Zoom's Missing Concept

Concept catalog
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I am writing on the Zoom’s Missing Concept case study.

I think the case study is directionally right but inaccurate in how it arrived at those conclusions.

The concept of starting a meeting, sharing that link, and allowing people to incrementally join on the meetings without needing for everyone available, and being able to do so by sharing a URL, over desktop/phone browser is in fact a significant upgrade, and that was a big feature.

But, the case study is misleading to compare Zoom with FaceTime, Skype, Google Meet. These products were not really positioned to compete with Zoom. CISCO WebConnect was their actual parable, and felt like CISCO never really bothered for reasons I cannot comprehend, tbh.

CISCO WebConnect was built for exactly same use case, and they had even better features such as drawing graphics on shared screens, remote control etc. If I recall correctly, CISCO lost to Zoom on pricing.

During COVID in the US, organizations such as schools were significantly constrained on their ability to purchase new software, and Zoom really came through on a superior pricing model. Zoom’s setup was (and probably even now) is messy, and some security researchers called them out as malware (a bit tongue in cheek, a bit quite realistic).

Google Meet is a reasonable parable but they shot themselves in the foot tbh, like they had done with rest of their enterprise offerings. Like, limiting the number of audience, requiring Google sign up, no support on remote control, drawing on shared screen, glitchy video rendering.

Skype and Lync (Microsoft’s Skype makeover) both deeply integrated with hardware. You could pick up a phone call at your desk, and the status would reflect on the messenger, and it’s pretty cool/creepy depending on how you see it. But they kinda lost because it was hard to collaborate with anyone outside the enterprise.

Zoom killed Skype is an overstatement. Skype was getting cannibalized by Slack, and no one wanted two instant messengers. Microsoft eventually did another makeover to Lync, and now it’s called Teams.

The case study correctly points out that the ability to allow people to join meeting without signing up in browser, and share the meeting via URL, hop on/off without closing the entire meeting is in fact a conceptual change that in retrospect makes total sense, and why anyone would do anything otherwise. That existed in CISCO, and Google Meet. The problem was in the pricing model, enterprise lock-in etc.

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Welcome, @suryakasturi ! And thanks for your thoughtful comments. My key point in that blog post is about a missing concept in Zoom related to scheduling, and that concept is still missing (and adding it poses some interesting design questions).

On the question that you address of what made Zoom successful, I agree that other factors (such as pricing models) were at play. But I think you’re underestimating the importance to Zoom’s success of reducing friction in the user experience. That malware you alluded to as “tongue in cheek” was deemed to be malware in a legal ruling, and Zoom settled with the FTC over its practices. The point is that the malware techniques weren’t producing a messy experience for the user – on the contrary, their goal was to allow installation of Zoom without approval steps, making it appear more seamless.

Regarding the link concept: it was there in Google Hangout but as a minor feature, and was limited to 15 participants. Zoom made links central from their start in 2012. The idea had originally come from join.me, which I vaguely recall is how Cisco got it. I discuss this story more in the talk I gave at Google in 2024 entitled “What makes software work?” which you can find on my talks page here.