Introduction
Zoom is a cloud-based video conferencing facility used for virtual meetings at home, school, and work in live chats and allows members to record the sessions for future reference. As Covid-19 persisted through 2020, companies recognized that online working could be a solution (Rohit, 2020). Yuan started thinking of video conferencing in his first year in college because he was tired of traveling for many hours to see his lover. The man joined Webex as a software engineer in 1997 after arriving in the USA, but finally left the job and founded zoom, where his former colleagues joined him. Yuan said the starting times of zoom were deeply intensive on product development. For the first four years, most of zoom’s staff comprised software concocts who was dedicated to increasing the video conferencing platform. Zoom is divided into individual and business users to facilitate communication and productivity.
The designers intentionally evaded the policy of reclaiming current, open-source software. Zoom chose the extensive and hard journey built from zero because the designers were ready to do it right. Yuan was intensely observant of customer desires and was known for responding to customer grumbles. Zoom conveyed 300 enhancements to the zoom policy and a Net Promoter Score of 71, compared to an average score of 59 for the technology segment (Gately, 2020). Zoom targeted organizations with over 12 employees despite being popular among individual consumers. Approximately half of the rich 501 corporations allegedly used zoom in 2019, and the number had grown by 228% in 2020 (Tillman, 2020). There are phrases used in Zooms such as zoom meeting and zoom room. During the pandemic, the zoom was and is still the most downloaded App in the USA and globally compared to others.
A zoom meeting is a video conferencing summit introduced using zoom and can be joined via a web camera or a phone. The convention can be between colleagues, learners, or health care providers. Zoom Room is a corporal hardware system that allows firms to program and unveil conferences from session housings. Zoom Rooms necessitate an extra payment on top of the normal pay and are an ultimate resolution for greater businesses. Zoom has features such as one-on-one meetings with free 40 minutes plan with up to 100 members (Pierce, 2020). The host can record meetings and events and share the screen with other members for viewing. As the pandemic continued, many employees worked at home using zoom, cutting costs and saving time. Zooming worked out for many users during a covid-19 pandemic because it is easy to use compared to other teleconferencing platforms, is cost friendly, readily available, and has high-security levels from intruders. Video conferencing has eased the way employers and employees communicate and work from home, students learn online and patients are attended by practitioners while at home.
Did Zoom have a Competitive Advantage in 2020, and what was the Source?
As the use of videoconferencing raised, zoom was chosen as a provider to numerous companies. While purchasing data showed that Zoom’s rates were habitually greater than that of opponents, client appraisals recommended a brink in product functionality and service eminence (Lev-Ram, 2020). During covid-19 pandemic in 2020, zoom had typical reasonable advantages such as fast to download and a few clicks for members to begin a conference from any place, whether at home or the workplace. Zoom had a streamlined interface for generating and attending webinars. The App was cheap and affordable to users, was highly reliable compared to others, and had high security. Zoom improved confidentiality and safety concerns, meaning no intruders could join the meeting.
All meeting members were releasing several related improvements to make the App effective. For example, zoom changes meant that all participants were retained in a vital waiting chamber by default and checked by the hosts before being allowed to join the summit (Gallagher, 2020). The company also acquired Keybase, an encoded messaging company, and started giving end-to-end encryption as a choice to consumers. Zoom also united with Crowd Strike, which provided system haven amenities. Special features and low pricing were offered to learning institutes and well-being providers. In March 2020, 40 minutes were given free to students in learning institutions worldwide (Gately, 2020). The firm merged with Clever, an extensively used, only sign-on portal in US faculties, to make zoom reachable to the 8,001 ingenious regions undergoing faculty shutting (Tillman, 2020). The enterprise removed assets from Khan Academy to supplement learning at home.
Zoom hardware companion in the US, known as Logitech International, delivered costless equipment packages for some American public institutes. Educating blogs were sponsored to create consciousness of zoom’s security features like Zoom Chilling Room. The learning segment valued zoom’s capability to accommodate many learners, make breakout rooms available, and work with inferior bandwidth requests. Separately from companies and other establishments, people used zoom for partying during the contagion. Different beings congregated on the App to celebrate birthdates, joyful times, and nuptials. The users relished free 40 minutes meetings for the above three individuals and the sound track to lengthier crowd conferences, social media gushing, and cloud sound tracking of the conferences at a trivial monthly sum.
Acquisition of higher-end features for users was made easy by zoom’s supplementary services, such as huge seminars and audio conferencing. US wellbeing info and concealment principles, such as the ones in the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) in the wellbeing care sector, cherished zoom’s submission. By July 2020, zoom surpassed the most-recognized telemedicine skills as ranked by surgeons (Pierce, 2020). The leader of certain health care mentioned that zoom was compliant with HIPAA, easy to use, affordable, and could accommodate many patients for group therapy. Zoom expands communication, builds good relations between employers and employees, improves effectiveness and job productivity, and offers good quality products with aggressive ratings.
