Zoom Lied About Its Usage

After questions were raised about Zoom’s usage claims during the COVID crisis, the firm quietly edited a blog post that dramatically lowers the number.

News of Zoom’s deception came to light in the wake of Microsoft’s earnings on Thursday, when Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela tweeted that he believed Zoom’s numbers were way off.

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“I believe Zoom’s 300 [million] figure is not a [daily active users] or [monthly active users] number but a meeting participants number,” he tweeted. Microsoft, by comparison, reported that its Teams service saw over 200 million meeting participants in a single day this month, generating more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes. Microsoft Teams now has over 75 million daily active users, the company reported.

Capossela is right, and Zoom quietly edited a week-old blog post that had made the claim that it had over 300 million “users.” Now, the post notes that Zoom has over “300 million daily Zoom meeting participants.”

That’s still higher than the Microsoft Teams figure, but not by a factor of four, like before. And if you add in Skype usage, Microsoft’s video conferencing solutions actually surpass Zoom overall.

This makes far more sense to me: Yes, Zoom is “easy,” but its no easier to use than competing solutions like Skype. And given Microsoft’s years-long efforts in this market, Zoom’s supposed dominance always range false to me. And now we know why.

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Conversation 3 comments

  • wbhite

    Premium Member
    27 May, 2020 - 4:42 pm

    <p>We're a full MS shop at work (on-prem back-end and O365), so when this whole COVID thing started I sent out an email to everyone explaining that MS Teams was our preferred platform for video conferencing (we're already paying for it, and it works well). An executive at our company, one week into it, decided that he liked Zoom better than Teams and dictated that all of his meetings be done using (paid) Zoom. I couldn't convince him otherwise; I think he got caught up in the Zoom media coverage.</p>

  • anderb

    Premium Member
    27 May, 2020 - 5:38 pm

    <p>I can't understand why some people appear to be so bitter about Zoom's success.</p><p><br></p>

    • Paul Thurrott

      Premium Member
      28 May, 2020 - 8:39 am

      It might be because Skype was a market innovator and Microsoft has handled its evolution poorly.

      As to why people take this personally, … I can’t explain it. But we see it a lot in tech enthusiasts circles.

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