If you use this as a company, you should assume that the CCP will have direct access to your confidential discussions and IP given their atrocious security record and extensive ties to China.

If ANY company has extensive ties to China, they are under full influence of the CCP. You literally cannot operate in China without this influence at any sort of scale.

Zoom is developed almost entirely in China. The CCP has policies that systematically steal intellectual property for use in Chinese companies. If they can intercept your IP, they'll steal it and give it to Chinese competitors.

In addition, Zoom is an American company, so they must comply with National Security Letters as well.

A friend of mine said they were using the "government version of zoom" or somesuch. (in the united states, some sort of secured zoom)

Ok

Your history leads the reader to believe you're being sarcastic.

Yet, many entrepreneurs here have echoed the same sentiment over the years

Consider that it's not a campaign.

Hackernews is predominantly White/West, of course the sentiment leans in that direction.

Anyway, everyone acts in their best interests.

China's largest telecommunications company was indicted under RICO charges for systematically stealing US trade secrets and IP, and similarly the CCP has a long history of directly endorsing and supporting such behavior.

By some estimates, they steal $600bn of US trade secrets on an annual basis.

In fact, hackers associated with the CCP government have been detected hacking and stealing such materials on behalf of Chinese competitors.

Why would anyone trust Zoom? Do you think the CCP has no influence on a company's technology being almost entirely developed in China?

What a load of horseshit.

Maybe you should search "doing business in China" on this site to see people's experiences. West biased? Yes. Ignorant of truth/solely gov-based favoritism? No - I watch carefully for that, looking more to personal experience.

Overvalued IMO. I don't find Zoom to be at all differentiated from the many other video call apps from Meet, Teams, Skype, etc. All the enterprise software companies include video meetings in their bundles, why would you pay extra for Zoom?

Everyone is still catching up to Zoom's features; many companies still don't have background replacement, or can't take as many simultaneous users.

This is really fascinating. Continuing along the comparison with airplane stocks:

On one hand you have companies that keep flying chairs in the sky filled with people, feeding them every few hours migrating them across continents.

On the other hand, I have a company that can replace my crappy apt bedroom with a fake office background.

Fascinating that VC funded madness has gotten to this point - prioritizing CTRs, engagement, growth rates and so on.

Business travel is a large part of airline profits. If people believe many of those business trips will be replaced with Zoom video conferences on a permanent basis, then you would expect Zoom to see increasing revenues and airlines to see permanently impaired revenue.

This is pretty much caveman/child logic though. You can make anything sound anything speaking like that ignoring all the complexities involved and actual value provided.

As an IT professional, I can know that operating Zoom (out any other similar service) is orders of magnitudes easier than an airline.

For one, having catastrophic bugs means to send a "sorry" mail to your users. And maybe fix them.

Such bugs on a plane mean death of people. It is similar to suddenly not having wings. And they are back, but half of the cabine is gone. And suddenly no more plane, you are kindly asked to flap your arms.

But all these difficulties means airlines truly deserve to be mistrusted as an investment vehicle, and to this direction Warren Buffet recently pulled out all investments from the airline industry. So it's really not that comical that airlines are where they are, especially during COVID.

Plus it seems like part of the business model of airlines is lobbying for government bailouts.

And less riskier too. 1 day downtime for Zoom will be a blow in their business but will be backup the next, a few flights crashing in day and the rest grounded will put an airline out of business.

Except Jitsi, you mean?

Because Zoom _works_. I know of multiple companies that pay for Teams due to Big Corp Politics, but still use Zoom because it actually works.

Honestly I’ve used a dozen different conference call apps in the past few months and they all _work_. I still don’t get why zoom is popular, on Linux they want me to install a browser extension just to join a call which is unacceptable when we have webrtc already.

IMO it’s one of those situations where some software becomes popular for reasons (marketing? Network effects?) and people just use it because it’s there. No one can shop for software and that’s why we need open protocols.

If you think webrtc is a replacement for zoom, then I don't think you have seen what many people are using zoom for. I am unaware of any webrtc implementation that can handle 100 people on a video call. Much less 1,000 or 5,000.

