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Comment by kaffeemitsahne | Hacker News Reader

Where did Zoom come from all of a sudden? I had never heard of it before the pandemic but now all my lecturers at two different universities are using it. They must be doing something right at least.

(edit: not to be apologetic for the issue at hand, of course)

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From what I gather, they're one of the few video conference solutions that "just work", you don't need to install anything if you don't want (works in the browser), and their user pricing is pretty cheap and straightforward ($15/mo/user). Also, they've scaled well as there haven't been too many (any?) major outages, even though their usage has gone up probably 50x (complete guess) in the last 1-3 months.

They were already one of the leading enterprise web conference providers, alongside Cisco and Microsoft.

If you're a connoisseur of video chat platforms then you probably already know it. For the past ~5 years it's been one of the best options. Really easy to use and good quality. Within our company we got in a habit of using the free 40-minute Zoom meetings, even though our IT department mandated us to use Skype (which is awful). I think a lot of people came to Zoom from a similar organic path.

Although this year, Microsoft came out with Teams which is just as good IMO. So we finally stopped using Zoom here.

They have a free promotional campaign for educational institutions that started 2020-03-13.

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