What Threats were Faced by Zoom in 2020?
In the early days of the pandemic attacks, safety and consistency were alleged as exposures for Zoom. In May 2020, Zoom was prosecuted for distribution its operator data with third parties without users’ permission (Lev-Ram, 2020). An additional menace was that unwanted people intruded on arranged conferences. As a result, numerous establishments, industries, and institutes rejected Zoom. Service outages were becoming an issue where the main instance happened in August 2020 and stopped all meetings in the United States and Europe. The number of users paying for the service only tripled while clients of free services had a huge increase.
For the whole of 2020, all videoconferencing products had great growth. Cisco was on top of selling internet-based telephones and had a 46% segment of conferencing equipment worldwide (Tillman, 2020). Cisco testified that Webex had 501 million conference attendants in May and recorded above 5.6 billion convention minutes in the first 12 days of April 2020 (Lev-Ram, 2020). Webex announced features like the skill to modify or distort backgrounds, live dictation, and locked caption. The acquisition of Babble labs eliminated clarity and productivity for Webex participants and background noise. The online education policy known as Webex Classrooms was tossed, which included breakout places and content allocation. Google Meet was another threat of zoom that hurled a derivative of a previous video conversing app known as Hangouts.
However, in May 2020, Google publicized that anybody possessing free Gmail account could pledge a meet call, with no summit time duration limitation that was later prolonged to March 2021. The sum of downloads of Google Meet increased to 50.1 million in May from 5 million in March (Tillman, 2020). The number of new users added daily was 2.1 million, with 101 million learning customers across 151 states (Gallagher, 2020). In October, Google stated that the third quarter of 236 million daily meeting members, compared to 601 million weekly (Gately, 2020). Google Meet announced features that gave more governance to hosts and were allowed to eliminate dumb contestants and oblige that participants ask for approval to get in. Breakout rooms, contextual distortion, and a grid view of up to 50 members were presented (Rohit, 2020). More than 101 features such as non-verbal responses and hand raises were also to be announced (Gallagher, 2020). Google came up with a video conferencing hardware bundle called Google Meet Series One, encompassed of a camera, sound bar with nine microphones, and a touchscreen remote, which assimilated with the Google Meet software.
Google Cubicle productivity suite, which assured full incorporation with Meet and Chat, was disclosed. Skype had developed to a universal user base of 664 million users who made 208 billion minutes of voice and video calls and funded $861 million in income (Rohit, 2020). Skype for corporate was being used by 101 million people per month and 40 million daily by March 2020 (Lev-Ram, 2020). Microsoft had mentioned new features such as the together approach whereby all group affiliates could be virtually transported to a place of everyone’s choice. Microsoft Teams had Microsoft 365 at a joint price of $6 per user per month (Tillman, 2020). Breakout rooms were introduced with summit outlines, webinar registering and reporting, touchless meeting experiences, streamlined calling experiences, and wellbeing and productivity understandings for managers. Microsoft combined with meeting room video conferencing hardware suppliers like Cisco and Logitech to document endless combination with Microsoft Teams.
Bluejeans were another threat to zoom and declared different structures, like constrained gatherings, waiting places, progressive encryption, joint display mechanism, securing a gathering to avert intruders, hand clapping and raising, and thumbs up or down. In June, BlueJeans had a 301 % rise over its pre-pandemic average and stated coalitions with Poly and Facebook (Pierce, 2020). In April 2020, Facebook was a challenge to zoom and had entered into video conferencing through messenger that had 50 people capacity with no time limitation (Lev-Ram, 2020). WhatsApp, Instagram, and Telegram had video conferencing features but were limited in functionality relative to the prominent providers. Zoom has been restructured with security modifications to comfort users. Such features include a requirement for a zoom meeting password to ensure that only invited people are allowed in the conference. The App encountered threats from its competitors, who introduced new features that attracted new users daily.
How Would a Person characterize Zoom’s Response to These Threats? Would Individuals Have Taken a Different Course of Action?
Zoom had many solutions to prevent defeat by competitors during the pandemic. By November, there were four main products in the company: Zoom Meetings, Video Webinar, Zoom Phone, and Rooms. Zoom Conventions was the most common invention in 2020 and is reflected equal to the App (Gately, 2020). Zoom Phone was an online telephony determination for adding conformist mobile calls to calls. Zoom Rooms was a hardware and software solution that allowed folks assembled in a corporal meeting room to participate in seminars. In 2020, Zoom presented several new features, counting the capability of clients to jot a film despite the speaker, toss attention on a video, touch up one’s online appearance, upsurge contextual light, diminish background clamor, and add video filters and responses.
The aptitude for conference contestants to choose and interchange between breakout rooms was also introduced, and the professional-grade sound was assured for art and music lessons. 5.0 format, introduced in May 2020, improved safety in the form of progressive, 257-bit encryption sustenance and prolonged skills for conference hosts to report and eradicate customers distorting the policy (Gately, 2020). Participant videos could be repositioned, keyboard shortcuts, and striped captioning improvements done in September. Zoom teamed with popular email software products such as Microsoft Outlook and IBM Notes to embed plugins for beginning or arranging a zoom meeting with one clack to expand contacts. Contracts were signed between zoom and message scheme companies such as Poly and Neat so that zoom could be used over such devices.
