Google Just Banned Zoom and Zoom Should Say Thank You. For most companies this would be a disaster. But for Zoom it’s actually a good thing.

This story starts with what might seem like very bad news for Zoom, courtesy of Google. 

But viewed through the right lens, it’s actually a very good thing for Zoom — and the whole episode includes a resassuring lesson for smart business leaders in any industry.

The background is that Google, which owns a Zoom competitor called Meet, sent an email to all Google employees recently telling them that Google would no longer allow them to use Zoom on their company-owned laptops.

The reason: “security vulnerabilities.” 

A Google spokesperson, Jose Castanda, explained the announcement to Buzzfeed News: 

“We have long had a policy of not allowing employees to use unapproved apps for work that are outside of our corporate network. Recently, our security team informed employees using Zoom Desktop Client that it will no longer run on corporate computers as it does not meet our security standards for apps used by our employees.

Employees who have been using Zoom to stay in touch with family and friends can continue to do so through a web browser or via mobile.”

For most companies, the idea of a technology behemoth like Google announcing that a version of their main product is banned because of security vulnerabilities would be a disaster.

But there are unique circumstances here that arguably make this a good thing for Zoom, to the point that Zoom should almost be thanking Google for doing it.

Here’s the rationale:

• Zoom’s main customers are businesses. It normally hosts about 10 million free and paid users on any given day.

• Over the last month or two, with millions of people quarantined at home, Zoom’s free user base has exploded. At one point last month, Zoom was hosting 200 million daily users, according to a company blog post, most of them for free.

• As user growth soared, two other things happened: Zoom became a household name, and some security issues that had been less critical when most Zoom users were businesses with IT departments and security protocols, became big problems for free, consumer-level users.

Read more: inc