Zoom outage caused by accidental 'shutting down' of the zoom.us domain

zoom.com is an audio equipment manufacturer, which was there before zoom.us.

I guess that's what happens where they had to accept substandard domain, because they were unwilling to be creative about their name.

But the dot com domain is now owned by Zoom Communications or just Zoom (as we know it). If you type "zoom.us" in your browser, you will be redirected to https://www.zoom.com/

Incidentally, Zoom seems a terrible name for a video conferencing app - anyone know why they chose it?

> zoom.com is an audio equipment manufacturer

False, the audio equipment manufacturer uses: https://zoomcorp.com/

The https://zoom.com domain shows content from the video chat platform.

Subjective, Zoom is a pretty cool name

One guess - fast video.

I always assumed that Zoom reacted to security/privacy concerns about its association with China by getting a "*.us" domain that sounded very United States.

The Wikipedia editors know, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Communications#Early_year... :

> In May 2012, the company changed its name to Zoom, influenced by Thacher Hurd's children's book Zoom City.

It cites https://vator.tv/2020-03-26-when-zoom-was-young-the-early-ye... where Jim Scheinman says:

> “I loved this fun little book as much as my kids, and hoped to use the name someday for the perfect company that embodied the same values of creativity, exploration, happiness, and trust. And the name works perfectly with a product that connects us visually to one another and that always works so fast and seamlessly.“

AFAICT they've used that domain since day one, so probably not.

Added context: Zoom delivered a step change in video conferencing quality for the many, vs the few, and in a lot of ways did seem to force others to be better.

During the pandemic many people used zoom more than their cell phones.

Maybe it’s just simple word play of “Zoom us” as in call us. As opposed to “Zoom me” which might be just for one person rather than group chat.

It is a one-syllable word, easy to pronounce in many languages, quite distinct from other words and brands, and can easily be turned into a verb.

Maybe after recent US events, everything will move to .ru TLD

They've had zoom.com since at least 2019 or so. It used to just be a redirect to Zoom.us though they've made a switch since then.

This is … Zombocom.

It’s all relative. Is “Webex” better? “Skype”? “BlueJeans”??

Do English speakers pronounce .us domains as dot us instead of dot u s?

Dot yoo ess. Source: am European.

Why does that make it a good name for video in particular?

Fair. They are worse.

I immediately agreed with this, but at the same time it’s not “fast” is it? It’s higher quality or more reliably, something like that. But emotionally I agree it does feel “faster”.

Me too: 'you ess' (British)

It would only be pronounced as "uhhss" as part of a domain hack. Otherwise "you ess". Source: am from USA.

Especially Skype, which is getting shit down. In favour of Teams, which is so much worse it’s hard to describe.

Why does it have to be -- ever "googled" something? ;-)

Cameras often have zoom lenses for close ups.

Fits great with the idea of bringing people together with video.

Noting that we British would always call our country "you kay" so .us would be derived from that. I suspect similar reasoning from Europe.

I also say 'dot you ess' and I was born in the USA.

The reference to "Zoom City" is from an article published in 2020. It seems like a remarkably fitting ret-conning of what is probably a very boring branding decision.

They did buy zoom.com from someone in 2019, though, for $2M.

https://domainnamewire.com/2019/03/23/did-zoom-pay-2-million...

What would be the point of ret-conning some other decision?

That's a really fantastic typo. I know it was unintentional, but still...

Zoomus

Verbing your nouns is a great way to lose your trademark.

Interesting. I used to buy Zoom modems in the 80s-90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Telephonics), but apparently they have nothing to do with either of the other two Zoom companies mentioned here. I had occasionally wondered but never looked into it until now.

You can do anything at ZomboCom.

Anything at all.

The only limit ... is yourself.

When they came up with it that would be a best case scenario.

We use Skype and it is worst atm. Skype freezes every minute.

Are there any actual recent examples of this? The major examples I've always heard are solidly in the 20th century. It's not like Google has had any problem holding their trademark.

Fair point - it's smoother video that gives a better quality experience.

The speed of starting a call sometimes could take a bit more but once established was higher quality than the alternatives at the time.

Back in the day, wasn't it either Zoom or Hayes?

BlueJeans is one of those absolutely catastrophically stupid branding decisions. There's just........ no justification. It's confusing at best, and abbreviated as BJ at worst.

Don't forget US Robotics

> In May 2012, the company changed its name to Zoom, influenced by Thacher Hurd's children's book Zoom City.

To save people the agony of visiting Wikipedia for themselves to check, changed from Saasbee. Which, good call.

Kleenex and Xerox were both (somewhat) recently in danger of loosing theirs. They both pulled pretty big campaigns to un-verb their trademarks. Google still has a bunch of other products that people are familiar with, so they are in less danger of loosing theirs right now, but give it some time (like 50 years, not 10) and it may happen, especially if they get broken up for being a monopoly. (Which has been mentioned)

I'm usually a big proponent of longer-term corporate thinking, but deciding your name around problems you might have five decades after becoming a household name is a little much.