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I think you have to accept it. Zoom was in the right place at the right time. Now it's a verb. The good news is that once a brand becomes a word, it doesn't
by jrockway 6y ago
I think you have to accept it. Zoom was in the right place at the right time. Now it's a verb. The good news is that once a brand becomes a word, it doesn't really mean much about the company itself. I blow my nose into CVS brand Kleenex. I have a Xerox machine made by Canon. I've captured many a "Kodak moment" with my iPhone's camera. Windows users routinely "Google it" by asking Cortana, which actually uses Bing. And I Zoom with my friends on Discord.
All in all, the COVID-19 pandemic has created a lot of strange victories. Would Tiger King, Animal Crossing, and Zoom have been popular if they rose to prominence at a different time? Probably not. I think the pandemic forced niche things onto people that don't normally encounter them. Adults have video conferences at work, but the pandemic brought them to kids. That is a recipe for a cultural moment and genericizing their trademark. (Animal Crossing I can't explain. I assume that the people that were going to play it were already going to play it, and I assume that the people that were going to reverse engineer the code to figure out how turnips were priced were going to do that anyway. But maybe not.)
- 40four 6y agoYou are right, Zoom was a right place right time thing. Doesn’t bother me other people saying it, but I’ve never used Zoom once, nor do I have any plans to, so I don’t see it making it into my vocabulary. I don’t get it either, but Animal crossing was already one of the most beloved and best selling franchises in Nintendo history, so the pandemic didn’t really do much there, except give people more time at home to play and crack the code faster!