

Zoom Shares Plunge 90% From Peak As Pandemic Boom Fades (reuters.com) 75
Shares of Zoom have tumbled about 90% from their pandemic peak in October 2020 as the former investor darling struggles to adjust to a post-COVID world. Reuters reports: The stock was down nearly 10% on Tuesday after the company cut its annual sales forecast and posted its slowest quarterly growth, prompting at least six brokerages to cut their price targets. The company, which became a household name during lockdowns due to the popularity of its video-conferencing tools, is trying to reinvent itself by focusing on businesses, with products such as cloud-calling service Zoom Phone and conference-hosting offering Zoom Rooms. Analysts, however, say any turnaround in the business is still a few quarters away as growth in its mainstay online unit slows and competition from Microsoft's Teams and Cisco's Webex and Salesforce's Slack gets intense.
"Zoom has a fundamental flaw -- it has needed to spend heavily to keep hold of market share. Spending to cling onto, rather than grow, market share is never a good place to be and was a sign of trouble ahead," Hargreaves Lansdown equity analyst Sophie Lund-Yates said. The company's operating expenses surged 56% in the third quarter as it spent more on product development and marketing. Its adjusted operating margin shrank to 34.6% from 39.1% a year earlier.
"Zoom has a fundamental flaw -- it has needed to spend heavily to keep hold of market share. Spending to cling onto, rather than grow, market share is never a good place to be and was a sign of trouble ahead," Hargreaves Lansdown equity analyst Sophie Lund-Yates said. The company's operating expenses surged 56% in the third quarter as it spent more on product development and marketing. Its adjusted operating margin shrank to 34.6% from 39.1% a year earlier.
Microsoft Teams sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone I know that uses it is doing so because the MBAs that run their companies got cozy with Microsoft. Has nothing to do with feature set, ease of use, or anything like that. It has to do with how much golf their VPs play with Microsoft sales people.
Re:Microsoft Teams sucks (Score:5, Informative)
It also has TONS more to do with the fact that those companies get Teams as part of the licensing agreement for email. (yes its groupware, but they buy it for the most popular E3 license for Exchange 365 mailbox and get Teams "for free")
Teams does the job, so why pay extra for Zoom? "We dont need to stop at McDonalds, kids. We have food at home."
Re:Microsoft Teams sucks (Score:4, Informative)
Teams (barely) does the job.
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But as someone who has taught 60 hour weeks with Teams and Zoom, Teams is painful but has way better collaboration. I think Zoom is great as long as you also have Slack, Matter most, or similar.
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Teams is painful but has way better collaboration.
Only if you want to open sharepoint up to outside access. We found out the hard way. Part of our security posture includes preventing non domain account access to Sharepoint. Which means if I host a meeting, I cant post a file from my desktop into chat for a client or vendor to grab because they are using their account and not ours.
They really need one more level of granularity to allow access to files in the meeting only. Or a DMZ style space for meeting shares. We're not opening up our Sharepoint to the w
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Teams (barely) does the job.
Which is more than can be said of Zoom, however!
Re:Microsoft Teams sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
Teams (barely) does the job.
Teams as a software package is a bucket of shit, but it does actually work and is far more feature rich than Zoom, to say nothing of the integration with the rest of Office.
If you're a Microsoft shop you'd be crazy not to implement Teams.
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On Linux it is even worse and it drains batteries. I have seen Macbooks for colleagues where Team did drain the battery more then the charger could put in it!
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If your charger can't supply a machine with enough power to stay on at maximum load, you don't have a user software problem. You have a hardware/hardware management software problem. This is 100% on apple.
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If a game does it OK or something like video editing, but a videoconference tool?
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Sounds strange indeed. Sounds like a complete misconfiguration of whatever hardware management is going on the background in fact. I had similar problems with ridiculous power consumption on GPU when my driver got (probably) corrupted and some applications just randomly tilted the GPU to maximum power.
Which on my home machine meant a lot of fan noise from sudden ramp up of GPU going from 50 watts to almost 200. I fixed the problem with driver purge via DDU and reinstall.
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Or the user is using a cheap charger.
Laptop chargers - whether USB-C PD, or proprietary, often share the same plug - but are available in varying wattages.
For example, you can get 40, 60, 80 and 100W USB-C PD chargers out there, and while a Macbook will charge from all of them, they may not supply enough p
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Yes but that doesn't change the parent's point. You still have a hardware problem, even if the hardware problem is the result of you making poor choices.
