Remote Tools 1: I Got Zoomed
By: Mark Frein
Tags: Software Design, SaaS, Zoom, Remote Working

I have wanted to do a short piece series on remote tools for a while. We are still in the infancy, in my view, of the remote work revolution (RWR) and the technology platforms that enable it are evolving rapidly. As well, competition is becoming fierce and the stakes considerable as we are seeing with Slack and Microsoft Teams. Remote work is distinctive as a movement in that it is being led by companies in the business of collaborative tools at scale (e.g. InVision, Automattic, Gitlab) and also powered by a suite of SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications for collaboration.

These are not reviews in the formal sense, and are not aimed to provide a balanced or in-depth examination of product features. Rather, I want to discuss how and why particular software platforms/tools have stood out from the pack and become household names and loved brands for remote workers. The pieces are ultimately less aimed at experienced remote technology-users than folks out there that may not have been exposed to remote-working or the tools that power the remote-work wave. [silly disclaimer … I’m not in the employ of Zoom, nor was I asked to write this piece].

I figured what better place to start than with Zoom, the video application powering conversations between remote workers every day across perhaps thousands of distributed organizations around the globe.

I’ve been playing with technologies for remote work for almost 25 years. Elsewhere I wrote of an experience in the 90s when I was a teaching assistant during my graduate work. Myself and the lead professor for an ethics course used early video-based technologies to give lectures for a group of students in Castlegar, British Columbia from Vancouver at the University of British Columbia. Given the two places are separated by steep mountains, often snowed-in over the winter, it seemed like a good experiment.

With permission from Eric. Yes, I look like an absolute fan-boy and he looks like he just had an IPO (which he did).

It rarely worked well. When it worked, it worked only so-so and lag issues were constant. Our fault tolerance for video-based meetings has gone up so enormously even in the last few years, largely due to the wonderful technical improvements in current platforms.

Times have changed. The progress has been incredible. I don’t know how many video calls are made daily worldwide across all platforms (I bet Zoom has a decent estimate), but I would guess it is increasing right now at a staggering rate year-over-year.

There are many great options for video-based meetings on market today. I’m not writing as an in-depth market researcher, a software design expert, or a technologist but rather as a daily user and paying customer that has worked the majority of my days distributed/remote for most of the last decade. This is my story, and my user experience, on how I got “Zoomed” and why, in particular, I made a key choice recently to buy my own personal professional license.

Those of us that work in technology companies often have access to amazing software tools. In many cases, our workplaces provide all the hardware and software we will need to do our jobs (and sometimes way more than we need!). It is more rare for us to personally purchase enterprise-class software licenses for technologies that are primarily for work. The reason why is partly about the community of users. We get value from user-communities.

In the world of software, we talk about “network effects” and Zoom, as with other communication platforms like Slack, MS Teams or even technologies like Trello for project workflow, make their future(s) or are broken from the success or failure at achieving and sustaining network effects. Simply, a network effect is a commercial situation in which the value of a good is dramatically enhanced to each user on the basis of how many users adopt the good. There is zero value for a Zoom user base of 1. But the value climbs exponentially with user adoption.

Given that video-based communication providers have offered solutions both for B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) situations, you can have what I’d call “contained” or closed network effects within enterprises or more open network effects among the public at large. Indeed, there is both the effect of people embracing the technology (e.g., video calls) and a particular technology platform. If a business is going to provide a video platform to its employees, it makes a ton of sense to pick just one.

Zoom certainly has positioned itself as a B2B solution. It was not the first-mover in video-based communication for either home or business use. However, its business success is a wonderful case-study of market and product strategy. I feel that Zoom had a very clear sense of the future of remote work, or, they just got very, very lucky in timing (probably a bit of both). As more and more work happens with people not in the same place, easy technologies not just for room-to-room meetings but for room-to-home, home-to-home, and multiple variants of all of this have become essential to business operations.

I first encountered Zoom just over three years ago at InVision, where I was an executive. InVision is among the world’s largest all-remote/distributed employers. For InVision, having a single-source for “live” facetime was essential. Prior to InVision, I had used a number of other video solutions — some oriented more toward the personal user (i.e., Skype) and some toward the business user (WebEX) and some in-between (Google Hangouts).

I was immediately struck by Zoom’s ease-of-use. But I have continued to be impressed with how they’ve evolved since I’ve met them. For a remote workforce like InVision (or Hashicorp, Gitlab, Zapier, Automattic and plenty more remote-focused companies), culture is created and sustained by the technologies that mediate communication. Strong culture — which, at the end of the day, is about relationships — is built on the foundation of frictionless communications. A high-growth technology company has plenty of scaling challenges that will impact culture … it does not also need to have the tools themselves getting in the way.

