THE PLATFORM WAS BUILT TO BREAK
FALSE DISTINCTIONS
Zoom broke conventions of the teleconferencing industry
by eliminating the premise that important business calls
only happened in a board room. The company was
founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan. Yuan was an alumni of
WebEx, the teleconferencing company that sold to Cisco
for $3.2 billion in 2007, and he recruited other alums of
the teleconferencing world to build a cloud-based
product that could run with no hardware other than a
laptop. That was a rarity in the industry—at the time,
teleconferencing systems often had dedicated hardware.
This meant Zoom wasn’t saddled with supporting old
technological infrastructure.
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Zoom’s creators also made a point of avoiding false
distinctions in teleconferencing. As Oded Gal, chief
product officer at Zoom, tells the story, both he and Yuan
were frustrated working on the platform under Cisco.
The platform was split. You needed one app for group
conferencing calls in board rooms, and another for
individuals chatting one on one.
A full zoom gallery (left) and a FaceTime group chat (right). [Photos: Zoom, Apple]
Such divisions still exist today. Apple’s FaceTime was
built for one-on-one conversations (though it has
supported up to 32 since 2018). Those conversations
work great on an iPhone, but the tool does not work for
for people on Android and Windows devices. Apps like
Skype offer more flexibility across devices and operating
systems, but they are bifurcated between personal and
enterprise customers. Skype and Skype for Business are
two separate apps—why?
“The idea behind Zoom was not just taking the
[conference] room [remotely] as the main experience,
but overall [enabling] any use case around video,” says
Gal. “It was more holistic in the sense that it wasn’t
focused on one use case. It was everything that was
communication linked to a video conversation.” That
flexibility—chat with whomever you want, on any device
that you like—is at the core of Zoom’s interface and
architecture. And that have-it-your-way interface is
supported by decisions like making the platform both
free and anonymous to try out. (Zoom makes money
through corporate subscriptions; personal accounts are
free.)
Which seems perfect for today’s social use cases. But
Zoom never intended for the platform to be used that
way. “We didn’t predict [Zoom] for the consumer world,”
Gal says. “A lot of people were just sort of forced into this
situation and had to comply with video communication . .
. people in different age groups and cultures. It’s forced
people to use such a product.” And there are good
reasons why Zoom, not its many competitors, became the
go-to videoconferencing service for people of all ages and
backgrounds.
IT’S ABSURDLY EASY TO JOIN A
MEETING
I’ve used Zoom for the last four years, at least twice a
week, and I never set up a Zoom account until today (to
do some fact-checking while writing this article). That’s
because Zoom lets anyone join a meeting with a link. End
stop. You don’t need to create a login (which even Google
Hangouts requires). You don’t need to enter some
esoteric 10-digit passcode (though pins can secure Zoom
chats—and you should use them!). You don’t need to
enter a credit card in case you go over their 30-minute
free time limit. Anyone can simply tap a link and join a
meeting.
That easy approach mattered early on in convincing IT
departments and business professionals to ditch their
entrenched teleconferencing systems for this startup.
“When GoToMeeting, Google, Cisco, Highfive, etc. were
asking you to buy specific hardware with long wait times,
you could set up a Zoom room with any small PC and
tablet,” says Joe Fahs, IT director at Kapor Center. “They
made it easy for people who were visitors to share their
screens in the conference rooms without having to use
HDMI cables and adapters.”
Nine years after it was founded, Zoom’s ease of hopping
into a conversation is still a major selling point that
helped it go mainstream. “[The] main reason [I use
Zoom] is the simplicity for people to join a Zoom
meeting, just click the link basically,” a Fast Company
reader who goes by shredical tweeted at us. “No
registration.”
The mix of being free and anonymous to use, with the
added bonus of a one-link joining system means that
Zoom is incredibly welcoming for the casual user—
whoever they may be. “I used to use Google Hangouts but
that’s now not much of a thing, and it (or Google Meet as
it is now) requires folks to have a Google account, which
may prohibit some folks from using it. Zoom is easy to
use, even for those who aren’t super technologically
adept, and doesn’t require a sign-in unless you want
them to,” says user Kate Davidson. “These are all
important things to me as I try to use something with
people in my church community who span the breadth of
technical ability.”
