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Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

Considering that at least Google is a direct competitor, and Amazon is very aggressive at stealing ideas from their partners, I think choosing an alternative like Oracle makes sense simply from a business ecosystem and competition perspective.

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>Google is a direct competitor

I think that people over estimate potential damages of being your competitors customer. Google is not going anywhere, with or without this contract, and if they want to make an investment in video conferencing, they already have more than enough capital & resources to do that.

Staying away from GCP purely because it is under google would be a crazy decision

As of April 29, Google Meet is now free, which is seemingly direct competition to Zoom, especially with the emphasis on security.

https://blog.google/products/meet/bringing-google-meet-to-mo...

Opinion my own not Google's.

First, Google Meet is also not e2e encrypted. Second, Google Meet is not now free. They're rolling it out over several weeks. My account isn't activated yet. Is yours?

Google is really, really late to game here. What was Google doing for the last 2 months while Zoom capitalized on our situation?

Google Meet is "free" for 60 minutes, which conveniently enough won't be enforced until September.

That's just a shady deal, especially if they end up trying to retire Hangouts chat and so normal users can no longer use free video / voice call services that they've come to rely on having for like 10+ years now.

Don't get me wrong - I love Meet on my business accounts and along with all the other Apps in G Suite, it is well worth paying for. But I also value the fact that normal ass standard Google users have been able to have access to a semi-decent video and voice conferencing platform for over a decade now. I hope that doesn't change come September.

Even for free I won't use it. I already have solutions that I (and the business I work for) have been using for several months. (Personal: Skype or Zoom; Business: MS Teams) Those solutions work. Not only do I not assume that the Google solution won't be half-assed, I also do not assume that it will remain free, nor even remain in their product line for any reasonable length of time for that matter. In fact, being "free" makes even more leery that Google will axe it down the road.

Regardless, if I (and I assume many beside myself) need a video conferencing solution, I would have found one by now and no longer need a "me, too" product.

Walmart doesn't host in AWS for exactly this reason. Amazon is famous for stealing whatever data they can get to promote their own business over their customers.

Some might consider Zoom giving Google, Amazon, or Microsoft insights into their business as the crazy decision.

Are we giving FB a pass for stealing competitor ideas? IG stories (from Snap), FB Room - Zoom Clone, etc.

In my view, those are not the same. If you have a product that I like and then I subsequently copy it then that's one thing. You store your data with me and then I use your data to give my product a competitive advantage over yours is completely different.

How so? Different in what sense?

Ideas are not protected under law. There's no "stealing" of ideas.

You can steal data, code, and customer lists.

The comparison is misplaced. Google is not in Zoom business. Google barely happens to have a third grade product for video call, sold as part of their business tools package. The Google product has been shut down and renamed like 5 times since it was created and people don't even take it seriously.

Amazon and Walmart are selling the exact same products, they're competing head to head for every sale trying to get the customer to not shop on the other.

They recently reported 100 million daily active users and growing by 3 million a day.

I think people are taking it seriously.

> Walmart doesn't host in AWS for exactly this reason.

This isn't strictly the case. They do push some of their data to other SaaS providers hosted on AWS.

Amazon has a direct competitor already:

https://aws.amazon.com/chime

I thought this might be the case, I haven't used chime and didn't really research into Amazon's messaging capabilities.

True, Oracle is so old and docile that they'd never attempt a competitor

Oracle entering a consumer market would be great way to screw themselves. One can dream.

>Amazon is very aggressive at stealing ideas from their partners

Are there some examples of this?

edit - this is somewhat related, from another comment in this thread: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40367626

I think Amazon as a company has earned a bad faith reading into all of their business ventures by bullying small sellers on their own platform by directly competing with them and using sales data to beat them in their own niche.

I'm sure there is much less evidence of this at the cloud/enterprise level.

Plus, Oracle will end up acquiring them, it’s unlikely that Zoom will last as a long term standalone business.

Zoom market cap 38.24B (70% more than Twitter), Oracle market cap 167.05B. Can’t last as a long term standalone business and has to be acquired by Oracle? Sounds like a pretty baseless claim.

Won't =/= Can't i.e. they may been seen as an attractive acquisition

Oracle has that much cash on hand, and the market cap is inflated by the COVID outbreak. That market cap could be $10B in a week.

Assuming that valuation will stay in place in the economic disaster that we find ourselves is a big leap.

Where are they going to pivot to?

Zoom is profitable, so I do not see why.

Heard of Chime? It's been there for years.

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