Category: Misc.

The general consensus is that seemingly overnight Zoom went from an unknown company to essential infrastructure. That’s not true.

Prior to the coronavirus, it was a major player in enterprise communications.  The reason most people didn’t know about it, is that it was designed as a B2B company (business-to-business sales) rather than a B2C (business-to-consumer). The company had a $16 billion IPO in April of last year. Hard to argue that it’s a “surprise” success after that. For several reasons, B2B companies typically don’t generate the amount of hype consumer-facing firms do.

To understand why Zoom is everywhere now, you need to understand that Zoom is really two businesses: software as a service and hardware.

Software as a service

This is the Zoom everyone knows about–video conferencing. Zoom offers this service through a freemium model. Basic service is free, and customers upgrade to paid tiers for additional features. This is a commodified industry. For the typical non-commercial user, there’s a limited difference between Zoom/Skype/Facetime/Google/Teams. The only major benefit for regular folks is that Zoom allows more than four people on a video screen at once. Zoom does offer benefits over the others for enterprise meetings (larger number of participants).

Hardware

Zoom became a viable business by concentrating on business communications. The following is a typical business situation that displays Zoom’s value.

Imagine that you own a factory in Minnesota. All of the operations people work out of the Minnesota HQ (finance, supply chain, etc.). Meanwhile, you have ten salespeople selling your product throughout America. Every month you have a meeting to talk about the impacts of each function on sales. 15 HQ employees attend the meeting in person and the 10 salespeople call in. Prior to Zoom, the company was required to maintain a bunch of different systems to run this meeting.

1. Room scheduling system to ensure the conference room is reserved
2. AV system to display the presentation to the people in the room
3. Screenshare system that ensures remote workers can see the presentation in real-time
4. Conference call technology to ensure that everyone can hear everyone
5. Audio system that captures all the conversation in the room
6. Cameras in the room so that remote people can see speakers

Zoom was the first one to provide all six in an integrated, easy-to-use offering.

Here’s how the company describes the product in their recent 10k:

Zoom took something that was fragmented and boring, and made it easy for IT people to manage. When the Coronavirus happened, Zoom was well positioned, because many tech-savy business were early adopters. This isn’t to say it has been painless. Here’s Zoom’s CEO talking in BusinessWeek about the growing pains of moving from a B2B company to B2C.

Yuan argues that Zoom’s issues stem not just from its explosive growth but also from the new types of users flocking to it. “We built this as a platform for knowledge workers, for businesses with IT departments,” he says, sitting against a digital backdrop of the San Francisco hills that he obscures as he leans into his webcam. For Zoom users in nonpandemic times, he goes on, there would be a tech support person helping them set up their screen-sharing settings and reminding them to have a password.

The whole article is worth a read.

TL/DR – Zoom didn’t come from nowhere. It was a massively successful enterprise communication platform that is now used by regular consumers.

Photo by Allie on Unsplash

It’s 2017 and the impossible has happened. I agree with Ross Douthat.

Douthat is an op-ed writer for the New York Times. He shouldn’t be. He once argued that people waiting longer to have children is “a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe.” He spent most of 2016 arguing that Trump would not be the Republican nominee, nor would he win the Presidency. After Donald Trump won the Presidential election and explicitly campaigned against Republican policies, Douthat thought to himself, “Democrats need to become more like Republicans.” He wrote anti-gay marriage columns as recently as 2013. For some reason, people take him seriously.

Today he told a Friedman-esq story about a friend’s theory on Trump shaming businesses into not leaving.

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Change Management is a vague concept. It has been around for about fifty years, but there it lacks an 100 percent agreed upon definition. A cynic would say it’s almost like people built an entire industry without fully understanding what it is they were claiming to do.  John Kotter, who popularized the term, originally considered it an 8-step linear process. PROSCI, the largest and most well known change management firm, defined it as “the discipline that guides how we prepare, equip and support individuals to successfully adopt change in order to drive organizational success and outcomes.”

These are partially correct, but holistically wrong. Change Management is just the tactical implementation of strategy. (more…)

I like Catherine Rampell. I can’t say that I am a regular reader, but every time I am forwarded something she wrote I normally read it. That being said, this week wasn’t a good week to be Catherine Rampell. She inadvertently made a case study in the dangers of data journalism.

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On July 22, 2014 General Motors announced they would recall an additional 800,000 cars, bringing their annual total to 29,000,000. According to The New York Times the cars have been called back for a number of problems including: “seats, air bags and turn signals, parts that may not have been welded together properly, and a loss of power steering.” General Motors knew about the problems since at least 2004. They did nothing. In fact, they threatened consumers who asked questions about malfunctions after their spouses and friends died driving the cars. 13 deaths have been linked to GM’s failure.

Pundits everywhere are talking about the value of leadership at GM, if there’s any question about the value of their leadership please, do yourself a favor and read this article from 2012. GM’s answer to declining millennial sales was to hire a Marketing Director whose solution was to “infuse itself” with the same insights that “made MTV reality shows like “Jersey Shore” and “Team Mom” breakout hits”.

Translated: Someone in GM thought it was a good idea to copy television shows that are universally regarded as absolute shit, the scorn of the nation, an embarrassment to everyone involved. 

Look on the bright side people. Millennials may be driving a $16,000 death trap, but at least it looks great in “techno pink,” “lemonade” and “denim.”

This seems relevant:

A corporation ages like a person. As the years go by and the founders die off, making way for the bureaucrats of the second and third generations, the ecstatic, risk-taking, just for the hell of it spirit that built the company gives way to a comfortable middle age…If the business is wealthy and strong, the executives who come to power in these later generations will be characterized by the worst kind of self confidence: they think the money will always be there because it always has been.
Rich Cohen, The Fish that Ate the Whale