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Zoom founder: open source Zoom code is not out of the question

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"I don't think Zoom is part of Zoom anymore. Zoom belongs to the world."

Source: GMIC

The original link: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Q0i-ddBrVRcOGll8E6ii3A

In April 2020, yuan zheng, founder of Zoom, appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine. Here, share the following:

Zoom dominated the new life of home work

Zoom CEO yuan zheng's children are finally starting to care about his work. On that morning in April 2019, yuan zheng, founder of the world's most popular videoconferencing company, rang the bell on nasdaq, and Zoom's debut on the stock market made him a billionaire.

But it wasn't until a Monday in mid-march that yuan's eighth-grade daughter had to go to school remotely because of a coronavirus. She finally questioned her father's work. "My daughter never asked me what I was doing," Mr. Yuan said with a smile. "The first time she stopped, she said," daddy, in Zoom, how did you raise your hand?"

Yuan's son, a freshman, also became an emergency user of Zoom. "I told my son that I finally understood why I worked so hard," said yuan. "I realized that maybe I made these tools just for you to use in online classes." "This newfound respect is still not enough to stop the two children from competing with their father for WiFi at home," joked yuan zheng, 50.

Welcome to the new life of home work through zoom. With the coronavirus sweeping the globe, quarantining cities, closing state shelters and closing schools and colleges around the world, Zoom is increasingly becoming one of the main tools for virtual birthday parties, business keeping going, students learning and people connecting. There are also growing concerns about Zoom's security and privacy, and more scrutiny than ever before.

Zoom's record traffic data

On the last Saturday in March, nearly 3 million people worldwide downloaded the Zoom app on their mobile devices for the first time, a record for Zoom, according to mobile intelligence company Apptopia. Since its IPO in April 2019, Zoom has been downloaded more than 59m times.

Zoom recently topped the list of all free apps on the Apple App Store, ahead of Google, WhatsApp and even gen Z's favorite TikTok. And that doesn't include the millions of people who access Zoom on laptops or desktops. On April 1, Zoom said it had 200 million daily users in March, a 20-fold increase from 10 million in its best day of 2019.

All this has pushed Zoom, based in SAN jose, calif., to new financial heights. On Monday, the company's shares have risen 143% since an initial public offering, last month, the s&p 500 index was down 11% of the time) rose by 44%, the company provides the market capitalisation of $42 billion and a net worth of 5.5 billion yuan, making him the next week Forbes billionaires list released one of the richest self-made new people.

Even before the novel coronavirus spread, Zoom was taking off, with at least 81,000 paying customers, including samsung and wal-mart. For the fiscal year ending January 2020, revenue was $623 million and net profit was $25 million, up 88% and 234%, respectively.

Zoom has also become a social media phenomenon almost overnight. On Twitter, TikTok and elsewhere, Zoom spreads widely, a feat for commercial software. "Just got an email from the professor:" remind you that you must wear clothes during the Zoom conference. "rules are made when necessary, not before." One user's quip on Twitter has been liked by more than 85,000 people.

Another twitter user joked: "haha, you think you're better than me because you went to harvard?? We're all going to Zoom college now." (the real harvard is putting all the rest of the class on Zoom.) the tweet got 21,000 likes.

Inside the company, Mr. Yuan and his employees had two problems: keeping Zoom running and making sure it was in the hands of those who needed it most. When parts of China were locked in, Mr. Yuan opened Zoom's base-level free account, which typically lasts no more than 40 minutes at a time and lasts 24 hours.

In mid-march he expanded the policy to cover all closed K12 schools, first in America, Italy and Japan, and later in 19 countries. By early April, more than 90,000 schools were using Zoom. Add them to the millions of users who take advantage of Zoom freemium for work or personal reasons.

Just a week ago, Zoom's biggest challenge seemed to be making sure its systems didn't collapse under the pressure of millions of new users, and the brand is becoming the buzzword for "the home age" videoconferencing. It's like xerox, kleenburg, and Google.

Zoom's growing security and privacy concerns

What Mr. Yuan didn't say: as his popularity rose, Zoom experienced a wave of growing pains and concerns, and in just a few days completely changed the discussion around its video tools. Some schools are already hesitant to offer Zoom to students. But events like Zoombombing have become so common that hackers and trolls crash Zoom conferences for other users that the FBI had to issue guidelines on Thursday to prevent them.

The New York attorney general's office sent a letter asking Zoom to address security issues. Zoom was also affected by other reports, including sending data to Facebook and even sharing LinkedIn information with pseudonyms, among other vulnerabilities. That's enough for SpaceX to join NASA and avoid using Zoom internally.

On Wednesday night, yuan and Zoom apologized in a blog post, vowing to freeze the development of new meeting functions, build a weekly public safety-focused city hall, and focus their engineers' efforts on privacy and security measures for the next three months. "I am committed to being open and honest with you," Mr. Yuan wrote. As investors continued to sell, Zoom's shares fell 20 per cent in three trading days. As a result, the move did little to allay market fears.

