After questions were raised about Zoom’s usage claims during the COVID crisis, the firm quietly edited a blog post that dramatically lowers the number.

News of Zoom’s deception came to light in the wake of Microsoft’s earnings on Thursday, when Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela tweeted that he believed Zoom’s numbers were way off.

“I believe Zoom’s 300 [million] figure is not a [daily active users] or [monthly active users] number but a meeting participants number,” he tweeted. Microsoft, by comparison, reported that its Teams service saw over 200 million meeting participants in a single day this month, generating more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes. Microsoft Teams now has over 75 million daily active users, the company reported.

Capossela is right, and Zoom quietly edited a week-old blog post that had made the claim that it had over 300 million “users.” Now, the post notes that Zoom has over “300 million daily Zoom meeting participants.”

There’s a huge difference between “users” and “participants,” as you can see from the Microsoft figures. Microsoft’s 75 million users resulted in 200 million meeting participants in a single day. So Zoom’s actual user numbers are probably one-third of what they originally claimed.

That’s still higher than the Microsoft Teams figure, but not by a factor of four, like before. And if you add in Skype usage, Microsoft’s video conferencing solutions actually surpass Zoom overall.

This makes far more sense to me: Yes, Zoom is “easy,” but its no easier to use than competing solutions like Skype. And given Microsoft’s years-long efforts in this market, Zoom’s supposed dominance always rang false to me. And now we know why.

Tagged with Microsoft Teams, Zoom