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Zoom is most definitely here to stay. I am confident that remote work culture will continue to be a part of normal working culture going forward. There's too ma

Zoom is most definitely here to stay. I am confident that remote work culture will continue to be a part of normal working culture going forward. There's too many advantages for both labor and businesses to keep remote work alive.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> Zoom is most definitely here to stay. I am confident that remote work culture will continue to be a part of normal working culture going forward. I'm with you on the second statement. I don't see the first immutably flowing from it. Zoom is dominant, but switching costs are small and their competitors are well capitalized and eagerly assaulting its fortress. Add to that their geopolitical vulnerability and their long-term dominance is far from assured.
- dbingham 5y ago
  I'm curious what you mean by 'geopolitical vulnerability'. How are they vulnerable?
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > I'm curious what you mean by 'geopolitical vulnerability'. How are they vulnerable? Zoom's China links have put it in hot water before [1][2][3]. If tensions flared, it could find itself cut off from some combination of a large section of its customers and/or large section of its workforce. [1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/china-based-executive-us-telecommunications-company-charged-disrupting-video-meetings https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/china-based-executive-u... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/technology/zoom-tiananmen-square.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/technology/zoom-tiananmen... [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52200507 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52200507
- muh_gradle 5y ago
  That's fair, I don't think it's a guarantee that Zoom will remain an industry leader. Google Meet and Microsoft Teams might catch up and overtake. Last I saw the numbers, Zoom still has a pretty big advantage as a brand name with 600 million DAU and being the brand name. I think the geopolitical vulnerability is fairly overblown.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- nine_k 5y ago
  Zoom is here to stay ≠ Zoom is poised to remain the leader indefinitely. But I don't see why Zoom would lose so much market share or revenue streams as to disappear or become a marginal player. Something extraordinary should happen for it to cease to be here to stay.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    Zoom could get put on the entity list and get Huawei'd.
  - michaelt 5y ago
    Skype used to be the only name in video calling. It wasn't anything extraordinary that made skype lose market share - just a gradual slide into irrelevance as competing products got stronger, and they tried to make a profit when everyone else was giving away the product for free.
    - el-salvador 5y ago
      One of the reasons we stopped using Skype is how slow it became, specially on non high-end phones. On the other hand WhatsApp was always fast. It seems they never optimized for performance.
llampx 5y ago
Is Zoom here to stay or is video conferencing here to stay? Google Meets and MS Teams are pretty good and built into their respective Office suite products.
- scarface74 5y ago
  I mean Google doesn’t exactly have a track record of successful products when it comes to chat and video conferencing.
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  For small meetings within established teams, strangely I kind of need to plug for gather.town.
- KittenInABox 5y ago
  I also prefer google meets, specifically because its live transcription imo beats out zoom's. This is useful/important for people that can have disabilities which involve speech processing. (eg. I know of people with ADHD or autism who would need to request something be repeated simply because the brain didn't process the sounds as speech the first time or something similar, when this isn't a problem when reading text.)
  - QuercusMax 5y ago
    I find that the live captions also help me when I'm tired or distracted; and sometimes it does a better job that I do of decoding thick accents.
  - mediaman 5y ago
    Interesting. I wonder if this is a problem for some people in-person, as well, or if the video specifically causes the speech to not get processed right the first time around. If it's a problem in both environments I could see remote work with closed captioning being a big benefit for people with certain types of neurodivergence.
    - 5y ago
somethoughts 5y ago
It will survive for sure - the question is if it will be an independent entity. My personal prediction is that Zoom - like Slack - will be acquired by Salesforce if Zoom's stock price normalizes. In both cases, benefit of doing the IPO is that it enabled the founders to cash out at market prices. Eric Yuan at Dreamforce - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7DmHSxsYoI& https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7DmHSxsYoI& There's another video of Eric and Benioff having a chat at Dreamforce.
- taylorhou 5y ago
  absolutely agree. a google or microsoft wouldn't cus the customer base overlaps with their own anyways. Salesforce on the other hand could continue on their path to becoming the enterprise suite of everything. real question though is who does SF acquire to gain a foothold in the email arena? superhuman?
no_wizard 5y ago
Whats interesting to me is that all the big players had Video meeting software that is exactly like Zoom, more or less, pre pandemic, and they were still losing out to Zoom, just at a much slower rate. I recall Zoom pre pandemic was still a profitable business[0][1]. Not the gang busters it was during the pandemic, no, a good, profitable business none the less. So whether Google or Microsoft or Slack can win now is debatable. They should have won this out before hand too, if you look at how things are stacked on paper. I don't know that the pandemic has changed the fact that these businesses are playing catch up in users minds. Ironically, if anyone is going to threaten Zoom, its likely to be Microsoft with Teams, and only because so many organizations are already on Office 365 and Microsoft seems to be sinking some sales channel hooks into Teams specifically, and arguably Teams is good enough and has most of the same extension points as Zoom does, including its own add on store and API for most major integrations[2][3][4]. It seems Google is having a lot less luck here, first hand experience being that every business I've worked for in the last few years have been Google Workspace customers, yet still prefer to use Zoom over Google Meeting, despite Google Meeting being effectively free with the rest of the Google Workspace product. I'm still mind boggled that Slack didn't capitalize on video meetings, they had all the technology and know-how, however execution matters like anything else, and I don't think they've been able to entirely execute on adding strong robust video offering to their core product. [0]: https://investors.zoom.us/news-releases/news-release-details/zoom-video-communications-reports-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year https://investors.zoom.us/news-releases/news-release-details... [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/06/zoom-earnings-q1-2020.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/06/zoom-earnings-q1-2020.html [2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2019/03/12/10-of-the-latest-microsoft-teams-integrations-to-help-you-work-smarter-not-harder/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2019/03/1... [3]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/samples/integrating-web-apps https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/sam... [4]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-teams-apps-dca531fb-3885-428d-ba1a-f3c17032e07e https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-teams-apps-d...
- taylorhou 5y ago
  Zoom has done well but the bundling of video conferences by microsoft and google will likely win out in the end. All it takes is a single botched update or more bloat in the software to have others try an included option. My company is on google workspace and quite frankly love the ease of being able to click a button to create and join a meet in next to zero spin up time. I loathe it when 3rd parties send a damn zoom or teams link cus they always want me to default to using their app that has settings/config issues with my hardware, etc... Most of the ultra large 10k+ employee companies seem to not mind paying for both though. My wife works at big oil and they use teams internally cus it's included but then use zoom with external cus it's "cool".
time_to_smile 5y ago
Zoom is probably here to stay but won't achieve dominance as the standard for video meetings the way I think investors speculated early pandemic. Pre-pandemic almost no remote companies that I knew used Zoom. It was almost exclusively google meet with a few use of other, lesser well known services. Zoom did some great early pandemic marketing and was able to quickly capture market share, especially in the "meeting with a 1000 attendees") type calls. I've known plenty of teams that switched of zoom into other platforms relatively quickly. I suspect that zoom will replace Oracle's webex and similar products for "business meetings" but will not achieve dominance in day to day meeting space. People already have solutions for the majority of their video chat needs: - small office meetings: Google meet/slack video - family calls: FaceTime (or equivalent) - socialization: Discord I suspect Discord will grow a bit as younger people enter the work force. Since they've optimized around gaming/livestreaming their screen sharing video is remarkably more crisp than either Google or Zoom.
mdoms 5y ago
Remote is here to stay. We'll see about Zoom, but I have doubts. They're up against the titans.
packetlost 5y ago
Eh, I disagree. Remote work might become more common for things like software engineering, but I fully expect most others to shift back to how they were pre-pandemic. It's just a question of how long that shift takes

