Mike wrote:
Okay, Zoom growth is going to slow, but let’s not get carried away. Assuming we all go back to the office, do we all go back to the same office? Not for me, and I suspect not for many. We have offices all over the country and the world.
Other than people walking into my office, I had very few in person meetings. Similarly, my firm cut down on business travel well before covid. I used to have telephone conferences all day. Those calls are now mainly Zoom calls and will continue to be Zoom calls now. How about calls with people outside your firms? I think the vast majority of those calls will also continue to be Zoom calls. If 20% more of the workforce works from home on a rotating basis going forward (accelerated shift as a result of covid), you will need to do Zoom calls with the group that includes them. I don’t think the cut back will be nearly as big a people think. People will continue to use Zoom.
This is certainly my experience. I work for a large organization (2,000+ users) which had Zoom licenses for about half of employees pre-pandemic and almost all employees from March on. Probably by 2022, work will return to close to normal in terms of a resumption of travel and in-office meetings. But this won’t hurt Zoom at all, because some things have changed that will never change back.
Pre-pandemic, even though we all had access to Zoom, conference calls were all by dial-in. They aren’t going back. Pre-pandemic, when we wanted to talk to someone directly, we called them, either on their office phone or their cell phone. And we were all still mostly communicating by cell through June or July, even though we could have been Zooming. But now, everyone just Zooms each other for one-on-one communication. That isn’t changing when we get back in the office. In fact, we are discontinuing our Verizon phone service and switching to Zoom Phone, effective January. Many employees will not have physical phones at all when we return to the office; everything will be done by Zoom Phone. For us, this is Zoom gaining revenue that would have gone not just to Verizon, but also to Cisco, which provides (1) our current voice-over-i.p. handsets and speaker phones, and (2) Jabber, our “soft-phone” solution. Other organizations in our space will follow.
I note also that Zoom’s chat function is superior to Teams and will likely also take share from Slack. The key to Zoom’s success, on an enterprise basis, is that the product is better. That is why people are using it even though everyone has Teams also.