So JioMeet has obviously “copied” / “inspired” it’s User Interface (UI) from Zoom. That is a fact and there is no denying it. Anyone who says otherwise need not be taken seriously.
Enough has already been said and discussed all over the internet about the UI similarities between JioMeet and Zoom. There is good amount of debate done and internet has basically been divided into 3 camps –

1. People calling it a marketing masterstroke by Jio
2. People calling it plain theft and even suggesting Zoom to take legal actions against Jio
3. Meh.. So what ??

Anyways, here are my two cents on the topic –

The key metric that everyone is gunning for is the user base or adoption. The target group for these apps can be broadly divided into traditional B2B and B2C segments. Let’s discuss some key points for these segments –

Business users (B2B)
1. Networking effect

• Zoom clearly has the upper hand here. They were able to monetize the hype at the right time and grew their user base exponentially. Zoom’s Daily Active Users (DAU) jumped from ~10M to ~200M from January to March 2020.
• For large MNCs with teams scattered across the globe, JioMeet probably is not even an option right now as most of their employees outside India most likely don’t even know about JioMeet yet.

2. Competition
The B2B Video Conferencing space has seen a lot of new and innovative applications come up in the Covid era. Apart from Zoom, the 2 most notable ones making significant progress are Google Meet & Microsoft Teams –

• Google Meet taking advantage of 1 click integration with Gmail and Google calendar
• Microsoft Teams levaraging it’s integrations with suite of other Microsoft products – Skype, Onenote, Onedrive, Word, Excel and on and on

3. Privacy and Security

• Though JioMeet says they have a privacy policy but the verdict is yet to come out on their privacy and security.
• Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams on the other hand have already proved themselves and have gained good credibility on this front.

4. Time to market
JioMeet went live approx 3-4 months after the worldwide lockdowns and may have already missed the bus as a lot of digital transformation across businesses has either already happened or is in progress with one of the competitors.

B2B Verdict – JioMeet has a lot of wood to chop for B2B segment and it would be a miracle if they are able to quickly gain any decent market share in this space.

Individual users (B2C)

• Apart from the initial curiosity about checking out the app (because of all the buzz that the comparison with Zoom created), there is actually no useful or new feature that JioMeet provides.
• The network effect is even worse for JioMeet in case of B2C as these users were anyways flooded with pretty good options in the form WhatsApp Video call, Skype and now Zoom of course. There is no incentive at all for these users to switch to JioMeet.
• There is no pricing or strategic partnership play here. Every B2C offering is free and has pretty much same set of features.

B2C Verdict – Unless and until JioMeet comes up with any innovative product features, B2C is something they are not gonna win. Remember JioMoney? That too was just another wallet/payment app with no product differentiation at all. It never stood a chance against Paytm et al.

Summary

Zoom has got nothing to worry about JioMeet copying their UI. However, they should consider that –

• Reliance (Jio) has always been a company focused on execution and often they are damn good at it. By lifting the product features & UI from Zoom they have made it clear that product differentiation is not their game plan this time as well. They are probably gonna go the old school way of ruthless execution to capture the market
• Reliance has got deep deep pockets and that was even before the insane amount of funding and strategic partnerships that Jio Platforms received in the past few weeks. We know from the past experiences that Jio is not afraid of burning money in the short term to quickly capture long term user base. Let’s not forget the mayhem that Jio created in the Indian telecom industry and how it became the largest telecom operator in the country within a couple of years.

Zoom should be more worried about Jio going after their core business and should keep their arsenal ready.