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> Zoom is most definitely here to stay. I am confident that remote work culture will continue to be a part of normal working culture going forward. I'm with you on the second statement. I don't see the first immutably flowing from it. Zoom is dominant, but switching costs are small and their competitors are well capitalized and eagerly assaulting its fortress. Add to that their geopolitical vulnerability and their long-term dominance is far from assured.

dbingham 5y ago
I'm curious what you mean by 'geopolitical vulnerability'. How are they vulnerable?
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > I'm curious what you mean by 'geopolitical vulnerability'. How are they vulnerable? Zoom's China links have put it in hot water before [1][2][3]. If tensions flared, it could find itself cut off from some combination of a large section of its customers and/or large section of its workforce. [1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/china-based-executive-us-telecommunications-company-charged-disrupting-video-meetings https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/china-based-executive-u... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/technology/zoom-tiananmen-square.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/technology/zoom-tiananmen... [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52200507 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52200507
muh_gradle 5y ago
That's fair, I don't think it's a guarantee that Zoom will remain an industry leader. Google Meet and Microsoft Teams might catch up and overtake. Last I saw the numbers, Zoom still has a pretty big advantage as a brand name with 600 million DAU and being the brand name. I think the geopolitical vulnerability is fairly overblown.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nine_k 5y ago
Zoom is here to stay ≠ Zoom is poised to remain the leader indefinitely. But I don't see why Zoom would lose so much market share or revenue streams as to disappear or become a marginal player. Something extraordinary should happen for it to cease to be here to stay.
- xxpor 5y ago
  Zoom could get put on the entity list and get Huawei'd.
- michaelt 5y ago
  Skype used to be the only name in video calling. It wasn't anything extraordinary that made skype lose market share - just a gradual slide into irrelevance as competing products got stronger, and they tried to make a profit when everyone else was giving away the product for free.
  - el-salvador 5y ago
    One of the reasons we stopped using Skype is how slow it became, specially on non high-end phones. On the other hand WhatsApp was always fast. It seems they never optimized for performance.

llampx 5y ago

Is Zoom here to stay or is video conferencing here to stay? Google Meets and MS Teams are pretty good and built into their respective Office suite products.

