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Zoom really strikes me as the Dropbox of 2020. Took over a field full of mediocre products with one that "just works" for the casual user. 'to dropbox' was a ve

Zoom really strikes me as the Dropbox of 2020. Took over a field full of mediocre products with one that "just works" for the casual user. 'to dropbox' was a verb too. Zoom will probably suffer the same fate, where the big corps catch up in UX and the little dedicated product can't keep up with the service you already have access to. When Google manages to properly integrate Gsuite with whatever chat service comes after Meet/Hangouts/Allo, then Zoom's days are numbered.

rosywoozlechan 6y ago
Does this apply to Slack as well?
- echelon 6y ago
  Absolutely. Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. Video conferencing is not a multi-billion dollar company. File hosting is not a multi-billion dollar company. The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is. No single feature constitutes a platform or ecosystem, and there's certainly no defensive moat. These single-purpose companies are just minnows to the bigger fish that have gargantuan budgets, extensive engineering headcount, and rich product ecosystems to pair these features with.
  - askafriend 6y ago
    > Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. That's a naive perspective of the role Slack plays in many organizations. For example, much of the monitoring and alerting workflows in our company run through Slack. We use it more than email. We can rollback production deployments with Slack commands as well as interact with our staging environments - and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the workflows we've built out with Slack's APIs.
    - quineoa 6y ago
      That sounds painful for an ops person. When I did ops work I much preferred to have as little abstraction as possible seeing how critical each action is. I would never want my production deployment rollback tied to my instant messenger plugin working.
    - echelon 6y ago
      That sounds about as natural as using Xbox Kinect gestures. Additionally, your SLA is now also tied to Slack's, which is a multiplicative downgrade. Not every integration makes sense. I know some companies doing business logic automation in Google Docs, and I'm also reminded of Twitch Plays Pokemon. Just because you make a choice to integrate with a product doesn't mean it's widely adopted, practical, or wise. Or supported. Edit: I want to clarify. I don't mean to be rude, and I wasn't in the room when y'all made these decisions. I just don't think Slack is the ship you want to tie yourselves to, especially not as your control plane.
      - gavinray 6y ago
        > I know some companies doing business logic automation in Google Docs Sorry, but I have to post this now: https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl "xlskubectl integrates Google Spreadsheet with Kubernetes." "You can finally administer your cluster from the same spreadsheet that you use to track your expenses." It's a (working) joke of course, but a hilarious one.
      - jjeaff 6y ago
        If they are like me, they use chatOps as a way to consolidate and shortcut different commands and dashboards. But by no means are operations dependent on our chat. If chat goes down, then you will simply need to login to our ci/cd service to initiate deployments, rollbacks, etc.
    - santoshalper 6y ago
      How often are you rolling back production deployments that you need a Slack command to do it? Perhaps I am missing something but this does not seem like a good use of time for whoever put it together.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    It's funny you'd say that when there are so many companies doing chat and video software and they're all billion dollar companies. Quick math, assume one tool is charging $8 per employee per month (meaning $100 a year). It only takes one million customers to be a billion dollar company ($100M yearly recurring revenues at 10x valuation). And one million customers is just a couple of fortune 100. The whole market is orders of magnitude bigger than that!
