How do you count the users of a service? The question may seem trivial, but there are multiple ways of doing this calculation: unique users active during a certain period of time (day, week, month …), registered users, users participating in a session … important is, as often happens, to maintain consistency and clarity in communicating data. Zoom admitted to not having 300 million unique users active daily as previously stated, since this number would generally refer to users taking part in meetings. Microsoft meanwhile has announced a growth of 70% of the daily users of Teams, arrived at 75 million, while Google announces that he has reached the milestone of 100 million of users active daily on Meet.
Zoom admits that it does not have 300 million users per day
300 million it is a rather large number: to have a yardstick, it is the set of populations of Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Poland and Belgium. According to the statements released in recent weeks by Zoom, this number was that of the unique users who use the service daily.
The company has now, however, corrected the shot: as reported by The Verge, Zoom now states that 300 million is the number of users attending meetings every day. The perspective completely changes, given that a person can attend numerous meetings increasing the total number of users taking part in the meetings.
The number previously communicated by Zoom therefore appears particularly misleading when compared with the numbers released by the other platforms, which instead represent the unique users. Zoom's growth is still phenomenal, given that the company declared 10 million daily participants in December 2019, but less impressive than the competition when taking into account the different metrics.
Microsoft Teams and Google Meet continue their growth
Microsoft has meanwhile confirmed that the growth trend for Teams it also continued in April: the company announced reaching 44 million daily users in March, while in April the service registered a 70% growth this month bringing active users to quota 70 million. Microsoft claims to have achieved 200 million meeting attendees every day.
Despite the remarkable growth, Teams continues to be used by a fraction of users with an Office 365 subscription: as Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack has pointed out, the numbers of Teams would be less significant because they would witness a reduced use among users who pay Office 365 and who choose to use other solutions instead of one that in all respects already pay.
Google Meet, on the other hand, seems to unexpectedly enjoy growing success: the service of the Mountain View company has registered 100 million daily participants, with 3 million new users every day. As Teams is included in Office 365, Meet is also an integral part of Google's office suite, G Suite, and is integrated with the tools that companies with a subscription already use. Curiously, however, it seems that the greatest growth in the service comes from private users rather than corporate users. This is partly explained by the opening of the service also to consumer users, who can now create new meetings without having a G Suite account: Google Meet is in fact currently available free of charge for all Google users until September 30th.
In March, Microsoft launched a new indicator, the Work Trend Index, with which the company intends to represent the changed habits in the world of work and the coordination of teams in companies. According to Microsoft, many of the changes we are witnessing during the pandemic will last and will persist even after the emergency ends.
However, the levels of use of the collaboration and online meeting platforms will not remain at the peak level that has been registering in recent months and will return to more contained levels: this makes the struggle for supremacy in this space more a long-term game than a quick game where the winner is quickly established. With the feature element rapidly reaching a level playing field between the various contenders, the transparency, the security guarantee and the flexibility They will undoubtedly bring long-term advantages to those who know how to integrate these elements into their offer.
