Seems funny to point at Google when I suspect the bigger revenue impact was probably MS Teams being “good enough for the CIO.” G-Suite is widely adopted but how does it compare to MS for enterprise revenue? I suspect MS is way bigger but have not checked in a while.
We tried to expand Zoom licenses during COVID because it worked better, and were told “no, use Teams.” We barely held on to Slack, which is only used (albeit heavily) by a few engineers and product folks now. Everyone else uses Teams as instructed…
I recall a Google Workspace insider telling me that its annual revenue was $1B circa 2018. Given that it's part of the Google Cloud segment, that made GSuite roughly 20% of its total revenue. Assuming this continued to hold, GSuite's 2024 revenue was around $9B.
Given that M$'s Office revenue for commercial and customer segments was around $50B, it's safe to say that GSuite is substantially smaller.
Whoever at Microsoft has made copying text out of MSTeams chat so horrendously broken, please tell: were you forced to make it that way because some product manager forced you to follow their MS365 hegemonic walled garden dream? or are you just a deranged AI?
> We tried to expand Zoom licenses during COVID because it worked better, and were told “no, use Teams.”
My workplace discarded Zoom because of its terms of use. They evaluated the stuff from IBM, Google, and F5. At the end none of those options actually worked, and MS added Teams to our license. I'm still annoyed that nobody bothered looking at jitsi.
There were already plenty of established video conferencing vendors in 2020, including giant companies like Cisco, Microsoft, and Google. Zoom was the first company to make a video conferencing product that was cheap, easy to set up (for free!), and that mostly “just worked”. So when Covid hit and everybody suddenly needed to do video conferencing on their own, with no IT department forcing the choice on them, they were perfectly positioned.
The sad message to founders is not that “early” doesn’t win — Zoom was in no way “early” — it’s that “better” doesn’t win. And/or that consumer success and enterprise success have very different leverage points.
One thing that helped zoom was the unrigid licensing at the time. You could oversubscribe and figure out POs later. If you didn’t need a whole suite of software & services it was less painful.
Also they supported hardware that was easy to set up and integrate ( team rooms and conf rooms)
>It’s important to note the mechanics of this story though – how it played out – particularly from a valuation standpoint. The market completely mispriced this, and it looks like it didn’t even see it coming.
Is there any indication that the rise and fall in Zoom's stock price was due to the market failing to predict the commodification of video conferencing, or simply a case of pandemic exuberance? Peloton's stocks also has seen a similar rise and fall, and it's not like they got bundled into G-Suite or whatever. At best there's Apple Fitness, but that's been around far before the stock price jump.
> At one point Zoom was the only one that could figure out how to video conference well.
I may be misremembering but wasn't it _Google_ who worked it out first (Hangouts was free and easy to use) and then fumbled it so badly that Zoom entered much later with a sorta-okay alternative at just the right point in time?
I truly don't understand how Google keep breaking good products but I remember Hangouts being kind-of amazing for a moment there.
(This is tangential and I don't think it undermines the article)
Zoom one in the business market because it had features that businesses need. For example screen sharing with remote control (something that Google still can't do, and Teams can't do on Linux). I believe it also had all the features like muting everyone first.
Hangouts was just like "call your mum" level of video conferencing.
You might be thinking of the second "Hangouts", whereas what I'm referring to was apparently "Google+ Hangouts" and was the original. You could get 25 people on there, and for a bigger audience you could go "on Air" (which streamed the Hangout). Looks very similar to Zoom (in fact I suspect Zoom was heavily inspired by it) and I remember using it (and it's descents) before COVID and the rise of Zoom.
Interesting treatment of the subject and well done, etc., but ...
What really interests me is, for the very first time, following a link to twitter and viewing something that is intelligible and digestable and cohesive in format and not some weird mid-conversation snippet that can't be viewed in context nor expanded nor make any logical sense of replies, etc.
It's almost as if someone at twitter bothered to survey online discussion formats of the last 40 years and choose some decent design guidelines ...
Netflix understands that there are show you watch and shows you put on background while doing something else. Not every show needs to be Sopranos, not every Netflix show is Emily in Paris.
Silly ask: "please not promote your new thing on page where most users going to see it because I don't like that thing"
Sure, it is nice if it had genre "Ambient", but it's up to users. What is a filler for you, might be an engaging story for others.
You can usually tell what it's meant to be just by color grading and audio mixing in the trailer. I want "audio sounds like it was recorded in a sterile podcast studio" tag more.
Seems funny to point at Google when I suspect the bigger revenue impact was probably MS Teams being “good enough for the CIO.” G-Suite is widely adopted but how does it compare to MS for enterprise revenue? I suspect MS is way bigger but have not checked in a while.
