It’s still up nearly 500 percent from this time last year, and Zoom has more than quadrupled sales year over year. Zoom’s stock dropped nearly 20 percent in November after the news that Pfizer’s vaccine was highly effective in late-stage trials. Perhaps most pressing, with multiple viable coronavirus vaccines likely to start distribution, we might not need to video chat so much next year. Slack, another best-of-breed workplace app that was acquired by Salesforce this week, also comes with a video component. Microsoft Teams, which has a Zoom-like videoconferencing feature, is essentially free for companies paying for Microsoft’s Office suite. What’s more, businesses that are cutting costs during a recession are less amenable to additional spending on software when they can lean on the contracts they already have. Giant software companies like Microsoft, Cisco, and Google have mostly caught up on video chat technology, offering vastly better products than they did before Zoom entered the scene. Now, as we close in on two years since Zoom’s public debut, numerous headwinds make the company’s future less certain. The company’s revenue is four times what it was in 2019. Zoom was the most-downloaded iPhone and iPad app of the year, beating perennial favorites like Instagram and YouTube. At this time last year, Zoom had on average 10 million daily meeting participants. It was one of several videoconferencing options already out there, but it captured the public imagination and market share more than most. As people joked at the time: Having a corporate Zoom account was the new having a car. For many, it became an indispensable lifeline to the outside world, with a free option that limited calls to 40 minutes and an unlimited paid option that enabled people to do many of the things they used to do in person. Not only did that mean a sharp rise in Zoom meetings for the millions newly working from home, but also Zoom birthdays and baby showers for everyone else. One year later, the world was in lockdown for the coronavirus pandemic, and Zoom went from being a niche business software popular among tech companies to the way people did just about everything. At the time, it was known for being a rarity: a newly public tech company that actually turned a profit. Zoom started trading on the stock market in April 2019.
If 2020 was the year Zoom rode the pandemic to skyrocketing success, 2021 could be the year the videoconferencing company comes back down to Earth.
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