2020 was a good year for Zoom. Now synonymous with video-conferencing, the company-name-turned-verb stock peaked in October 2020, a market interpretation of how the Zoom Boom has defined the daily lives of many millions throughout the COVID-19 outbreak.
Video calling apps have become an almost fundamental part of our lives, the closest we’ve reached to in-person, human interaction. Quarantines and lockdowns have mainstreamed video chats and while giants such as Microsoft, Google and Cisco have been major players, Zoom had soared beyond any other platform “because its product is easier and more robust than others and it’s at right time when people really need it,” Wayne Kurtzman, who tracks teleconferencing platforms for market research firm IDC, told CNN back in March 2020. It managed to overcome security and privacy controversies and maintain a stronghold in video-call land.
Towards the end of 2020, however, the company’s shares were trading lower — potentially due to profit-taking — but also perhaps because of the many alternatives that had sprung by then like virtual mushrooms after a pandemic.
Other than an obvious market share these companies would like to access, some of them address the now-all-too-familiar “Zoom fatigue”, defined as the “tiredness, worry, or burnout associated with overusing virtual platforms of communication,” by Psychology Today.
Asynchronous enterprise communications
Some of those challenging Zoom are focusing on asynchronous forms of communications. Loom merges video communications and instant messaging to create a work environment collaboration: “People can consume, process and respond on their own time, like an old-fashioned letter. It doesn’t require scheduling or coordinating,” the company explains on its website. This makes sense in replacing dragging daily briefings, sending pre-recorded updates ahead of synchronized meetings, or summarizing messages succinctly instead of scheduling unnecessary meetups.
Similarly, Grapevine strives to eliminate scheduling issues and cheekily open its landing web page with the sentence “Schedule fewer Zoom meetings.” It offers one-way video updates as yet another asynchronous solution for tackling location and time-zone issues or participating in those endless daily standup calls.
SuperNormal and Remote Workly, also asynchronous video updates platforms, add AI-powered summarized transcripts, which are clickable and so team members can skip ahead to the sentences that are critical to them while maintaining that relatively personal vibe a video provides.
Then there’s Bubbles, a chrome extension focusing on screen grab collaborations. “We are taking the screen sharing experience to the next level, so that collaboration doesn’t get in the way of doing great work,” writes CEO and founder Tom Medema. In an effort to reduce miscommunications, this platform helps start a conversation by dropping a comment on anything seen on-screen, and sharing a private link to start a conversation – in the context of what is seen. Their examples include Designers giving feedback and comment on digital assets or product specialists demoing products and creating audio or text highlights.
And the list goes on, from All Hands to RealTalk and many other initiatives popping up to tackle exhausting, online meetings. So much so, there’s a “remote work tools” category at this year’s Golden Kitty Awards, annually celebrating ProductHunt’s products, makers, and community members.
As teams become increasingly distributed, video communication is important for both internal alignment and external business development. Purpose-built communication tools help enable more effective team stand-ups (Standups), ongoing team communication (Tandem), working sessions (Remote HQ), and spontaneous watercooler chats (Snack). Others are enabling sales calls (Demodesk), asynchronous communication (Loom), workplace training (Hone), and less-distracting communication (Focusmate).
–JJ Oslund, The Startup
Events and more in the Age of Video Revolution
Other parallels to the Zoom universe exist in the realm of virtual events. Bizzabo is on fire these days, though it could have been easy to predict a downfall for the events-tech startup when the coronavirus froze an industry worth 500 billion dollars. But within two weeks its Israeli founders managed to pivot their product into the virtual events world and have concluded 2020 with 100% growth and tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Their latest round of 138 millions dollars, led by Viola Growth ?-Next47 and American Insight Partners VC, demonstrates growing trust in its current and future business model.
Another virtual events platform, Hopin, has hit a 2.1 billion dollar valuation and has raised 170 million dollars in total merely eight months after its launch — making the British company arguably the fastest-growing startup in Europe. Offering features like 1:1 networking, virtual booths, and integrated registration, “allows it to better monetize events, which is why it is possible to build large businesses within these narrower verticals,” JJ Oslund explains on Medium’s The Startup.
As part of his analysis, he points out how these tailor-made startups in fact “pose even larger threats to Zoom than any of its direct competitors.” According to Oslund, the ability to focus on a particular user — from classroom teachers to project coworkers to game night friends — creates a unique advantage for verticals perfectly suited for their customers. “Vertically-focused startups design products to better meet the needs of particular user segments. This allows them to create and capture more value than a horizontal product like Zoom is able to,” he argues. (Here’s his full list of Verticalization of Zoom).
What comes next?
In his essay “What comes after Zoom?”, Benedict Evans compares the video app to Skype, meaning there’s much to do in order to stay relevant. Skype’s uniqueness as a VOIP solution drifted once voice became a commodity. Evans argues that is exactly what will happen with video, “the question will be how you wrap it. There will be video in everything, just as there is voice in everything, and there will be a great deal of proliferation into industry verticals on one hand and into unbundling pieces of the tech stack on the other.”
Another point he makes is that Zoom should be asking the right questions in order to stay in the game.
Zoom has done a good job of asking why it was hard to get into a call, but it hasn’t asked why you’re in the call in the first place. Why, exactly, are you sending someone a video stream and watching another one? Why am I looking at a grid of little thumbnails of faces? Is that the purpose of this moment? What is the ‘mute’ button for – background noise, or so I can talk to someone else, or is it so I can turn it off to raise my hand? What social purpose is ‘mute’ actually serving? What is screen-sharing for? What other questions could one ask?
–Ben Evans
If Zoom refrains from facing these questions, it could find itself in the far far away galaxies of Dropbox and Skype, while the future brings in the communication forms of the next generation.
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