Why Zoom isn’t the answer for the future of work (and what might)
Part 2 of 2
This post is part 2 of an analysis of why Zoom won in 2020 due to the pandemic and why it won’t win for the future of work.
In part 1, we went into depth why Zoom won in 2020. We explored how Zoom set up their product for success compared to their competitors, how the stock market news hype fueled their growth, and how a single decision led to a massive competitive moat.
Now let’s dive into why Zoom isn’t set up for success for the future of work.
As a little background, I have a Masters in Information Systems from University of Maryland, College Park (Go Terps!) and have been working with and launching startups since I was 17. Now, I am building a communication tool for newly remote teams that miss those drop-in chats called Yuzu.
Zoom Was Built for a Pre-Covid Era
Eric Yuan built Zoom as an iteration on Webex.
He left Webex in 2011 because he, “did not see a single happy customer.” So he took off with 40 other Webex engineers, secured $3M in funding, and spent the past 9 years to make Zoom a better experience.
What Zoom has built is a great product. It’s reliable, has high quality video, and the free tier is really generous. It’s not game-changing, but it’s really just a well-built iteration of Webex that created a $100B+ company (Jan 2021).
But the future of work needs a radical shift in voice and video communication though. Not an iteration. Why? Well because the shift to remote work is a radical shift in how we work, so a there needs to be a radically different solution to remote work.
How do we know this? Because for the past few years Buffer has been running its State of Remote Report and have been consistently coming to the same conclusions. Remote workers are struggling with “loneliness” and “collaboration and communication”.
This is caused by the inherent nature of remote work. The default mode of communicating remotely is through chat and text. And a majority of remote work advocates have been working asynchronously. Meaning employees do the work on their own time, which is great for doing focused work, but really bad with keeping a team in-sync and feeling connected.
Asynchronous communication also doesn’t work for teams that require back-and-forth conversations such as marketing and product management. And It is especially bad for early product development.
I would bet that the remote workers pre-covid were mainly introverted, where they just wanted to focus on their work and not talk to colleagues, but covid changed all of that. Extroverts have now found the pros of remote work and want a piece of the action, but feel extremely lonely and disconnected with their co-workers.
You might say, “So what? Things are going to go back to normal after COVID.” Well, think again. According to Upwork’s Future of Workforce Pulse Report, they estimate that 36.2 million Americans will stay remote by 2025. Owl Labs also conducted a survey in mid-2020 and had a few surprising findings. They found that if working from home was no longer an option after COVID-19, almost 70% of respondents would be less happy and almost half would look for another role that allowed remote work.
If your company doesn’t provide remote work at some level, you’re at a competitive disadvantage. The top talent won’t want to work there and those that stay will be unhappy.
There seems to be some push-and-pull here. On one hand, remote workers are struggling with collaboration and loneliness, but they want it enough that they would find another job if their employer didn’t offer it.
I’ve even personally interviewed 140+ remote workers over the past 8 months and there is a consistent theme that I constantly hear: Connecting with your co-workers while working remote is hard and it shouldn’t be.
This means there is a market need to provide a better way for teams to collaborate and stay connected while working remote than the current solution of Zoom + Slack.
The Need for The Slack of Voice & Video
Slack made text communication at work fun.
To the reactions, the #pets channel, and even the default color theme. But, it was also designed to make work communication more efficient with its use of channels, a searchable history, threads, and integrated apps.
We are missing exactly this in voice and video solutions. What we have today are boring blue, gray, and black themes in siloed off virtual rooms. We have really awkward “Zoom happy hours”. And there isn’t the ability to have quick side conversations with people in the call. Have you tried having multiple conversations on a Zoom call? It’s impossible
What we are missing is the fun and spontaneity that occurs in the office. Those casual “Hey, how are you?” and hearing the commotion of co-workers laughing in the distance as you join them out of curiosity. There also isn’t the ability to have quick side conversations with people once you’re already in the call. Have you tried having multiple conversations on a Zoom call? Start a break out group? Clunky, so you sit there for a break in conversation to speak.
There have been a number of startups that are trying to solve this. I would put them into 2 categories: 1-click chat and spatial chat.
For 1-click chat, they take inspiration from the likes of Teamspeak and Discord. You can see the various video calls happening across the team and join in that conversation with a single click.
For spatial chat, they take a completely different approach. Instead of teleporting around to different video calls with 1-click, they have audio and video always connected and as you approach people the audio and video gets louder.
Each solution have made a ton of buzz in the past year with either side raising millions of dollars in the past year. (See $3.9m, $11m, $1m, $1.5m)
If you want a full list of the startups with these solutions click here. In a future post, I will be giving the pros and cons of the different approaches.
Till then, follow to get notified when that post is released.
My team is also building out a solution for better remote work communication.
Our approach takes the best of both categories. If you want to learn more about what we are building you can click here.
