Unfortunately my daughter has a fever. Here in BC, Canada, we can call 8-1-1 to speak with a pediatric nurse for free thanks to Healthlink BC (https://www.healthlinkbc.ca/). We called and the nurse felt we needed to speak with a doctor, so we made an appointment for just 40 minutes later! The nurse said the doctor would call us on the phone and give us instructions for a video “visit”.
Forty minutes later the phone rang. We answered and a voice said “Please hold while we connect you to a Zoom Phone call”! This means at least this part of the BC government is using Zoom Phone, not just Zoom!
We spoke with the doctor for a few minutes to give him some history and then he said we should start video. We expected the normal experience of everyone hanging up to join a meeting, but we were surprised by something new… Without hanging up, we switched to email and tapped a link (it was sent while the phone call was in progress) and the doctor told us the passcode to enter and the call converted to a Zoom Meeting!
Think about that for a moment. We got a call on our mobile number (so we were on our regular phone) that was transferred in to the Zoom app without any hiccup. We did have to tap the normal “join with internet audio” button upon entering the meeting but that was it. His audio was not interrupted since he was already in Zoom. Very impressive!
This is the power behind the “video first” approach. I believe this has the potential to create a future where a company like Zoom can be a major disruptor of communications technology and user experience. Let me make the case…
I think we may be witnessing a soft form of infrastructure inversion. For example, when the internet started it was forced to fit through the old phone infrastructure. Remember dial-up modems? everyone thought the idea of doing more than simple statically delivered text was already more than could be handled, EVER, and the internet would never work. Eventually however, we became able to send not only text but digital voice using a Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) through the phone lines…what a waste that must have seemed when you could just talk the normal way (by the way, at this point video was thought to be impossible, EVER). Fast forward and now the infrastructure has completely inverted and all phone calls are digital and go over the internet. If you haven’t read anything about this phenomenon, it is one of the most interesting recurring concepts I’ve ever been exposed to (By this I believe: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31869077-the-internet-of…). For example, cars started out on roads made for horses and they looked very inefficient, today that infrastructure is designed for cars and horses are widely accepted as less efficient. Continue to fast-forward and companies like Netflix have proven that even full resolution films can be “broadcast” through the internet. This, plus device tech and other innovations, paved the way for a combined technology, video + voice, in real time, by anyone anywhere. Ok, so obviously I’m heavily paraphrasing history here, but you get the point (I hope).
That was a long paragraph and you might be wondering where I am going with this and what Zoom has to do with it all. Well until Zoom’s video-first approach, what we had was essentially chat or audio apps adding video as a feature. It was something dropped in on top of existing infrastructure and it wasn’t very efficient. The quality was bad. Calls froze so often that we would take pictures of people’s “bad-connection-faces” and email it to them to piss them off. It became common to switch video off so the call would at least have a chance of continuing. Enter Zoom. Zoom was built from the ground up to deliver great video. Once you have that nailed, think how trivial simple voice-only calls become. Zoom has essentially inverted the soft infrastructure. It can carry the old infrastructure on the new. That is inversion!
There is another extremely important part of infrastructure inversion: once the inversion occurs, new use-cases begin to emerge that were not possible before. This brings me back to the beginning of this post. Remember that seemingly normal phone call we were on that suddenly turned in to a Zoom Meeting? That took a lot of hard and soft technological innovation, working together, but the end result felt simple and fluid. The end result was only possible because Zoom is video first and can run a phone system on top of their video system, rather than the other way around, so the two can be seamlessly integrated in new ways. To think of it this way: We did not experience a trick of being transferred from a phone call to a video meeting. We were already in a Zoom meeting, we just didn’t know it yet on our end. Granted we were indeed transferred, but the other side was not, and even so, it was still handled with minimal interruption on our end.
I know I’ve taken some liberties here to paint a picture. I do however think this is an obvious but also easily overlooked aspect of the Zoom growth story. Feel free to debate with passion.
