In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when I was first forced to use Google Meet to speak with a few teams, I was seriously underwhelmed. The reason was quite simple: the product barely worked. I’m not talking about weaknesses in fringe features but literally, the audio and video did not work reliably. Although my regular browser is Firefox, I used Google Chrome to load Google Meet, surmising that staying withing the native Google ecosystem would result in good performance. Switching browsers made absolutely no difference. The video quality was so bad that only the person actively speaking would come through in a badly artifacted feed; everyone else would be frozen or turn into a black rectangle. I couldn’t see why anyone would suffer through this terrible experience that was not only worse than Zoom, but worse than WebEx, GoToMeeting, or even (gasp) Verizon BlueJeans. (It takes real effort to make software that’s worse than what a telco can provide.)
Because of my poor initial experience with Google Meet, I cringed when first joining Chainguard – a company founded by ex-Google employees who have naturally standardized on all things Google. But six months into using Google Meet, not only am I tolerant of it, I’m actually a huge fan. I’m now a fan to the point where I think Google Meet – and Microsoft Teams – will be the ultimate winners in enterprise videoconferencing. Zoom, I’m afraid, is going to fall by the wayside and die a slow death as both a product and a company.
Product capabilities aside, Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace have shown that essential productivity tools for office workers are delivered best as bundles. Of course, Microsoft was the pioneer here, boxing out point solutions like WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 with equivalent tools, but sold as a suite: the original Microsoft Office, delivered on something like 40+ 3.5” floppy diskettes, if I remember correctly. A few decades later, Google came along and replicated this packaging but with cloud-first versions, which they mostly assembled by acquisition (Google Docs was originally Writely, Google Sheets was XL2Web, etc.). Microsoft has been playing catch-up ever since with cloud Microsoft Office 365, whose components on the web are still demonstrably worse than their desktop equivalents.
With the rise in hybrid working and remote-first companies, videoconferencing software is rapidly becoming a must-have component for office productivity technology. Although Zoom was the early leader here – I’ve been using it commercially for over ten years now, since the early days of Chef when we switched to using it from GoToMeeting – competing solutions from the dominant office suite providers have caught up. Microsoft Teams is essentially a weird glued-together hybrid of Skype for Business + Microsoft Sharepoint + Yammer that provides enterprise videoconferencing, file sharing, and chat in a mediocre but adequate tool. Google Meet, on the other hand, is finally a decent offering after many missteps in this area (how many Hangouts or Chat variations did Google go through before finally creating Meet?) that doesn’t try to do filesharing (why would they, with Google Drive already) or chat (no solution that Google offers today – try Slack). Not only is the product now actually performant but Google is finally creating integration points with its other Google Workspace products that truly add value. For example, whoever thought of automatically updating past Google Calendar invites with the links to Google Meet recordings and transcripts is a genius. No more combing through folders of MP4s to find the recording, or having to publish them to an external tool like Rewatch to share with others. The recordings are automatically there for every invitee to access! I can also foresee future integrations with other Google products like Gemini to be able to ask it questions about past meetings you’ve been in – kind of like Gong, but for general purpose use cases rather than just for sales calls.
Which brings me to why I’m bearish on Zoom. I don’t think it can stand alone as a B2B videoconferencing solution, particularly when Google Workspace at $12 per user per month (PUPM) includes enough Google Meet to satisfy all but the most demanding users (150 participant video meetings + recording, noise cancellation). That $12 PUPM is something CIOs are already willing to pay for basic productivity software features (word processing, spreadsheets) so the videoconferencing is essentially a free add-on. Compare this to $13-$18 PUPM just for Zoom, a point solution videoconferencing tool, and you can see how the economics don’t work out in Zoom’s favor. There is almost no company of any size in the world that is not already paying either Microsoft or Google for an office suite, and so long as they get “good enough” videoconferencing as part of that price, Zoom will be a loser.
What are Zoom’s strategic options? They could try to position it for non-enterprise customers (B2C versus B2B, or maybe focusing on SMB/midmarket rather than enterprise), they could try to partner with others to cobble together an office suite (e.g. Notion, Dropbox Paper, Coda, etc.), or maybe do both. Either way, it’s a long row to hoe for Zoom to continue to maintain relevance given the dominance of existing office productivity software inside organizations of all sizes.