What Comes After Zoom? — Benedict Evans

As a breakthrough product, I think it’s useful to compare Zoom with two previous products - Dropbox and Skype.

When Snap launched, there were infinite way to share images, but Snap asked a bunch of weird questions that no-one had really asked before. Why do you have to press the camera button - why doesn’t the app open in the camera? Why are you saving your messages - isn’t that like saving all your phone calls? Fundamentally, Snap asked ‘why, exactly, are ... See more

Part of the founding legend of Dropbox is that Drew Houston told people what he wanted to do, and everyone said ‘there are hundreds of these already’ and he replied ‘yes, but which one do you use?’ That’s what Zoom did - video calls are nothing new, but Zoom solved a lot of the small pieces of friction that made it fiddly to get into a call.

That’s the question Zoom and all its competitors haven’t really asked. Zoom has done a good job of asking why it was hard to get into a call, but hasn’t really 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 t... See more

I compared Zoom with Dropbox and Skype, but another useful comparison is with photo sharing. There have always been hundreds of things that did this, but we saw a succession of companies that worked out something new around user experience and psychology that took them beyond ‘photos’ to some deeper insight - first Flickr, then Facebook and Instagr... See more

The other comparison, though, is Skype. Just as for video, VOIP had been around for a long time, but Skype solved a lot of pieces of friction, in both engineering and user experience, and by doing so made VOIP a consumer product.