle over a year ago. Microsoft kept adding bloat to it and making it work worse and worse. It was ripe for picking. Covid19 just made the point obvious, when people needed a video conferencing app they could count on, they looked elsewhere.
There is nothing like Zoom to save PowerPoint (or whatever) presentations with audio and laser pointer as “.mp4” movies. It works great, without any lost frame or page (as PowerPoint itself fails when converting into movie also losing the laser pointer!), generating small movies without quality loss (PowerPoint itself generates huge movies 5-times larger!). Great for lecturing online at the University!