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Teams (barely) does the job.
Teams as a software package is a bucket of shit, but it does actually work and is far more feature rich than Zoom, to say nothing of the integration with the rest of Office.
If you're a Microsoft shop you'd be crazy not to implement Teams.
Especially when it's more or less included in the price of many corporate subscriptions. It works, it integrates nicely with Active Directory and Exchange, and plays well with Office. It's kind of a no-brainer to use it.
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MS Teams is just fine. (Score:2)
I can't believe I'm saying this - as a grey-haired FOSS advocate I have a truckload of reasons to not like or trust MS - but AFAICT MS Teams is just fine. It's MS-branded IRC + Videochat + Kalendar + Taskboards all in one neat package that Trudy at the reception can handle just as well as a seasoned expert like me. If a company is hook line and sinker with the Empire already it totally makes sense to use Teams rather than a third-party tool.
Yeah, it might eat truckloads of memory, but what doesn't these day
teams is better than Zoom for sure (Score:1)
Zoom was always the crappy flaky option, with bad sound and picture quality. It's gotten slightly better. BlueJeans was always the premium choice. Teams has really interesting features like it has a transcription feature that actually understands Indian english better than I can. There's no reason to use Zoom just because you heard that your kid's elementary teacher was using it during lockdown.
I'm not saying Teams is great, it suffers from the same problem that every Microsoft product does, which is that i
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This is the classic Microsoft playbook since time immemorial. Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, dBase... ... now Zoom.
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Can't say I particularly care if Zoom is dying. This was pretty much predictable given that it only ascended in the first place because of a lockdown. End of lockdown == bye bye Zoom.
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Re:Microsoft Teams sucks (Score:5, Informative)
While Zoom is better in some ways, Teams does have some features that Zoom does not. Granted these features may not be of interest for those not using Zoom for work, for those working at smaller companies, or for those who work at companies that don't use any Microsoft products.
Re:Microsoft Teams sucks (Score:5, Interesting)
I admin both in my org and a lot of the features you mention in Teams are also in Zoom: Outlook integration (via plugin but not quite as integrated, it's true), federation (SSO is supported at certain Zoom subscription levels), user status, on-the-fly A/V changes while in-call.
What I've found is that Teams is best suited for intra-org use with "Microsoft conditioned" users or with external orgs that also have O365 tenants. The unwashed masses don't have quite the same "ease of use" in Teams that fully licensed users have.
Zoom is better at meeting with masses of mixed users. Schools I work with tend to have better success with Zoom when interacting with students and parents as they are generally not as accustomed to the "Microsoft Way" that is expressed in Teams.
Zoom Rooms, as a technology, are a little more polished than the Teams Rooms offering. I've installed several of both over the past year and people seem to grok the Zoom Rooms tech faster. There's nothing stopping Teams Rooms from getting as good as Zoom other than time and will.
And that's the crux of Zoom's future: they have to continue to innovate to keep Teams from killing them off. Their recent collaboration announcement is laughable and a real boneheaded move IMHO. I don't think there's room for 3 office collaboration service providers. Microsoft and Google are the duality that we don't want but do deserve. Zoom might have a little captive market (like they do for Zoom Phone...it's pretty much the only thing that works well with a Zoom Room for PSTN audio conferencing) but it's not big enough to do much more than maybe get the company bought out.
Re:Microsoft Teams sucks (Score:5, Interesting)
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Zoom also shows those same status messages.
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"integrated with Outlook." Oh dear. They might as well have integrated with Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect. Outlook is so bad our company IT guys have given up on trying to get calendaring to work right--phantom meetings on the schedule no one owns, or company meetings *everyone* owns, meaning anyone can alter a company-wide meeting! I thank God that I don't have to use Teams.
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You.
Can't.
Teams will act like it allows you so select multiple screens worth of text but, in reality only allows you to select what's visible on the screen in the window, and nothing else that's scrolled past. So, you're forced to scroll to the top, and select-copy-paste one, fucking screen at a time. And, for some unknown reason, copy doesn't always work -- you ha
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If you're copying and pasting entire long conversations then I have to say You're Doing It Wrong.
If you need a written record, send an email. If you need to find something someone said, use the search (that works quite well). It also allows you to flag / save messages for easy finding later if you see something important.
IM (in general, not just teams) is for short detached conversations, not for conveying pages of information which need to be stored. You're using the wrong medium.