Once you get passed a dozen or so video call users in the same meeting, your options diminish quite a bit. I'm not saying zoom is the only option, but there aren't just tons of easy to use options that do that well.

jitsi also just works.

you might like the servicr, but zoom is definitely overvalued, no question about it.

Jitsi works reasonably well on PC, but not on mobile.

Moreover, Zoom has documentation on how to use it, and Jitsi has none. (They have the stubs for documentation, but the content itself is largely missing.

One other thing Zoom has going for it: name recognition. In a crowded market, name recognition is more valuable than the tech.

Two or so years ago a friend set up Jitsi and RocketChat on his server because 2 friends and I were using Discord for studying for exams and he wanted to try out an open source alternative. It was so bad that we stopped using it immediately and went back to Discord - three people click on a room link, two end up in the same room, one is in an empty room; people kept dropping out every minute; one shared his screen, and while one person could see it, the other couldn't; some people heard others, some didn't; and the installer on Windows was so bugged that one person couldn't even run the desktop version and had to resort to the browser version which had its own problems.

Maybe this has improved since but I wouldn't use Shitsi again with Discord as an alternative.

> Two or so years ago

> Maybe this has improved since

Yes.

Great!

Google Meet works, and works faster. One URL, click join, bam you're in. Zoom you have to install (and accept that the CCP will steal your IP).

>"All the enterprise software companies include video meetings in their bundles, why would you pay extra for Zoom?"

Network effect.

Zoom adoption has reached critical mass. Why does anyone pay for Slack when IRC is free? It's what everyone else is doing.

The network effect cuts both ways here. Why pay extra for Zoom when you are already invested in Office 365? The ability to invite external participants to join a call via web browser limits the friction getting people to join calls on unfamiliar systems.

You can also invite external participants via browser in Teams. Only downside of Teams is that it only shows 4 recent speakers’ video feed.

Hats off to Zoom. Someday I hope we get a post-mortem from someone with a hand in the technologies they're using to scale. 3 months ago I think 90+% of the population had never heard of them and now it's a household name.

Three months ago I would've probably bet every dollar I had against a company in their position being able to fairly-reliably scale exponentially to meet an unforeseen circumstance.

I'm curious to see if they can ride this into long term success.

The question is how long can Zoom keep this up and when will it start to go downhill, even when the airline industry starts to recover (if they can recover).

In both cases, What goes up, must come down.

Yet again proving that nobody cares if your product is a security disaster.

Can someone be so kind to explain how is the market worth of a company calculated? Is it based on (1) the number of users (2) how much capital gets invested in it with purchase of shares? ..?

I just find it hard to grasp the idea that an app can "be worth" more than 7 largest airlines combined; because I do not clearly understand how the worth is being calculated.

Worth, as from the article is market capitalization. Market Capitalization is shares outstanding times price per share. Price per share is the price at which shares of that company trade at.

You could also look at enterprise value which is market cap + net debt for a better view of size.

In the investment markets people frequently joke about how poor airlines are for an investment. Many of them don’t even own their own planes because they do not make enough money to use the depreciation.

Do the airlines have an api ? zoom does : https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/api-reference/zoom-api

How many yc startups will be enabled with it ?

Shopify has market cap of $82 billion.

Is it sustainable?

Seems overvalued imo

Interesting all the cons have much less karma than the pros on this topic as of now.

Zoom P/E ratio is 2k+. Seems overvalued?

Compared to what? Plenty of companies are losing money and are highly valued, which is kind of like having a P/E that is greater than ∞.

It's actually p/e in the negatives. Anyway people should stop using it as some kind of god metric. It is easy to justify cases where large or negative p/e makes sense.

I read once that there are negative absolute temperatures defined such that all negative numbers are (in a way) greater than all positive ones.[1] That is, the temperatures below absolute zero are actually hotter than +infinity.

It seems reasonable to look at negative p/e numbers in a bit of a similar way, as being beyond infinity on a scale.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature

Reality?