Zoom Admits it Doesn't Have 300 Million Users, Corrects Misleading Claims (theverge.com) 45
Zoom has admitted it doesn't have 300 million daily active users. From a report: The admission came after The Verge noticed the company had quietly edited a blog post making the claim earlier this month. Zoom originally stated it had "more than 300 million daily users" and that "more than 300 million people around the world are using Zoom during this challenging time." Zoom later deleted these references from the original blog post, and now claims "300 million daily Zoom meeting participants." The difference between a daily active user (DAU) and "meeting participant" is significant. Daily meeting participants can be counted multiple times: if you have five Zoom meetings in a day then you're counted five times. A DAU is counted once per day, and is commonly used by companies to measure service usage. Only counting meeting participants is an easy, somewhat misleading, way to make your platform usage seem larger than it is.
Statistics and liars (Score:4, Interesting)
They all do.
Big PR announcement about hitting some big arbitrary milestone number. Sometimes followed by quiet correction buried somewhere but usually not.
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Re:Statistics and liars (Score:4, Informative)
Zoom is a Chinese company. For all you know, that post was done by somebody that has English as 2'nd language.
"Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (Zoom) is an American communications technology company headquartered in San Jose, California." - Wikipiedia on Zoom [wikipedia.org]
They definitely have developers in China, however, which can mean many, but not all, of the effects of being a Chinese company. I think that it's pretty clear why these stories are coming about given that some zoom competitors made their base product free to match Zoom. The competitors missed the boat (the one I'm thinking of is still limited to 100, even if you pay). Anything to stop progress for a while so their products can catch up. Try Jitsi instead [jitsi.org], at least it's free and you'll be able to run your own server and isolate it if you need to trust the privacy.
Re: Statistics and liars (Score:1)
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American WebEx has people in China as well.
an easy mistake to make (Score:2)
I'd really say that this seems to be an easy mistake to make, it takes a bit of explanation to explain to the public outreach office that they can't simply rephrase "300 million daily Zoom meeting participants," the figure that the engineering team gave them, as "300 million daily users" for the press release.
I doubt that it was a deliberate attempt to deceive, since I think most of the people reading the press release would read "daily zoom meeting participants" as being the same as "daily users" anyway.
Re: an easy mistake to make (Score:2)
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Zoom is hardly alone in cooking their numbers. It's why the SEC exists, to halt or even prevent such fraud.
Semantics (Score:3)
Should a press release be immutable? Maybe this was an exaggeration or maybe the person writing the release misunderstood what they were trying to convey and the company corrected it in good faith. I don't think they need to be taken to the woodshed for this.
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Personally I think they should be unchangeable and irrevocably linked directly to any corrections. Of course I'm not a Madison Avenue bigwig, so the PR flacks aren't going to pay any attention to us.
Public Relations and Marketing are professions where lying and manipulation are considered virtues rather faults. It's quite likely that the flack had no clue what they were writing about, but it wouldn't have made any difference either way. If they were at all interested in accuracy and reliability they woul
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Should a press release be immutable? Maybe this was an exaggeration or maybe the person writing the release misunderstood what they were trying to convey and the company corrected it in good faith. I don't think they need to be taken to the woodshed for this.
I don't think it's a big deal, as the 300 million number is just a marketing number among many marketing numbers. However, press releases are immutable. After all, it's information that is being released. The press release can be corrected with subsequent information, but the original information has already been released so the original is supplemented but not replaced by subsequent releases.
Just like 3 billion devices run Java (Score:2, Informative)
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It's been a while (Score:4, Informative)
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I suppose "user-friendly" is true, with its brain-dead interface, limited feature set and almost non-existent security. Better quality and latency? Not that I've seen, especially when compared to a professional-quality services like Teams, Lync, WebEx, or even most of the other consumer apps like WhatsApp and VNC.
