Hacker News Reader

Comment by smallerfish | Hacker News Reader

Whatsapp had already carved out its market (because of SMS being charged for in its initial markets) before Facebook acquired it. https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-monthly...

Granted that they've at least tripled MAU since, but that's the power of network effects. There's a heavy dose of "in spite of" rather than "because of". On the other hand if Meta tried to, say, merge Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger, I think they'd lose half their users overnight.

Similarly, if Meta bought Zoom (and kept it running as it does today), most businesses probably wouldn't switch. Zoom already owns the market.

View on HN

> Similarly, if Meta bought Zoom (and kept it running as it does today), most businesses probably wouldn't switch. Zoom already owns the market.

Zoom's continued survival still surprises me. There was a point in time during its meteoric rise, early in the pandemic, when stories broke about it being spyware for China and a security threat, and its use was subsequently banned in many places. Then some months later people were back to using it, as if nothing ever happened.

It also has appalling UX. They seem to place buttons completely at random. Pop ups all over the place. It makes Teams look good.

Zoom had appaling security when it started being used by the masses. But it did the right thing, acquired Keybase which were doing really great work in the field of security and UX, and they subsequently fixed the problems Zoom had (stories about spyware for China are bullshit, as usual, they just had just *really* basic issues like anyone was allowed to crash into a meeting by just knowing its ID, which used to be easy to guess). Today, I consider Zoom a solid, safe choice for private meetings until something new comes to light that proves otherwise.

I think you're forgetting the core controversy, which was that their marketing materials proudly claimed they used end-to-end encryption, which was just completely false at the time.

Zoom has by far the best feature set out of any videoconferencing system - Zoom Rooms work almost seamlessly, and the core product is pretty user friendly and incredibly reliable from my experience - something I've never been able to say about Hangouts, Teams, Skype, GoToMeeting or Webex.

I donr use zoom much but it has a very intuitive UI - everything is easy to discover.

Meanwhile in TEAMS people dont know how to do things.

Recently I had a meeting that was supposed to be recorded, firsf nobody could record it; now the supplier side does not know how to share it as a downloadable file.

The Microsoft cloud experience is pure trash from productivity point of view.

My favorite thing about Zoom (and I suspect a large portion of its staying power) is that it somehow manages to just work on every device, even if your device is slow or your internet connection is garbage. Heck, I’ll be on a Zoom call on my phone driving in a rural area with two bars and I’ll somehow still get grainy video.

In comparison, I use teams for my two person startup and we can only get that absolute trash fire working reliably about 75% of the time.

So? OP claimed nobody was willing to do private communication on facebook/meta infrastructure. More than 2 Billion people on the planet do just that on WhatsApp, which is Meta. It doesn't matter that WhatsApp started as its own thing, it is owned by Meta and people use it all the time for very private things.

Facebook messenger is another example, hundreds of million of people use it all the time.

>So? OP claimed nobody was willing to do private communication

You are arguing against an obviously silly false premise. I said "large numbers of people" were unwilling to use FB for private communication.

There's also the ios to Android usecase.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com