In an exclusive interview Thursday night, Mr. Yuan said he was proud that Zoom had recently helped people. He took personal responsibility for what happened and said he wouldn't stop until he had the trust of his users. "We take this very seriously," said yuan. "I really want to build something to make the world a better place."

Born to a family of mining engineers in east China's shandong province, yuan was attracted to entrepreneurs like Bill Gates from an early age. After receiving a degree in applied mathematics from shandong university's college of science and technology in 1991, he decided to go to the United States. Before he left, us customs asked for his English business card. It listed Mr Yuan as a consultant who was misunderstood as a part-time contractor. His visa was refused. Over the next year and a half, skeptical immigration services turned him down seven more times.

Yuan zheng refused to give up. He eventually went to California and got a job at webex, an early web conferencing and videoconferencing application. It was acquired by Cisco in 2007. Four years and four months later, frustrated with the quality of Cisco's services, yuan left the company. He set up Zoom and began offering it free to organizations and institutions in need, such as the university of San Francisco. Providing Zoom service for free is also the key to yuan zheng's business. According to its s-1 report, most of Zoom's customers started as unpaid users a year before its 2019 IPO.

Zoom's challenge

Now, as the work-at-home economy becomes crucial, Zoom's altruistic impulse is taking on global significance. But it is not the only company to jump on the bandwagon and turn a profit later. Google and Microsoft also announced more free features for their classrooms and videoconferencing tools. RingCentral, a cloud communications company based in Belmont, calif., and Newsela, an education technology company based in New York, are among the many little-known companies.

But perhaps no other company has signed up so many new users so quickly. How can Zoom keep up? "Is your platform ready for almost every college class in the United States? At the same time? Ask a lot of friends." Adrienne Keene, an assistant professor of American studies at brown university, said on Twitter.

She later wrote to Forbes in an email that it was unrealistic to expect us to switch to a zoom phone and everything would be fine. She pointed out that some students live abroad, have unreliable WiFi or no quiet space at home. "Still, I'm looking forward to seeing their faces and hearing their voices."

Mr. Yuan probably didn't expect Zoom to promote a socially detached lifestyle in various ways. But when novel coronavirus began shutting down its business in China in January, the company began preparing for big changes. At the time, Mr. Yuan said, customers like wal-mart and dell were concerned and wondered whether their local employees could shift full-time work to communications by Zoom. Before going public, Zoom trained its staff on natural disaster preparedness, even though it did not expect the disaster to be a plague.

Mr Yuan said Zoom's 17 data centres were designed to handle a 100-fold surge in traffic. "Theoretically, the beauty of the cloud is that, you know, its capacity is infinite," he said. Zoom's engineering team spans the globe, including China and Malaysia. Zoom has a strong technical force, can be all-weather remote monitoring system.

Still, some Zoom users have noticed video quality dropping or it's hard to connect in the first place. Zoom's online help center is experiencing "longer waiting times than normal." On March 23, Zoom's service page acknowledged that some users of its free service had problems starting and attending meetings. This is not surprising, given that daily active mobile users grew by 610% in the past two months, according to Apptopia.

It's not just Zoom's challenge. The entire Internet is under pressure from so many people living entirely online, says Morgan Kurk, chief technology officer at CommScope, a communications technology company. His advice: schedule your Zoom, or any virtual meeting, after about an hour and 15 minutes to avoid the virtual rush.

For Zoom, the closer, more pressing issue is security and privacy. In late march, Vice Media's tech news site Motherboard revealed that Zoom was sending data to Facebook even if users didn't have Facebook accounts. Zoom says the information flowing out is limited to metadata -- the type of device you're using, the size of the screen, the language you're using, and the time zone you're in. A day after the news broke, Mr. Yuan apologized on his blog, explaining that the program allowed users to log in via Facebook and that the code had been removed.

How to protect users from hackers? On March 30, Letitia James, the New York state attorney general, wrote to Zoom outlining privacy issues, including whether the surge in users had made the platform more vulnerable to hackers.

"During the novel coronavirus pandemic, we are working around the clock to ensure that hospitals, universities, schools and other businesses around the world are in touch and operating normally," Zoom said in a statement sent to Forbes. "We appreciate the New York attorney general's engagement on these issues and are pleased to provide her with the information she has requested."

Zoom's apology

In recent days, Zoom's apologies and clarifications on blog posts have become all too common. Mr. Yuan acknowledged that other hackers or pranks at the zoombombing and Zoom conference were something he never expected. 'I really don't understand why a hacker would want to hack into a classroom,' he said. Are they going to learn algebra? Maybe calculus?

