Is Zoom becoming a platform?

 

Have you noticed the new-ish browser-like tabs that have shown up on Zoom these days when you share a screen?  They allow for multiple screens to be shared and for meeting attendees to toggle between different screens and the camera view. 

It's a small user experience change, but I think (in conjunction with other features like live annotations) it may herald a change in the way Zoom thinks about itself as a product. These are the sorts of product changes that I find fascinating to explore - trying to peer behind the scenes and think through why certain decisions were made.  What motivated them to build this?

So imagine you're a product leader at Zoom. You rode high during the pandemic. Covid19 took your company from a nice-to-have tool to a mandated everyday experience for work. You perfected the art of high quality video calls, noise cancellation and buffering. Your video is crisp and - most importantly - reliable. But then where do you go, how do you drive growth?  Do you encourage more meetings? How would you even go about that? That would be a behavior change taking place off your platform. 

However if you stay as you are as the "kleenex" of video meeting software (kudos to Zoom for becoming a verb!) you risk commoditization.  So you've got to move, but where? First, I imagine Zoom identified their key advantage: they're probably amongst the top 5-10 software applications used by workers (Google Drive, MSFT 365, Slack, Chrome, etc). 

Looking at that list provides our clue. Google, Microsoft and Slack all also offer video conferencing capabilities. Maybe not as high quality as Zoom's, but when you're a procurement manager tasked with consolidating vendors and reducing cost, what's a few pixels or a 5% chance of "I can hear you, can you hear me?"?  They also market themselves as hubs "where work happens".  

If you're Zoom, why can't you also be where work happens? Instead of expanding from chat or documents into video, you go the other way. Allow your customers to take your application from a place of meeting to a platform for collaboration.  Zoom has started on this roadmap with whiteboards, annotations and now the browser-like tabs. With these capabilities Zoom can be used for much more than just meetings. 

 I'm now wondering how far this roadmap goes. Further investment must depend on whether they're hitting their success metrics. Are these features being used? Are they preventing customers from churning off to Google, Microsoft or Slack?  What might come next? A documents competitor? Or is that a step too far?