A family participates in Passover Seder via the Zoom app last week.
Photo: Bob Daemmrich/Zuma PressAs if Zoom Video Communications ZM 5.69% didn’t have enough troubles, now it has the world’s most valuable company breathing down its neck.
Twice last week, Microsoft MSFT 0.01% issued statements touting the popularity of its Teams collaboration platform for meetings and video calls. The company said Thursday it hit a daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes on March 31, up 200% from two weeks prior. The company also said total video calls over the platform grew more than 1,000% during the month of March. That came three days after Microsoft boasted of the security of videoconferencing in Teams.
Microsoft never mentions Zoom in its statements. But the coronavirus pandemic has made the popular videoconferencing service a household name—and the one for all competitors to beat. Microsoft also picked a time in which Zoom looked particularly vulnerable. The statement on Team’s security features came just days after Zoom Chief Executive Eric Yuanpublicly admitted to having “really messed up” in his handling of security concerns. Brad Zelnick of Credit Suisse downgraded Zoom to an equivalent of a sell rating last Monday, citing in part security concerns along with the stock’s high valuation. He noted that Microsoft Teams “remains the most significant competitive threat” over the longer term.
Zoom, for its part, considers Microsoft both an important distribution channel as well as a competitor, based on the company’s 10k filing last month. That is because many users of Teams also use Zoom for videoconferencing. Mr. Yuan is also aggressively trying to repair Zoom’s image. Among other changes announced last week, Zoom hired former Facebook security head Alex Stamos as an outside adviser. Mr. Stamos has been a frequent critic of his former employer and other big tech names—including Zoom—over issues of privacy and security.
Politely trolling the competition is nothing new for Microsoft. The company’s frequent boasts of Teams’ user count often come at the expense of Slack Technologies, WORK -0.80% another key competitor. An update from Microsoft in November about Teams passing 20 million daily active users took Slack shares down 8% in one day.
But Microsoft isn’t above taking a page from its competitors either. In its post Thursday, the company announced the ability to add custom backgrounds to Teams meetings. And a Microsoft executive told the Verge that the company is working on allowing more than four people at once on the screen of a Teams call. Both moves mimic two of Zoom’s most well-known features; the company has offered a “Brady Bunch” gallery view in its meetings since 2013. Imitation, not intimidation, is the sincerest form of flattery.
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Write to Dan Gallagher at dan.gallagher@wsj.com
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2020-04-13 11:42:22Z
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