Incidentally you could alw
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Wow. If you think this is a solution, you win the Microsoft Apologist of the Year award for Outstanding Shillery. I hope they pay you well.
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I personally have two problems with Teams:
a) It's the slowest bucket of shit program I've ever used, routinely bringing a perfectly capable laptop to its knees.
b) It breaks the concept of multitasking in an attempt to retain everything within itself. MS is slowly backtracking on this, letting you pop out chats, change default behaviour to open in App etc. But it's fundamentally a problem to have a program do everything and only able to do one thing at a time.
If teams were like browser tabs, always there in
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It breaks the concept of multitasking in an attempt to retain everything within itself.
Agreed. Every time someone sends me a "teams site" link I have to reverse-engineer the link to find the underlying OneDrive, because the app version is slower and less powerful than the OneDrive web site. And it is very annoying when it displays an Office document for me *inside the app* The funny thing here is that these are cases where all Microsoft needs to do to make the product better is to simply remove features!
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I missed the start of enough meetings because of that. It just doesn't work.
Eventually I switched to the browser-version to actually get background blurring but that one is also very slow.
If a video-conference tool takes more power from a PC then an online (MMORPG) game then you are doing something very very wrong. I have the idea that the client never used the GPU and just used the C
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This is the fundamental flaw of zoom. It costs money and does one thing. It is not the often good enough MS products. It is not Google meets that comes with a whole ecosystem to support it. It is paying for a one trick pony because you need that one trick pony to be the best at the one trick, not good enough at several
I have used these products extensively. There all do the job. B
Merge with Slack (Score:3)
Microsoft intends to destroy both.
Zoom has a fundamental flaw (Score:4, Insightful)
The application is no longer stable. During the height of the pandemic, it was pretty good. I could get an invitation to a Zoom meeting, fire up the app and connect. Now, I have to allocate an extra 10 minutes before the scheduled session to download yet another version of the product. Just 1) stop fiddling with it. Or 2) find a way to make it backward compatible with the last 6 months or one year of releases.
It's been fine for me (Score:1)
The application is no longer stable.
I use Zoom for work multiple times a day every day of the week - so far I've not noticed anything like that instability, or a need to frequently update. I spend zero time on updates or zoom fiddling per week.
So far Zoom still seems like one of the better connections to me, especially compared to anything I've ever used from Google. Have not used Teams for a while but Zoom is better than Teams back when I used it.
I have to say that Slack Huddles are working pretty well an
Re: It's been fine for me (Score:1)
Re: It's been fine for me (Score:1)
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a more secure, or accessible, or feature rich meeting, then isn't it worth it?
No. It was fine for two years with no updates. And if this was in a corporate setting where I'd have to get IT sign-off on installing a new version, I'd have missed this week's meeting. So it's totally unusable.
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Now, I have to allocate an extra 10 minutes before the scheduled session to download yet another version of the product
Are you sure you're not talking about Skype? I haven't used it in a long time, but it seemed like every time I used it it demanded an update. Oh, and it took a lot longer than 10 minutes.
Didn't build on their strength (Score:4, Interesting)
Instead they let people add funny hats, look like cats, and do fancy backgrounds. Fun toys but not whats needed for a business application, and probably sources of instability. Now they want to become the widely - hated "Teams" app and provide a one stop integration of business stuff. People ALREADY HAVE one-stop integrated apps, we don't need another. We need great tools to allow efficient work from home.
Re:Didn't build on their strength (Score:4, Informative)
Its a matter of opinion if Zoom handles low speed links well. What does not need debating is their misuse of higher speed links.
I was watching Zoom and Webex just the other day.
Webex-to-Webex call at 2.5Mbps was 1080p HVEC. Meanwhile the Zoom-to-Zoom call at 720p was using in excess of 4Mbps. Zoom's egregious misuse of throughput with the inability to control it (easily) is a disservice to us all.
Jump between a Webex and Zoom call sometime. You'll soon appreciate high quality audio and video on Webex over Zoom's lower quality codecs and resolutions.
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The value of the drawing package depends on the work you do. I'm an instrumentation scientist / hardware engineer so being able to sketch things during a discussion is extremely valuable.
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On a Zoom call while riding my Peleton (Score:3)
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Just gonna short-circuit this vibe and buy 1000x calls for GME strike $25 exp 11/25
kthxbai
Also, trash fire.
Re: On a Zoom call while riding my Peleton (Score:2)
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Yep - my post was satire.