    - lern_too_spel 6y ago
      That's assuming there is a monopoly. The cost of providing a chat service is low and dropping. If Microsoft or Google can provide it for free on top of the communications services companies are already buying, why would anyone pay an additional $8 per user per month for chat?
      - user5994461 6y ago
        Companies are paying as much as $25 per month per employee for minor tools. It's not uncommon that a company has 3 different tools doing the same thing. Enterprise are not rational actors trying to save money. Vendors don't go below $5 a month because they know enterprise will bear the cost.
  - lliamander 6y ago
    > The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is. So Google? Microsoft might count too, but I haven't used their suite in a while. Also, I would think integrated email would be necessary too.
    - santoshalper 6y ago
      It is 100% going to be Microsoft. Google is laughably bad at enterprise software and Microsoft really has no meaningful competition at this point. Teams is now crushing Slack in market share for the exact reason he mentioned - enterprise IT managers do not like the Unix approach of small targeted tools. They like product suites. Office 365 is as every bit as dominant today as Windows was 20 years ago.
      - 55555 6y ago
        Why do they like product suites? This is alien to me.
        jackcosgrove 6y ago
        Probably because the product suite components integrate much more easily than a bunch of separate tools from different vendors. And there are fewer particulars to know if you stay in one ecosystem. Maybe there is even a unified administration console.
      - lliamander 6y ago
        I see that Teams has full Linux support. I am glad.
jeffbee 6y ago
The difference with Zoom is it was created by a person with decades of experience engineering video conferencing at scale.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rescripting 6y ago
  I'm curious why this matters? Is dropbox's current failings its inability to scale?
  - whymauri 6y ago
    I think Zoom has proven that they have exceptionally good product vision. I'm not sure Dropbox has over the past few years.
    - Guffton 6y ago
      It may do but other providers will be just as good. So Zoom may find themselves squeezed out.
    - jl108 6y ago
      these are two different topics
- ryanbrunner 6y ago
  I don't think this is all that different from Dropbox. For years, Dropbox was able to outperform all the big players who tried to compete because their core sync technology was rock-solid. Still to this day, I find my ICloud sync folders can be fairly unreliable (files will take a mysteriously long time to appear once in a while) - I've never had anything like that sort of an issue with Dropbox (although I haven't used it in a while).
adventured 6y ago
> When Google manages to x y z When pigs manage to fly. FTFY If your premise is that Google will stop being so frequently incompetent at product and deliver a killer competitor for Zoom, then it's far more likely that Zoom's future is a bright one. > Zoom really strikes me as the Dropbox of 2020 ... Zoom will probably suffer the same fate Nobody killed Dropbox either, they have continued to expand year after year. Dropbox has grown its business every year for the past decade plus. You act like the competition wiped them out, when nothing like that has happened at all: Dropbox doubled the size of their business over the prior three fiscal years (2017-2019). I'm pretty sure that reasonably qualifies as thriving. Zoom is growing even faster than Dropbox did, they'll be larger than Dropbox in another few quarters. So how many years will it take for the competitors to catch up in a way that considerably slows Zoom down and how large will Zoom be at that point?

