Saved by sari
Why Zoom doesn’t have product/market fit
Companies like Zoom that achieve massive growth and ubiquity lose one important competitive advantage: the ability to focus on a particular user. Recent events have forced the adoption of Zoom for use cases that it was not originally designed for. Teachers struggle to manage a classroom. Game nights with friends feel overly rigid. Working on a proj... See more
JJ Oslund • The “Verticalization” of Zoom
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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.
Benedict Evans • What Comes After Zoom? — Benedict Evans
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sari added
You can join a Zoom with a link, but a company basically needs to onboard all of its employees if it wants to use Slack to communicate. Plus, Slack is mainly a B2B product, while Zoom serves (and counts in its 300 million figure) both B2B and B2C. As a result, Slack’s growth has been excellent but not as eye-popping as Zoom’s.
Packy McCormick • While Zoom Zooms, Slack Digs Moats
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Arguably, Zoom’s virality has caused negative network effects, at least for me. The more people who join Zoom, the more Zoom happy hour invites I get, the worse my life becomes.
Packy McCormick • While Zoom Zooms, Slack Digs Moats
sari added
Zoom, actually, I think used the original internet concept of reducing friction. Go back three years before Zoom, remember how painful it was to download an app like BlueJeans or Skype. It was so painful. Even today when people send me a BlueJeans link, I'm like, "Please guys, let's not do this. Please go to Zoom." You want one click, start talking... See more
Invest like the Best • Internet Scale Businesses
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It’s easy to think of Zoom’s simplicity as a competitive advantage, but this kind of simplicity is actually hard to implement in practice. Customers request endless features while competitors emerge with a longer list of functionality. Yet I observe that it’s a distinctive quality of networked products that they often do one thing well.
Andrew Chen • The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
It’s easy to think of Zoom’s simplicity as a competitive advantage, but this kind of simplicity is actually hard to implement in practice. Customers request endless features while competitors emerge with a longer list of functionality. Yet I observe that it’s a distinctive quality of networked products that they often do one thing well.