My detailed user impact and delight list goes like this:

It just works. This has been a big focus by Yuan and team. I was immediately impressed, and continue to be impressed, by the speed-to-load, the quality of video, and general uptime with a bug-free experience. It’s not perfect, especially at low bandwidth, but it does just work. It plays well with others. Among the many small pieces of genius design, I feel the ease of scheduling and integration with calendaring, messaging, emailing, etc., make Zoom so frictionless to use and, particularly, to adopt. I shoot a url to someone I want to join me via any other communication medium (calendaring, emailing, text chat), and the time to get up and running without major software install has been a major competitive edge. Not to mention out-positioning other B2B solutions that required expensive hardware. Many feel this single-point host model has been Zoom’s killer go-to-market strategy. The ease of adoption has certainly increased virality. It’s its own thing. I actually like that as of now, at least, Zoom isn’t a small piece within a bigger empire. It can feel as though some other video meeting solutions are freebie hooks meant to imbed in your flesh for other reasons. Personally, quite aside from software, privacy, or other considerations Skype felt different to me after the Microsoft purchase. I have nothing against Microsoft or big tech. But there are times when being part of these large multi-solution platforms really helps a solution shine and times when the software “feels” like a castoff. Zoom, in my mind, realized an incredible IPO last year in a very mature and crowded field of video communication solutions because of rare kind of strategic focus. Let’s do one thing, and do it better than anyone else. It works great for simple use, and has more depth for power use. What I mean here is that I can launch a call with my 86-year-old father easily but I can also do screen share with markup, recordings, one-to-large groups, and other razzle dazzle stuff. In computer gaming, there is an art to making the game easily playable right from “on” versus games where you can only really have a full experience if you read a manual or watch YouTube videos. Each has a market. But the true art is making a gaming experience that has both. Immediately playable, but with surprising strategic or play depth discoverable over time. It is fun. Last but not least, Zoom has a sense of humor. In the pic above, Eric was showing me a feature then only available on Mac, but now available on PC. I can look like I’m on a beach, in outer space, or in the Hobbit Shire. For me, this is a key characteristic even if not a businessy one. Enterprise software can be humorless at times. Trello, a Kanban application for team projects, has done an amazing job making its brand personal and loved (with a cute puppy named Taco even!). Evernote did this for me, for a time (elephant!). Zoom is doing the same, at least for me, and it hasn’t even needed an animal mascot. ;) I run online D&D groups using Zoom and everyone now has their go-to fantasy theme background.

This last point about fun is an important consideration, at least for me, when it comes to Zoom’s success in the holy grail of ubiquity (i.e., the volume of users that have used it, are using it, in the market) but also product stickiness. I LIKE using the software. There’s a lot of software I use, but I don’t necessarily enjoy using. I have a positive brand affinity for Zoom. I recommend it (and hence contribute to its NPS or net promoter score). I take a little bit of pleasure each time I click the Zoom link to open a meeting. I’ve recently seen Zoom not only in businesses, but for the board meetings of community centers, small schools, and other organizations not usually at the cutting-edge of business tool adoption. This bodes well for them, and the entire segment, frankly.

The personal punchline.

When I no longer had access to Zoom through my employer, I faced a tough situation. Zoom has a great free version. You get use out of the platform for a reasonable chunk of time. And, it is nothing like having the Pro version in terms of flexibility, and having unlimited time. I was using the free version at a new employer — a small startup in cash conversation mode where I was a remote employee, but many of the workers shared an office. It didn’t obviously make sense to go enterprise (yet) on a paid plan.

Maybe a month in, I navigated Chrome to Zoom.us and looked at the paid plan for Pro. It was an absolute no-brainer. Zoom got me. In my mind, it had become equivalent to having a phone. I couldn’t function without it. I didn’t think of it as “a” video solution but the solution and literally as something I had to have for both work and play. I assigned myself a custom Zoom profile number (same as my cell). Emotionally, it was like paying for an annual phone service, or for a key website domain name. I don’t know what my upper price point limit would be, but at the moment, the $14.99/month/host Pro plan is an easy decision. Heck, I get value from D&D games alone on that pricing.

Zoom will have to continue to refine, adapt, evolve and outposition rivals. It was already a tough field, and it will get even tougher. I believe they got me by a) diligent strategic operational focus b) diligent focus on user experience. Good businesses are built on the basis of simplicity, in almost every situation. I think Zoom reminded us of that and I hope they continue to do so.

— Mark, remote worker, Zoomer not Boomer