Zoom vs Alphabet Inc. (Google)

Eric Yuan grew up in Shandong Province, China. His girlfriend — later his wife — lived in a city ten hours away by train. Yuan later said that riding that train repeatedly as a young man, he would think: "What if I could see her without travelling?" The question stayed with him. It became the founding motivation for Zoom, which Yuan would not create for another 24 years.

Yuan had joined Cisco through its acquisition of WebEx in 2007 and became one of the company's most senior engineers. By 2011, he was frustrated: WebEx customers consistently told him the product was difficult to use and unreliable. Yuan proposed building a new video platform from scratch. Cisco declined. Yuan left, taking 40 engineers with him, and founded Zoom in 2011. Cisco, his former employer, became one of his main competitors.

When COVID-19 forced global lockdowns in March 2020, Zoom became the de facto communication platform for hundreds of millions of people simultaneously. Daily meeting participants grew from 10 million in December 2019 to 300 million in April 2020. "Zooming" became a verb. Zoom's stock rose 500% in 2020. Eric Yuan became a billionaire many times over.

As pandemic restrictions lifted and people returned to offices, Zoom's growth rate collapsed. The company had hired aggressively during the boom and laid off 15% of its workforce in February 2023. The stock fell over 85% from its 2020 peak. Zoom remained a large, profitable business — but the extraordinary circumstances that had briefly made it one of the most important companies in the world had passed. Eric Yuan took a 98% pay cut in 2023 in an unusual display of corporate accountability.

Zoom reported full-year fiscal 2025 revenue of $4.67 billion — modest 3% growth — but with non-GAAP operating margins of approximately 40%, making it one of the most profitable software companies of its size. The company rebranded from "Zoom Meetings" to "Zoom Workplace," integrated an AI Companion 3.0 capable of agentic task execution, and expanded into Zoom Phone and Contact Center. AI Companion adoption grew fourfold in a year. The company entered fiscal 2027 targeting its first $5 billion revenue year. The question facing Zoom — as for every legacy SaaS company — was whether AI would make the product indispensable again, or whether it would simply slow the pace of irrelevance.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in 1995. By 1996 they had built a search engine called BackRub — named after its method of analysing backlinks. It ran on Stanford's servers and consumed so much bandwidth that the university repeatedly asked them to take it down.

Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Google a cheque for $100,000 in August 1998 after a brief demo in a Stanford parking lot. There was one problem: Google Inc. didn't exist yet. Page and Brin had to incorporate the company before they could cash it.

In 1999, Page and Brin tried to sell Google to Excite CEO George Bell for $1 million. Bell turned them down — the search was too good, it would send users away from Excite's portal too quickly. Bell later called it the worst decision of his career. Excite filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Google became worth more than $2 trillion.

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, Google declared an internal "code red." The company that had invented the transformer architecture — the technology that made ChatGPT possible — had published its research openly and was now scrambling to compete with the system it had inadvertently enabled. Google rushed Bard to market. It made a factual error in its first public demo. The stock dropped $100 billion in a single day. Google's search share fell from 80% to under 70% as users migrated to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.

In September 2025, a U.S. federal court ruled that Google had illegally maintained its monopoly in search, ordering the company to end exclusive distribution contracts with Apple, device manufacturers, and browser makers. The Apple deal alone had been worth approximately $20 billion per year to keep Google as the default search engine on Safari. The court stopped short of forcing Google to sell Chrome or Android, but the ruling was the most consequential antitrust action against a technology company since the Microsoft case of 1998. Google announced it would appeal. The case is expected to reach the Supreme Court.