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…

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.

>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)

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.

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.

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 ...

"The Netflix case shows the might of capitalism driving [greater quantities of quickly-produced slop] to users at [higher] cost."