When it comes to video conferencing, many people think almost instinctively of Zoom such has been the meteoric rise of the popular video conferencing app during these times of global lockdown and quarantine. However, as meteoric as that growth has been, it’s not the only app of its kind seeing remarkable growth.
According to The Verge, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed in a recent earnings call to investors that there are currently 75 million active users on Microsoft Teams at the moment, massive rise form the roughly 20 million active users only a few months ago. What makes this number even more impressive is that unlike Zoom which is used by most people for free, Teams usage is mostly paid for as part of people with Office365 subscriptions and is especially popular with business thanks to its increased security. In fact, during the earnings call, the company revealed a jump in revenue of 15% and profits by 22% through its various digital platforms, so it is one big tech company not too affected boy the ongoing pandemic even if it means some of its hardware sales have been slowed during this period.
Meanwhile, Google has also made its Google Meet video-conferencing application available for free to people that aren’t subscribed to its G-Suite application to take advantage of Zoom’s security blunders and the bad press around it and they are seeing a reported rise of as many as 3 million new users a day with over 100 millions users a day on average, though it doesn’t reveal if these are one-off users or active users.
Even WhatsApp is looking to capitalise on the Zoom security issues, as they have announced an increased limit for its group calling from 4 to 8. Launching already on iOS with Android still to follow suit. Though everyone will need to have an updated version of the app to take advantage of this limit increase.
With Facebook introducing Messenger Rooms to also expand to large scale video-sharing, expect them to also get into this game. It appears videoconferencing is the app business to be in and as the world relies on them more, expect their popularity to only continue to grow. Whether they will be able to maintain this sort of usage as people adapt and change to new normal post the pandemic though is something that we will have to wait and see.
Last Updated: May 4, 2020
