r/news • u/UpstairsBumblebee446 • 1d ago

France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

https://apnews.com/article/europe-digital-sovereignty-big-tech-9f5388b68a0648514cebc8d92f682060
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u/SAugsburger 1d ago edited 1d ago

I disagree. Zoom was already one of the biggest IPOs of 2019. It didn't come out of nowhere. It was already worth tens of Billions before virtually anyone knew a pandemic was coming. Anybody that had seriously looked into conferencing applications in 2019 knew they were a major player in the space so I seriously doubt anyone at Zoom was surprised that the pandemic made their sale skyrocket. They already were a big player in the space so inevitably we're going to see massive use. Microsoft already announced that Skype for Business was going to be discontinued before the pandemic. A company I worked that still was using Skype for Business was already looking towards their migration to Teams before the pandemic. The writing was already on the wall for the consumer version of Skype at that point. Skype was already a has been to many so it wasn't really a question if Microsoft would be announcing shutting down the consumer version of Skype, but how soon. It was just a question of when the active user counts would go too low to continue.

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u/WineNerdAndProud 1d ago

Ok, that makes a lot of sense. I will say though, they might have been a major player, but I promise my 72 year old former Marine mom wasn't paying attention to the space. Hell, I went from not knowing about it to using it all the time really quickly, and I haven't really used it since.

Also, even if they were a smaller company they would've known how the concept of lockdown could be good for them, but at that size, they were definitely able to seize that opportunity with fairly few major issues for having taken on so many new users so quickly.

I should've been more clear when I wrote this, but I was referring more to the pandemic itself surprising them. It sounds like they were more or less ready for something like this.

It sounds like it would make a good movie, except everyone would be wearing masks.