THE BIG CHATS OFFER THE
SENSATION OF BEING IN REAL
GROUPS
The system is built to support video streams with up to
100 concurrent users sharing video. (Google Hangouts
allows a max of 10 for free, or 25 paid.) This is possible in
part because Zoom doesn’t process any of the video feeds
on your screen. Instead, it redirects these streams to each
individual computer on the call. So it’s your phone,
tablet, or laptop that’s doing all of the heavy processing
around a Zoom stream—even if you’ve added a vanity
filter or a custom backdrop. If Zoom weren’t built this
way, the video wouldn’t just be choppy; the prospect of
100 concurrent streamers would be technically
infeasible.
[Photo: Zoom]
It might sound overwhelming to have dozens of faces on
your screen at the same time, each in their own teeny tiny
window. But seeing so many people you know in one spot
—even your screen—has proven to be a powerful
sensation as we’re all working and socializing from home.
“It’s the closest thing you can get to a social gathering,”
Gal says. “If you’re at a dinner or a religious ceremony . . .
you’re all sitting in a holy place or around a table . . .
[and] you see each other. You’re physically with the
people wanting to have that experience.”
Many users agreed. “Since our marketing, web, and PR
team have been working from home the past three weeks,
the ‘Brady Bunch’ style gallery view helps us all feel
closer together,” says Kevin G. Clark, of the company
Element AI.
But this big view comes with a catch. Zoom calls can be
tiring—in a phenomenon some people are dubbing
“Zoom fatigue.” The main reason behind that fatigue isn’t
just the meetings themselves, but that we have to work
much harder to read social cues from one another on a
screen than we do in person. We can also misinterpret
these signals on a screen. For instance, while gaps of
silence are normal in face-to-face conversation, on
teleconferencing systems, a 1.2-second lull in the
conversation can make it appear that people aren’t
friendly or focused on the chat.
EVERYONE CONNECTS RELIABLY,
ALWAYS
The other major reason people use Zoom is not just
because it’s easy; it’s also reliable. Over the past decade,
teleconferencing—in video or voice—has become
something of a 90% technology. It works 90% of the
time, which means at least one person in the meeting is
going to be unable to connect, or have issues talking or
hearing. “I’ve used just about every video conferencing
platform out there,” says reader John Goodman. “My top
reason for choosing Zoom is simply because it works for
nearly all participants nearly all the time.”
Zoom’s spartan windows and barebones UI lacks the
pizazz of competitors, like Skype. It has a single bar with
mute-unmute and start-stop video buttons highlighted
on the left side. In the middle, there’s one big share
screen button (because it’s a popular feature people are
always looking for). There are other buttons for security,
chat, and emoji—though it’s easy to glance right over
them. Its video feeds are rarely what I’d consider crisp or
sharp. But they do work. “Having used Zoom for a while
I’ve never had a call drop, or not been able to get on,”
reader Lee Lam tweeted at Fast Company. As Gal
explains, Zoom designed the service to always have a
backup server in case the one in use went down, ensuring
that a meeting never drops.
IT TOOK ZOOM DOING A LOT OF
LITTLE THINGS RIGHT
Will Zoom’s good fortune continue? Or is it the rare (and
temporary) beneficiary of a global crisis? The company
has faced major privacy breaches. Random users can
easily reverse engineer those easy-to-share Zoom links to
hijack the system’s UX, break into a private conversation,
and even sabotage innocent conversations with perverse
content. These are problems for consumers, but they
could be devastating for the businesses that actually
subscribe to Zoom, subsidizing the platform for the rest
of us.
Zoom is responding to this by making all streams 256-bit
encrypted and moving security settings (namely, the
ability to add a passcode to a room) to the forefront of
the interface. Passwords do add a step more friction to
hopping in and out of rooms, and only time will tell if
these updates are enough to thwart attacks on the
conversations between a large number of users. A worst-
case scenario for Zoom is that concerns over privacy, or
design interventions to promote privacy, trump the app’s
core convenience.
These problems don’t seem to be stunting Zoom’s growth
right now. Zoom, in spite of its flaws, has become the
social medium of the moment.