Mr Yuan says many of the problems stem from Zoom's main historical use: for work. Zoom conference workers who share explicit images with co-workers or play pranks on others don't last long at work. Public meetings are different. Classrooms become virtual. When the school began to close, Mr. Yuan said, his instinct was to help.

But in hindsight, Zoom was too quick. It is best to hold a day or two of teacher training before opening a shop. He says some security best practices, such as passwords and locked participant screens, are already available. Zoom's error was not to set them to default values. I think it's my fault. We should do more to train them, yuan said. We didn't do a good job because we wanted to give them free access, and we assumed they had good IT resources to configure security Settings.

Other much-maligned practices or bugs in Zoom's software stem from its naive attitude to how things work outside the enterprise. The attention trackers that have now been removed were originally used for corporate training, Mr. Yuan said. On company conference calls, being tied to a LinkedIn product that displays information about a user's work doesn't seem dangerous.

Some errors, such as implementing end-to-end encryption of Zoom's tools, are entirely avoidable, but they are not. (on Thursday, the digital rights group Fight For the Future launched a campaign calling on Zoom to go further and make its tools truly end-to-end.)

Zoom insists on collecting user data only when absolutely necessary to provide technical and operational support, in other words, to make sure your conference audio and video work. One school in Colorado says it won't use Zoom, citing concerns about how its data will be used and who will control it in the long term.

Lynn Haaland, Zoom's global risk and compliance officer, said Zoom didn't have the ability to monitor anyone's conversations or meetings in real time. Harland recently joined Zoom from PepsiCo.

Zoom belongs to the world

On Thursday morning, Mr. Yuan held an all-staff meeting at Zoom's temporary headquarters -- his home office is in SAN jose, calif. -- and slept just two hours a day. He says the past few days have been difficult and this is the worst crisis of his career. Now it's in the hundreds of millions and growing. "I want to raise the bar," he said. "I told the team, let's double check, triple check privacy and security, and don't let any of our users down.

Just a week ago, yuan zheng was different when he approached Zoom - and not just because he was using another virtual background. He then attended the first virtual happy hour with other chief executives; He talked about new features being developed, from snapchat-like features for users to the joy of cuddle Zoom to Settings for university-sized lecturers. Some are half-finished, others are mostly finished after all new features were frozen on April 1.

Mr. Yuan said Zoom could take other decisive steps beyond what it shares on its blog. Mr. Yuan said he would "probably" remove all tracking and cookies from Zoom's site. A bigger problem, says Zoom's chief executive, is that you will soon find that all meetings through Zoom require password protection. He said the company will double its bug rewards program and welcomes all criticism and feedback. If Mr. Yuan can't make Zoom the most secure platform in the world, in the next few years, he said, he will even consider open-source Zoom's code for others to try.

"I don't think Zoom is part of Zoom anymore. Zoom belongs to the world." Yuan Zheng said. "So I need everyone else's help. Together, let's build a better, safest platform in the world that benefits the whole world."

The future of the Zoom

What happens to Zoom after the pandemic is over? Analysts see the virus as a wake-up call that businesses are seeing by permanently moving to work from home, saving on rent and commuting time. Zoom's users have converted to more paying customers over time, and even when Zoom's news wasn't overwhelmingly positive, j.p. Morgan research's Sterling Auty remained bullish on the stock. He added: "Zoom has a culture of wanting to make things better, and what they're doing is a testament to that."

Alex Zukin, an analyst at royal bank of Canada, said the company's paying customer base disagreed with recent Zoom questions. Even before Zoom went public, Zukin said, the CIO and customers knew about Zoom's security Settings and limitations, and they had studied Zoom's architecture before. They were happy with it. "I think Eric was in an impossible position," zukin says. "I don't think they would have built the product with that in mind." He thinks Zoom has temporarily fallen victim to its own popularity and hype.

"There are a lot of rabbit holes that you can go down that don't make money, that are very distracting. When you're using Zoom for a birthday party instead of Zoom for a business."

Mr. Yuan acknowledged that most of the problems were of his own making. "I think we made a mistake, but with good intentions," he said. After the ups and downs in app store rankings, Mr. Yuan expects Zoom to return to its main business customers one day.

"If I had a choice, I would definitely go back to B2B," he admits. "now it's a completely different game." However, for Zoom's millions of new users, Mr Yuan vows: we need to work 10 times harder than before to win back trust.

It was a difficult time and became more intense as his work was known and watched by his family. A week ago, Mr. Yuan said, his mother, who lives in the house, asked him why he was always late for lunch. Now she wants to know why yuan zheng always hides in his home office and hardly sleeps.

Meanwhile, the days when Mr. Yuan's children used Zoom to seek support from their father's clients may be over. Yuan said he hopes he can persevere in adversity and set a good example for his children. "I told my children we are going through a very, very difficult time. Until then, yuan will do everything he can to keep the world's isolated people in touch.