Zoomtopia

The Six Five team discusses Zoomtopia.

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Transcript:

Daniel Newman: So Zoomtopia, your show.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, so I have written before about the Zoom platformizing their offerings, right? Platforms are the thing to do. We see it with Microsoft, we see it with Google, we see it with Salesforce and now we’re seeing it with Zoom expanding their capabilities and two new capabilities, a little bit of a surprise. They add an email client and a calendar client to the experience. So what that would mean is that you could essentially be inside of the Zoom experience and calendar experience and have, for lack of a better term, a unified inbox where you would have messaging, you would have email, you would have calendar and you would have video. I kind of joked that even back in 1992 when AT&T bought my company, NCR, we were working on a unified inbox and the industry is still trying to do it almost 30, yeah, 30 years later.

But it is a big move. Now you don’t have to move off of your email client. If you want to plug into Gmail and use this as a front end, you can as well. This gives Zoom access to really important data because if you’re going to do email and calendar, you’re going to do Zoom Chat okay? And all of this data that can come in and make the overall experience better using big data and machine learning. You can imagine if you’re integrating Zoom into your hospital workflow, you’re integrating it into your call center, which by the way, they’re making huge strives in that. It all makes sense.

I want to get my hands on it and use it before I pass thumbs up or thumbs down. I really, I had a chance to interview Oded Gal, the chief product officer and I play junior product managers you like, I like to do all the time with him and I think we’re in perfect alignment. Finally Zoom Spots. You want a tool to have your team do whiskey tasting or drinking games? Zoom has brought it to you, which is a different environment from the classic. My junior researcher, Jacob Fryman loved this idea and he’s hardcore Gen Z, so we’ll see.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, a lot of things got announced. I think it was a bit of a reiteration of the company’s platform strategy sensibility. Some great customer validations came, CEO of HP, Enrique Lores gave a glowing testimonial to how Zoom really helped transform their business. Maybe that even had some influence on the ultimate decision for them to buy Poly and really lean in even further to that kind of future work thing so keep that and my comment on this one pretty short, but I think Zoom is at an inflection point. I think the market largely got the idea that everything was going to be remote forever, wrong. I think it’s going to be much more hybrid and much more, there’s going to be much more in person than I think we actually envisioned.

So getting that right and getting that hardware, software and platform correct is going to be an important thing, especially for a company like Zoom that really one big when people weren’t mobile and that’s got to be the big transformation the company makes that’s throughout its stack and that’s getting more hardware centric through potential partnerships.