You all know the cold open to SNL:
"Live from New York…it’s Saturday Night!
Watch this week’s SNL:
"Live from Zoom, it’s…
Alan
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There have only been a handful of times when a brand name has become synonymous with an item:
(most of us call a tissue a Kleenex; for decades, a tampon was referred to as a Kotex)
Rarer still is when a product becomes a noun; “could you Google that for me?”
Could Zoom be the next??
Alan
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At least in my part of the universum, Zoom is already a name that everyone knows. The media is bashing Zoom like crazy. “Google bans Zoom”. Huge letters on the front page. I mean… Google has their hangouts for business, no? It is already a telling fact that people at Google are actually using Zoom instead of the company’s own software. And Microsoft with their unacceptably blunt lock-in-strategy is a virus in itself. If companies and states now recommend to use Teams instead of Zoom, they really don’t understand the business model of Microsoft at all.
But let’s go back to the first sentence: I see so incredibly many events now happening on Zoom and everyone knows Zoom and everyone I have used Zoom with was very positive about the ease of use and the easy way to share screens, do remote support, work on a whiteboard. It just works so easy and privacy is a joke, if people scream about end-to-end encryption but are still posting their screenshots on FB and Instagram etc.
Given the ubiquitous presence of Zoom, I am really confident the completely overblown panic about privacy issues will flatten out very soon. The name “let’s zoom together” will persist and this is liquid gold if you hold Zoom shares. I expect a wild ride in the coming few months, but Zoom won’t go away. Jitsi is no where near Zoom and hopefully Microsoft, Google and FB, at some point, grow weary of pushing the “Zoom is insecure - we are the good guys” narrative. What then persists is the term “zooming”, like people saying “iPad”, if they meany any tablet or to google something, even if they use bing.com.
Even if video conferencing will decrease after the acute Corona phase, people will associate their online meeting adventures with Zoom much more strongly than anything else. Let’s hope Zoom really understands the importance of cleaning up their product security concept and keep Zoom as easy to use as it is right now.
Some really stupid things (like presenting contacts with the mail addresses in the same domain, except a few chosen generic providers) are already fixed. But the guys who introduced this feature really need to be identified and re-educated. If that happens, Zoom has imho a good chance to grow substantially for a few years.
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