Partnership with a wireless presentation expertise producer called Aver information lead to the inauguration of a conferencing touch section, a video screen with touch monitor controls that permitted filming sovereign of a processor. After sometime in 2020, zoom was estimated to enlarge to numerous new devices such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google’s Nest Hub Max (Gallagher, 2020). Joining the App’s conference straight from the floppy corporate statement policy was made possible by the zoom-slack technologies partnership. The CEO of zoom during the pandemic would have taken the same and some additional measures to prevent threats. The leader would reduce the cost of bundle purchase and use more than the competitors and ensure that no intruders can be allowed to video conference with the team. The manager could also increase the 40 free minutes to 50 minutes for every group with more than three members to attract many new users.
What Should Zoom Do to Sustain its Performance?
Zoom should improvise some techniques to ensure customer satisfaction and efficiency. The methods include putting someone in charge where every conference should have a host, and huge summits should possibly have a few co-hosts (Gately, 2020). Meeting controls like the expel switch kick, someone, out or mute the mic if essential. This rule is easily disrupted when several individuals or groups distribute an account. If a user logs into Zoom, the person will be the host when the conference begins. If the operator is sent a link to intersect the meeting by an administrative assistant who sets it up using the boss’s identifications, and none will be in the meeting, probably, the convention will have nobody in governance.
Deciding how closed meetings need to be is another way of sustaining zoom performance. For the meeting to be secure, “join before host” should be turned on, and the account holder or somebody trusted with the password should be available to cheer the seminar (Rohit, 2020). Zoom should make meeting keywords previously used voluntarily compulsory for all conventions. Every attendant must have the code before joining the conference. A coded link that permits members to come to the meeting without input should be shared. If the password needs to be changed in the future, the coded link should be nullified. The “Mute all” button controls audio in zoom after clicking on the Members’ key at the center of a row of buttons that appears at the bottom of a Zoom screen for a list of all the accomplices. A video camera and microphone portraits will appear after all the names, and the host can mute other members exclusively.
Zoom should introduce ways to increase bandwidth to expand audio and video quality. When the user joins a summit, the client will carry out several checks, such as existing bandwidth and quality-of-service telemetry, to enable a steady, reliable link while listing audio and screen distribution over video. There are guidelines for enhancing a convention experience, even in low-bandwidth circumstances (Pierce, 2020). If a bandwidth bottleneck causes a poor presentation, the user can manually try to diminish the bandwidth required to run zoom seminars by disabling HD video and feed. To disable HD video, the user needs to clunk on settings, click on the audiovisual tab, and uncheck the package for HD film. Zoom should not limit the number of members in the meeting at a specific time to increase profits.
Despite the video being the main feature in zoom conference, the client can turn off film to reduce the bandwidth for clear audio. The client clicks on the video icon and ensures that the Start Video knob is traversed to turn off the videotape (Gallagher, 2020). Zoom should educate users on the importance of understanding the bandwidth usage for a conference, using the right direct firewall configuration, and enabling peer-to-peer networks. The company should improve the quantity or introduce new tools used by users to manage VPN and fragment tunneling. Zoom should continue giving free 40 minutes to the clients to improve daily usage by new clients. The App managers should ensure that few or no security issues would be reported in order to increase trust from customers.
Conclusion
In conclusion, during the covid-19 pandemic, zoom helped many institutions, such as schools and healthcare facilities, meet online at home or in the office. The firm was cost-effective and gave free 40 minutes to groups above three. Zoom faced threats such as introducing new videoconferencing providers that received many new users daily. Such suppliers included google meet, WhatsApp, Facebook, Microsoft 365, and Webex, among others. The firm solved some of these threats by introducing the zoom phone for adding conventional calls to zoom rooms where the members assembled ready for the summit. To sustain performance, zoom should ensure that every meeting has a host and passwords are used for logging in to prevent intruders. New tools to manage the tunnel should be introduced and ensure every member has a code for joining the meeting. Zoom dominates other videoconferencing apps in America and worldwide.
References
Gallagher, R. (2020). Zoom for online learning updates. Zoom Blog. Web.
Gately, E. (2020). Zoom now offers video conferencing hardware with Haas. Channel futures. Web.
Lev-Ram, M. (2020). Here’s why Zoom was zooming even before the coronavirus pandemic. Fortune.com. Web.
Pierce, D. (2020). Zoom conquered video chat — now it has even bigger plans. Protocol. Web.
Rohit, K. (2020). Zoom brings new value-added security features for virtual classes. Deccan Herald. Web.
Tillman, M. (2022). What is Zoom and how does it work? Plus tips and tricks. Pocket-lint. Web.