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Comment by theptip | Hacker News Reader

> Yuan told employees that Zoom the product does not allow Zoom the company to "build as much trust or be as innovative as in the office." So why does it even exist and how is it making money?

This line of reasoning is asinine. Perfectly defensible to say that Zoom is great for other industries, or orgs built with different structure. While eating your own dogfood is a confidence builder, it’s by no means a requirement for companies to do it 100%.

Also to suggest that Zoom is only meaningful as a product if you can run your company fully remote is laughably myopic; there is lots of value to having VCs between offices and teams, even if those teams work in-person.

Sure, Zoom has marketing material that leans into remote work. To avoid confused thinking like the OP you should note the purpose of marketing teams and not over-index on what they say.

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It seems to me to be a missed opportunity. If you believe Zoom is merely a video conferencing app then of course Zoom is only meaningful as that. But remote work is not going away and there is an opportunity to support it by being more than simply video conferencing.

Zoom is a remote work product. Zoom says there's a lot of remote issues. That says to me that there is an opportunity to dogfood their own product development. Just going back to the office is a huge waste of potential.

In some sense, yes a missed opportunity. On the other hand, their customers are voting with their feet; most are returning to office.

I would characterize it more as a bet that didn’t pay off. In 2020 it was a no-brainer to bet on substantially more remote work, and Zoom was one of the best-positioned to make that bet. In 2023 that bet looks way lower in EV. They still have upside potential but I don’t think anyone realistically expects that the F500 are going full or even majority remote anymore.

Even with hindsight it seems a good bet, I don’t think they incorrectly evaluated the information they had or could have been expected to have.

In my industry (not tech, but white collar) a ton of companies have downsized their office space to where it's now impossible for everyone to work in the office. And because of that, there will always be remote work in this industry as a whole because it's a valuable perk. Companies that don't offer full or partial remote are at a hiring disadvantage.

Remote work is a relatively new market that Zoom accidentally fell into. However, they don't seem to have the leadership to capitalize on that early lead and they'll eventually become irrelevant as other companies build video conferencing as a mere feature of a bigger remote work platform.

I think it’s likely to pan out as you say; video calls are a feature not a product, and Google Workplace / MS Office should be able to get to parity soon (though the sluggish improvements to Meet make me hesitant to bet it’ll be this decade).

That said, you could make the same argument about Dropbox and they are still around.

Totally agree. Why not use this as an opportunity to explore the problem their users are presumably facing?

I would agree with you. But on the other hand, I think there will be a very high rewards for an entity that can "unlock" a easy, repeatable and usable set of remote work patterns. And by reward, other companies would pay a lot for this.

It seems that a lot of the reversal of the WFH / remote work trend is coming from the higher ups at companies, mostly centered around culture, on-boarding of new employees, getting things done, etc.

The "a lot of work got done around here in the 5minute hall way conversation" crowd has some good points honestly. I know at my company, they instituted 2 days in the office, specifically mentioning the erosion of our culture and "ways of working."

Were I the Zoom CEO, I would 100% be experimenting and iterating on what it means to be a "remote first" Fortune 500 company, because doing that correctly is worth a lot of money.

> While eating your own dogfood is a confidence builder, it’s by no means a requirement for companies to do it 100%.

Of course. It is also not a requirement for Microsoft's UI designers to actually use Windows and so on. Nevertheless, if you decide to dogfood, it gives your company many advantages that you otherwise lose.

To your point of video conferences between offices and teams... I think the worst possible setup is a zoom conference that's a hybrid of remote and in-person attendees. It's where video conferencing really falls down.

I worked for a company remotely and really hated the experience of being "zoomed in" to a conference room. Couldn't hear, couldn't participate, couldn't jump in, etc. Lots of side conversations at the table. Then the whole table stands up and goes to lunch. It wasn't until the company went fully remote that remote work, well, worked.

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