Re:It's been a while (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, for big meetings it's been Webex, and I've never seen it try to force you into using other Cisco products. On the other hand Skype for Business integrates will with Outllook calendar, which is a bonus, but it's not pushing too hard. However Microsoft wants to kill it and replace it with Teams even though it is badly integrated. Team does way too much, trying to be the one tool to do everything possible while failing at most of it. It can't even integrate into OSX properly and won't pop up notifiers properly that someone is texting you.
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It's been a while since the last anti-Zoom post. This seems really petty.
Petty?
Zoom is a publicly traded company. When you give out wrong or misleading information, it can affect the stock price.
I view the Zoom blog post about their "300 million daily users" as the equivalent of a Zoom press release.
Here's what was written in their blog post:
Will data centers get overloaded if everyone opts into the same ones?
Even with data center customization available, Zoom is designed to scale to meet heavy usage demands. We’ve been adding capacity in our data centers and working with our public cloud partners to scale as needed to ensure reliability, even with more than 300 million daily users.
Thank you for your support
We continue to be very appreciative of all of our customers’ support in our journey to a more secure Zoom platform. It makes us very proud to know that more than 300 million people around the world are using Zoom during this challenging time.
Zoom's stock price hit a new all time high on that bit of news.
Instead of quietly editing the blog post and correcting the error, they should have make another blog post pointing out the error and noting the correction.
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What is a "user"? (Score:2)
What actually counts as a "user"? Someone with an account can start a meeting, and send a link to someone else to join without having an account. Does the joining person count as a "user" or not, since they have no account? They're participating in the meeting, but not registered.
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A user is a unique human being. Within the realm of fly-by-second online software utilization, each company has to define what kind of use warrants the term "user". Not all companies accept "real human" as a user.
Facebook, for example, asserts that they have 2.5 billion active monthly users. Of course, few believe that 2.5 unique humans intentionally open one of their apps or logs into their website for the sake of scroll through social media channels on a monthly basis. More likely, it's 2.5 billion accoun
Such a trustworthy company! (Score:2)
My trust in Zoom only increases, day to day!
What's new? (Score:2)
They might have 300 million active users (Score:2)
Bigger Question. what do you get done in a day? (Score:1)
if you have five Zoom meetings in a day
How many people have that many meeting in one day? My average is near one, max is three. Even if your meeting are 30 minutes a piece, that is almost a third of your day in meetings. Every day!
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Empty suits are holding more meetings to toot their horn, it's self-promotion vehicle. So yes, I now have 3X as many meetings because of these insecure megalomaniacs
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It might depend on what counts as a meeting. If ad hoc two-person, audio-only meetings count (also know as a telephone calls), then I have way more than 5 a day.
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It also very much depends on your job description. If you’re a developer, sure, 5 meetings a day may seem like a lot. If you’re a CISO leading a team of 150 people, it’s not so much - upper management’s role is to make decisions based on information provided to them by others, and the only way to get that information is to talk to people.
Everybody’s role is different; not understanding that reflects poorly on you.
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Everybody’s role is different; not understanding that reflects poorly on you.
What part do you think I didn't understand? That there are cases where someone is having five or more meetings a day?
My first sentence was:
How many people have that many meeting in one day?
That isn't everyone in the company, I would hazard a guess that its probably one in maybe 50 people have that many meetings in a day. The average company wide is probably closer to two meetings a day.
The last company I worked for use to have four or more meetings a day for everyone in the company. These got tracked and managers had to explain why everyone was s
Re: Bigger Question. what do you get done in a day (Score:2)
My team has a meeting every morning. Then there are usually a couple breakaway meetings afterwards. Then the company has about two meeting a month. Then there are interdepartmental status meetings once or twice a month. Then there are inter-departmental meetings for new projects.
It adds up quickly. It's rare I have less than two Zoom meetings in a day.
no huge difference (Score:1)
In reality (Score:2)
It should be zero. (Score:1)
margin of slime vs tortoise throb (Score:2)
Google Meet One-ups Zoom With Free 60-Minute Meetings For Consumers [slashdot.org] — 29 April 2020
I nearly took a swipe at that tripe yesterday, but it didn't seem worth the effort. A day later, different story. If any