rosywoozlechan 6y ago

Does this apply to Slack as well?

echelon 6y ago
Absolutely. Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. Video conferencing is not a multi-billion dollar company. File hosting is not a multi-billion dollar company. The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is. No single feature constitutes a platform or ecosystem, and there's certainly no defensive moat. These single-purpose companies are just minnows to the bigger fish that have gargantuan budgets, extensive engineering headcount, and rich product ecosystems to pair these features with.
- askafriend 6y ago
  > Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company. That's a naive perspective of the role Slack plays in many organizations. For example, much of the monitoring and alerting workflows in our company run through Slack. We use it more than email. We can rollback production deployments with Slack commands as well as interact with our staging environments - and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the workflows we've built out with Slack's APIs.
  - quineoa 6y ago
    That sounds painful for an ops person. When I did ops work I much preferred to have as little abstraction as possible seeing how critical each action is. I would never want my production deployment rollback tied to my instant messenger plugin working.
  - echelon 6y ago
    That sounds about as natural as using Xbox Kinect gestures. Additionally, your SLA is now also tied to Slack's, which is a multiplicative downgrade. Not every integration makes sense. I know some companies doing business logic automation in Google Docs, and I'm also reminded of Twitch Plays Pokemon. Just because you make a choice to integrate with a product doesn't mean it's widely adopted, practical, or wise. Or supported. Edit: I want to clarify. I don't mean to be rude, and I wasn't in the room when y'all made these decisions. I just don't think Slack is the ship you want to tie yourselves to, especially not as your control plane.
    - gavinray 6y ago
      > I know some companies doing business logic automation in Google Docs Sorry, but I have to post this now: https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl "xlskubectl integrates Google Spreadsheet with Kubernetes." "You can finally administer your cluster from the same spreadsheet that you use to track your expenses." It's a (working) joke of course, but a hilarious one.
    - jjeaff 6y ago
      If they are like me, they use chatOps as a way to consolidate and shortcut different commands and dashboards. But by no means are operations dependent on our chat. If chat goes down, then you will simply need to login to our ci/cd service to initiate deployments, rollbacks, etc.
  - santoshalper 6y ago
    How often are you rolling back production deployments that you need a Slack command to do it? Perhaps I am missing something but this does not seem like a good use of time for whoever put it together.
- user5994461 6y ago
  It's funny you'd say that when there are so many companies doing chat and video software and they're all billion dollar companies. Quick math, assume one tool is charging $8 per employee per month (meaning $100 a year). It only takes one million customers to be a billion dollar company ($100M yearly recurring revenues at 10x valuation). And one million customers is just a couple of fortune 100. The whole market is orders of magnitude bigger than that!
  - lern_too_spel 6y ago
    That's assuming there is a monopoly. The cost of providing a chat service is low and dropping. If Microsoft or Google can provide it for free on top of the communications services companies are already buying, why would anyone pay an additional $8 per user per month for chat?
    - user5994461 6y ago
      Companies are paying as much as $25 per month per employee for minor tools. It's not uncommon that a company has 3 different tools doing the same thing. Enterprise are not rational actors trying to save money. Vendors don't go below $5 a month because they know enterprise will bear the cost.
- lliamander 6y ago
  > The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is. So Google? Microsoft might count too, but I haven't used their suite in a while. Also, I would think integrated email would be necessary too.
  - santoshalper 6y ago
    It is 100% going to be Microsoft. Google is laughably bad at enterprise software and Microsoft really has no meaningful competition at this point. Teams is now crushing Slack in market share for the exact reason he mentioned - enterprise IT managers do not like the Unix approach of small targeted tools. They like product suites. Office 365 is as every bit as dominant today as Windows was 20 years ago.
    - 55555 6y ago
      Why do they like product suites? This is alien to me.
      - jackcosgrove 6y ago
        Probably because the product suite components integrate much more easily than a bunch of separate tools from different vendors. And there are fewer particulars to know if you stay in one ecosystem. Maybe there is even a unified administration console.
    - lliamander 6y ago
      I see that Teams has full Linux support. I am glad.

jeffbee 6y ago

The difference with Zoom is it was created by a person with decades of experience engineering video conferencing at scale.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rescripting 6y ago
I'm curious why this matters? Is dropbox's current failings its inability to scale?
- whymauri 6y ago
  I think Zoom has proven that they have exceptionally good product vision. I'm not sure Dropbox has over the past few years.
  - Guffton 6y ago
    It may do but other providers will be just as good. So Zoom may find themselves squeezed out.
  - jl108 6y ago
    these are two different topics
ryanbrunner 6y ago
I don't think this is all that different from Dropbox. For years, Dropbox was able to outperform all the big players who tried to compete because their core sync technology was rock-solid. Still to this day, I find my ICloud sync folders can be fairly unreliable (files will take a mysteriously long time to appear once in a while) - I've never had anything like that sort of an issue with Dropbox (although I haven't used it in a while).

adventured 6y ago

> When Google manages to x y z When pigs manage to fly. FTFY If your premise is that Google will stop being so frequently incompetent at product and deliver a killer competitor for Zoom, then it's far more likely that Zoom's future is a bright one. > Zoom really strikes me as the Dropbox of 2020 ... Zoom will probably suffer the same fate Nobody killed Dropbox either, they have continued to expand year after year. Dropbox has grown its business every year for the past decade plus. You act like the competition wiped them out, when nothing like that has happened at all: Dropbox doubled the size of their business over the prior three fiscal years (2017-2019). I'm pretty sure that reasonably qualifies as thriving. Zoom is growing even faster than Dropbox did, they'll be larger than Dropbox in another few quarters. So how many years will it take for the competitors to catch up in a way that considerably slows Zoom down and how large will Zoom be at that point?