Does Google Threaten Legacy Zoom Enterprise Attachment?
While the article completely ignored legacy attachments and how they impact the supremecy battle between Google and Zoom, its baseline premise for how Google is using its position and engineering resources to rapidly commoditize key features focuses on diminishing Zoom’s potential for converting new users into customers. That argument stands because new users motivated by pandemic remote work conditions are unlikely to have even considered Zoom Rooms, especially the school and government users that probably represent the highest value targets for conversion.
Relevant to the broader discussion of longterm viability, Zoom has a strong enterprise install base founded on its Zoom Rooms third party appliances that many businesses have already invested in to outfit conference rooms with native Zoom video conferencing. They provide impressively low friction business customer attachment that will certainly be a barrier for converting existing Zoom customers to other services.
Google and Microsoft have done themselves few favors in competing for Zoom’s pre-pandemic customers with their own missteps. Microsoft, in particular, seems to have bred untimely substantial barriers when it announced that it was retiring Skype for Business in favor of Teams. Though insisting that Teams will have all of the Skype capabilities, enterprises that had deployed Skype telephony and conference systems appear to be in a bind since Microsoft no longer supports the Lync Room System appliances that powered Skype Rooms. Google also has its own meeting room technology, but its chaotic platform strategy has likely impeded broad adoption. That may be changing as a new report has all of Google’s messaging and conferencing development consolidating under a single team lead. However, none of those legacy weaknesses should significantly limit attracting new active users away from Zoom.
An argument for recording meetings is also valid as a differentiating Zoom feature. Microsoft and Google both reserve that capability at higher pricing tiers and currently provide no option to activate it on a per user basis. I doubt that that will be a long-term market barrier if it proves to be driving subscribers to Zoom.
Thanks for the response and your insight, Michael!
