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Comment by oceliker | Hacker News Reader

I feel like Zoom is the Coca-Cola to Google and Microsoft's Pepsi. Zoom is the "OG" product (in the post-March-2020 remote working world), and probably most people's personal favorite. But their competitors have caught up, and they are getting a significant portion of corporate contracts now. And unlike with soda, I don't think there is a lot of direct-to-consumer opportunity in this field.

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> I feel like Zoom is the Coca-Cola to Google and Microsoft's Pepsi.

I'm not sure I buy this, Microsoft and Google were into video conferencing well before Zoom existed. Zoom was well positioned to eat Microsoft's lunch with their product when the pandemic hit. But MS is catching up a bit, and the WFH pressure is easing a bit. This seems like a normal contraction after a Zoom boom.

Zoom is trying to compete by launching Zoom email, calendar, and group chat. Probably a lot of the headcount increases are due to moving fast and trying to get to market as fast as possible.

That ... does not sound like it would work. Zoom is a success because the founder and the founding team came with decades of video conference experience and really just re-implememted webex/cisco products without any bullshit. What do any of these people know about hosting email?

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

I'd add that Chat seems like a modern day corollary.

Remember the time Facebook tried to take on Gmail? Neither does anyone else.

uh, I do? https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/15/facebook-email-killer/

They’re definitely not the OG. Anyone remember Skype before Microsoft mothballed them?

Hence my qualifier:

> Zoom is the "OG" product (in the post-March-2020 remote working world)

We are at the point where every org is going to pay for zoom anyhow like they pay for both ms office and gsuite for the same set of workers. People send meeting links on zoom to clients and collaborators at other orgs. Its the standard now. Try sending a teams link and your clients will say “well we dont use teams can you send a zoom link?”

That's not my experience at all. We basically use Google Workspace for everything except Bluejeans for large meetings. We don't use Zoom at all.

I work in a customer facing role for enterprise software. I have to join plenty of customer Teams and WebEx links whether I like it or not. We use Zoom internally.

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