Zoom's Linux Client Locks Up GUI (Score:2)
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Even in Windows Zoom doesn't obey convention. Double clicking the title bar makes it go full screen instead of maximizing. And it's got plenty of other UI annoyances like the always-on-top pop-up when you minimize or how all the buttons at the bottom move when you open a sidebar (click the "chat" button and suddenly your cursor is now sitting over "share screen")
Did you know Zoom was up 400% during the pandemic? (Score:2)
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The company is fine. The "investors" were crazy (Score:3)
Doubt Zoom will still exist in three years (Score:5, Interesting)
First, an anecdote...
Working for a K12 school district, I was tasked with renewing our Zoom subscription. We had purchased a 150 license package in March 2020, but by the end of the 2021-22 school year, only 17 staff were still using it. We still had COVID-Relief funds to cover the cost another year, but we were seeking to downgrade.
I contacted my sales rep in May 2022, requesting a quote for 50 licenses. My sales rep responded with one of those "We're excited about the opportunities for the coming year and would love to schedule a 30-minute discussion with you about them" messages. I said no thanks, please send me the quote. May passed. June passed. July passed. I repeated my request over and over, but no quote.
In August, finance received an auto-renewal invoice of $6,000. I e-mailed my sales rep again, inquiring about the invoice when I had asked for three months for a 50-license quote. She said, "Oh, we can downgrade you to 50 licenses, but first you have to pay on the invoice." Two months go by where my finance director and I are arguing with the rep to give us a quote, and that we won't pay on an invoice for terms we didn't agree to. We were told that we had to, there was no other way, their finance team didn't allow anything else, and that the terms of the prior agreement stipulated that our renewal would be auto-renewed unless we declared in writing our intent to cancel, so we were obligated to pay on invoice.
At the end of October, my superintendent and finance directer capitulated, saying that 1) We had the money, 2) They promise to refund us, and 3) it's not worth the effort. We paid the $6,000 invoice, and just yesterday, we downgraded and received the refund....by ACH, because that was the only way they would let us receive it.
Second, the punchline...
Zoom doesn't care anymore about its customers, only its bottom line. The higher-ups could have said to themselves back in 2021: "Hey, this is awesome, but this pandemic won't last forever", and figure out how to prepare for a downsizing. They could have said to themselves at the start of 2022: "Hey, we're losing customers, but we saw this coming" and figure out how to provide their remaining customers a valuable product. Instead they're treating their customers like crap to find underhanded ways of making a buck at the expense of customer service.
Their product isn't improving. As others have said, it's been eroding in quality, while other competitors have been improving theirs.
They won't exist in three years.
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Yes, at first, I thought I just had a crappy sales rep. But I made a short summary out of a long, convoluted story. One of the details was that we involved the sales rep's manager, who stuck by the sales rep, argued with us, and refused to let us change sales reps. Birds of a feather...
Also, I was referencing the lack of integration. Zoom could have done a lot with creating open APIs that allow for integration with other products, or they could have partnered / merged with another business solutions pro
Re: Doubt Zoom will still exist in three years (Score:1)
Zoom should focus on SMB and Consumer (Score:2)
Zoom is never going to be able to compete with Microsoft and Cisco in the Enterprise, because they do not have a huge suite of software to bundle together in an ELA.
On the other hand, SMBs vastly prefer Zoom over Teams and Webex because it is so much easier to use and it "gets the job done" - and these SMBs do not need all the junk that Cisco and Microsoft want to bundle in.
Know your nieche.
Zoom. Just my opinion... (Score:2)
Zoom charges far too much for unlimited meetings ($150 "pro", $200 or $250 business), so if you, as an individual, have a normal budget and don't have to have it, you probably won't. If Zoom is used at all, it'll be the free, 40-minute tier. For as long as it's available, anyway. That could go away since the company is apparently in distress.
If they were more reasonable about their single-user pricing, I'd be happy to pay long term. Maybe $15/year or so. As it is, without a really demanding need, at ten tim
What? (Score:1)
"struggles to adjust to a post-COVID world"
How can this possibly be true? Here in the US the California governor and US president (at a minimum) still maintain the COVID state of emergency.
Can Confirm Business Switch (Score:2)
We just ported 400+ numbers, converted 200+ users and got rid of our on prem phone system (Mitel) and went to Zoom Phone. Our entire org used Zoom already for meetings, with SSO we had everyone set with free basic and a few dozen paid meeting accounts. Very simple easy move. Everyone loves it, no more desk phones and true mobility and they can take phone calls just like meetings now.