scarface74 5y ago
I mean Google doesn’t exactly have a track record of successful products when it comes to chat and video conferencing.
CoastalCoder 5y ago
For small meetings within established teams, strangely I kind of need to plug for gather.town.
KittenInABox 5y ago
I also prefer google meets, specifically because its live transcription imo beats out zoom's. This is useful/important for people that can have disabilities which involve speech processing. (eg. I know of people with ADHD or autism who would need to request something be repeated simply because the brain didn't process the sounds as speech the first time or something similar, when this isn't a problem when reading text.)
- QuercusMax 5y ago
  I find that the live captions also help me when I'm tired or distracted; and sometimes it does a better job that I do of decoding thick accents.
- mediaman 5y ago
  Interesting. I wonder if this is a problem for some people in-person, as well, or if the video specifically causes the speech to not get processed right the first time around. If it's a problem in both environments I could see remote work with closed captioning being a big benefit for people with certain types of neurodivergence.
  - 5y ago

somethoughts 5y ago

It will survive for sure - the question is if it will be an independent entity. My personal prediction is that Zoom - like Slack - will be acquired by Salesforce if Zoom's stock price normalizes. In both cases, benefit of doing the IPO is that it enabled the founders to cash out at market prices. Eric Yuan at Dreamforce - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7DmHSxsYoI& https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7DmHSxsYoI& There's another video of Eric and Benioff having a chat at Dreamforce.

taylorhou 5y ago
absolutely agree. a google or microsoft wouldn't cus the customer base overlaps with their own anyways. Salesforce on the other hand could continue on their path to becoming the enterprise suite of everything. real question though is who does SF acquire to gain a foothold in the email arena? superhuman?

no_wizard 5y ago

Whats interesting to me is that all the big players had Video meeting software that is exactly like Zoom, more or less, pre pandemic, and they were still losing out to Zoom, just at a much slower rate. I recall Zoom pre pandemic was still a profitable business[0][1]. Not the gang busters it was during the pandemic, no, a good, profitable business none the less. So whether Google or Microsoft or Slack can win now is debatable. They should have won this out before hand too, if you look at how things are stacked on paper. I don't know that the pandemic has changed the fact that these businesses are playing catch up in users minds. Ironically, if anyone is going to threaten Zoom, its likely to be Microsoft with Teams, and only because so many organizations are already on Office 365 and Microsoft seems to be sinking some sales channel hooks into Teams specifically, and arguably Teams is good enough and has most of the same extension points as Zoom does, including its own add on store and API for most major integrations[2][3][4]. It seems Google is having a lot less luck here, first hand experience being that every business I've worked for in the last few years have been Google Workspace customers, yet still prefer to use Zoom over Google Meeting, despite Google Meeting being effectively free with the rest of the Google Workspace product. I'm still mind boggled that Slack didn't capitalize on video meetings, they had all the technology and know-how, however execution matters like anything else, and I don't think they've been able to entirely execute on adding strong robust video offering to their core product. [0]: https://investors.zoom.us/news-releases/news-release-details/zoom-video-communications-reports-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year https://investors.zoom.us/news-releases/news-release-details... [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/06/zoom-earnings-q1-2020.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/06/zoom-earnings-q1-2020.html [2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2019/03/12/10-of-the-latest-microsoft-teams-integrations-to-help-you-work-smarter-not-harder/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2019/03/1... [3]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/samples/integrating-web-apps https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/sam... [4]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-teams-apps-dca531fb-3885-428d-ba1a-f3c17032e07e https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-teams-apps-d...

taylorhou 5y ago
Zoom has done well but the bundling of video conferences by microsoft and google will likely win out in the end. All it takes is a single botched update or more bloat in the software to have others try an included option. My company is on google workspace and quite frankly love the ease of being able to click a button to create and join a meet in next to zero spin up time. I loathe it when 3rd parties send a damn zoom or teams link cus they always want me to default to using their app that has settings/config issues with my hardware, etc... Most of the ultra large 10k+ employee companies seem to not mind paying for both though. My wife works at big oil and they use teams internally cus it's included but then use zoom with external cus it's "cool".

time_to_smile 5y ago

Zoom is probably here to stay but won't achieve dominance as the standard for video meetings the way I think investors speculated early pandemic. Pre-pandemic almost no remote companies that I knew used Zoom. It was almost exclusively google meet with a few use of other, lesser well known services. Zoom did some great early pandemic marketing and was able to quickly capture market share, especially in the "meeting with a 1000 attendees") type calls. I've known plenty of teams that switched of zoom into other platforms relatively quickly. I suspect that zoom will replace Oracle's webex and similar products for "business meetings" but will not achieve dominance in day to day meeting space. People already have solutions for the majority of their video chat needs: - small office meetings: Google meet/slack video - family calls: FaceTime (or equivalent) - socialization: Discord I suspect Discord will grow a bit as younger people enter the work force. Since they've optimized around gaming/livestreaming their screen sharing video is remarkably more crisp than either Google or Zoom.

mdoms 5y ago

Remote is here to stay. We'll see about Zoom, but I have doubts. They're up against the titans.

packetlost 5y ago

Eh, I disagree. Remote work might become more common for things like software engineering, but I fully expect most others to shift back to how they were pre-pandemic. It's just a question of how long that shift takes