We tried to expand Zoom licenses during COVID because it worked better, and were told “no, use Teams.” We barely held on to Slack, which is only used (albeit heavily) by a few engineers and product folks now. Everyone else uses Teams as instructed…
I recall a Google Workspace insider telling me that its annual revenue was $1B circa 2018. Given that it's part of the Google Cloud segment, that made GSuite roughly 20% of its total revenue. Assuming this continued to hold, GSuite's 2024 revenue was around $9B.
Given that M$'s Office revenue for commercial and customer segments was around $50B, it's safe to say that GSuite is substantially smaller.
Whoever at Microsoft has made copying text out of MSTeams chat so horrendously broken, please tell: were you forced to make it that way because some product manager forced you to follow their MS365 hegemonic walled garden dream? or are you just a deranged AI?
> We tried to expand Zoom licenses during COVID because it worked better, and were told “no, use Teams.”
My workplace discarded Zoom because of its terms of use. They evaluated the stuff from IBM, Google, and F5. At the end none of those options actually worked, and MS added Teams to our license. I'm still annoyed that nobody bothered looking at jitsi.
There were already plenty of established video conferencing vendors in 2020, including giant companies like Cisco, Microsoft, and Google. Zoom was the first company to make a video conferencing product that was cheap, easy to set up (for free!), and that mostly “just worked”. So when Covid hit and everybody suddenly needed to do video conferencing on their own, with no IT department forcing the choice on them, they were perfectly positioned.
The sad message to founders is not that “early” doesn’t win — Zoom was in no way “early” — it’s that “better” doesn’t win. And/or that consumer success and enterprise success have very different leverage points.
One thing that helped zoom was the unrigid licensing at the time. You could oversubscribe and figure out POs later. If you didn’t need a whole suite of software & services it was less painful.
Also they supported hardware that was easy to set up and integrate ( team rooms and conf rooms)
>It’s important to note the mechanics of this story though – how it played out – particularly from a valuation standpoint. The market completely mispriced this, and it looks like it didn’t even see it coming.
Is there any indication that the rise and fall in Zoom's stock price was due to the market failing to predict the commodification of video conferencing, or simply a case of pandemic exuberance? Peloton's stocks also has seen a similar rise and fall, and it's not like they got bundled into G-Suite or whatever. At best there's Apple Fitness, but that's been around far before the stock price jump.
> At one point Zoom was the only one that could figure out how to video conference well.
I may be misremembering but wasn't it _Google_ who worked it out first (Hangouts was free and easy to use) and then fumbled it so badly that Zoom entered much later with a sorta-okay alternative at just the right point in time?
I truly don't understand how Google keep breaking good products but I remember Hangouts being kind-of amazing for a moment there.
(This is tangential and I don't think it undermines the article)
Zoom one in the business market because it had features that businesses need. For example screen sharing with remote control (something that Google still can't do, and Teams can't do on Linux). I believe it also had all the features like muting everyone first.
Hangouts was just like "call your mum" level of video conferencing.
You might be thinking of the second "Hangouts", whereas what I'm referring to was apparently "Google+ Hangouts" and was the original. You could get 25 people on there, and for a bigger audience you could go "on Air" (which streamed the Hangout). Looks very similar to Zoom (in fact I suspect Zoom was heavily inspired by it) and I remember using it (and it's descents) before COVID and the rise of Zoom.
This video demonstrates an early version of it (from 2011!): https://youtu.be/KLf9jzFvkTA
This is 100% true in the enterprise. Recently I was about to buy OpenAI team licenses and realized Gemini Pro is already part of our account.
Essentially OpenAI can't enter our company unless there is a compelling reason.
There will be 1000s of such companies.
It’s a sad world when better tech can’t win.
Maybe in the future things will change and there’ll be more genuine competition.
Interesting treatment of the subject and well done, etc., but ...
What really interests me is, for the very first time, following a link to twitter and viewing something that is intelligible and digestable and cohesive in format and not some weird mid-conversation snippet that can't be viewed in context nor expanded nor make any logical sense of replies, etc.
It's almost as if someone at twitter bothered to survey online discussion formats of the last 40 years and choose some decent design guidelines ...
In other words, a blog post. Welcome back to the Year 2000!
"The Netflix case shows the might of capitalism driving [greater quantities of quickly-produced slop] to users at [higher] cost."
Netflix understands that there are show you watch and shows you put on background while doing something else. Not every show needs to be Sopranos, not every Netflix show is Emily in Paris.
Then why do they spend so much marketing them? I think the position you describe is a capitulation not their original intention.
It would be wonderful if they didn't shove in users faces and possibly labeling it as filler.
Silly ask: "please not promote your new thing on page where most users going to see it because I don't like that thing"
Sure, it is nice if it had genre "Ambient", but it's up to users. What is a filler for you, might be an engaging story for others.
You can usually tell what it's meant to be just by color grading and audio mixing in the trailer. I want "audio sounds like it was recorded in a sterile podcast studio" tag more.
That's a fair point; there's certainly a balance of the two.
You mean it totally isn't just about saving money, just mostly?