{"id":40845,"date":"2020-05-11T15:22:20","date_gmt":"2020-05-11T15:22:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/?guid=453054c2e7dc0050a23b083b318a9377"},"modified":"2020-05-11T15:22:20","modified_gmt":"2020-05-11T15:22:20","slug":"zooms-rise-to-prominence-has-been-meteoric-its-fall-could-be-equally-spectacular","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/zooms-rise-to-prominence-has-been-meteoric-its-fall-could-be-equally-spectacular\/","title":{"rendered":"Zoom’s rise to prominence has been meteoric – its fall could be equally spectacular"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n Keumars Afifi-Sabet<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
12 May, 2020<\/span><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Last weekend we hosted a Zoom-based birthday party for my girlfriend, packed with a four-round quiz, six-part scavenger hunt and a few rounds of e-Pictionary. Oddly enough we were having just as much fun online as we would if we\u2019d headed for a night out at Popworld, as was originally planned. This has become the new normal, and we\u2019re not alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Millions of us have inexplicably signed up to the business-centric\u00a0video conferencing platform<\/a>\u00a0in recent weeks to stay in touch with friends and family. Our online gatherings now extend beyond work meetings into the realm of\u00a0virtual pub trips<\/a>, birthday parties, and even pre-booked dance classes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even as the coronavirus crisis began escalating, nobody could have foreseen the extraordinary surge in Zoom\u2019s popularity, especially given\u00a0the former dominance of Skype<\/a>. Not even Zoom\u2019s founder and CEO, Eric Yuan, would have anticipated a thirty-fold increase in usage, with daily meeting participants ballooning from 10 million in December 2019 to\u00a0300 million just last month<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Zoom\u2019s surge is bizarre in many ways, none more so than how it flew by Skype, although the surge in popularity is something of a special case. Its success is entirely predicated on a short-term growth in demand fuelled by COVID-19 lockdown measures, which will likely be lifted to a great extent by the end of the year. The firm\u2019s privacy and security woes have proven that success isn\u2019t always a walk in the park either, but\u00a0these problems are ultimately manageable<\/a>. The more worrying challenge might come a little later down the line.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s every possibility, first of all, that the company has hit its peak in terms of its user base. Additionally, many of us have been taking advantage of the company\u2019s cost-free tier, meaning the company now encounters a headache that oddly enough resembles the existential crisis plaguing the digital media industry. While online publications have had no problem attracting hundreds of millions of online readers, figuring out how to monetise this massive traffic has been difficult. Zoom, similarly, may struggle to actually convert this unprecedented demand into a viable revenue stream.<\/p>\n

To make matters trickier, phasing in a cost-barrier beyond a 40-minute time limit, which itself can be easily bypassed by starting a new conversation with participants, may drive people away. The likes Skype or\u00a0Facebook\u2019s own newly announced services<\/a>\u00a0are just as capable.<\/p>\n

The final, crucial point to consider is that people aren\u2019t attached to Zoom as a company or platform, but to the friends and family it allows them to keep in touch with. Once\u00a0lockdown measures are lifted<\/a>, it\u2019s more likely than not we\u2019ll leave the service as quickly as we found it and arrange to meet up in-person with the folks we\u2019re desperately missing. As enjoyable as our Zoom-based birthday bash was, I\u2019d still choose that night out in Popworld if given the option.<\/p>\n

For these reasons, the company\u2019s explosion in popularity, a surge in daily participants and even its exorbitant $40.5 billion valuation \u2013\u00a0more than double its $16.1 billion market value in January<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 are all highly volatile. Zoom\u2019s executives, therefore, must ensure all business and product decisions made in light of this short-term success are sufficiently future-proofed.<\/p>\n

There really is no predicting what might happen in a world riddled with coronavirus, but there\u2019s every chance that once we\u2019re all allowed outside and Zoom\u2019s active daily user count plummets, its investors will lose confidence and cut their losses. That could leave the company in a far more precarious position than it has ever been, even before COVID-19. While Zoom represents an astounding story of business success in 2020, the same forces that fuelled its rise may also be the root of its downfall. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Keumars Afifi-Sabet<\/p>\n

12 May, 2020 <\/p>\n

Last weekend we hosted a Zoom-based birthday party for my girlfriend, packed with a four-round quiz, six-part scavenger hunt and a few rounds of e-Pictionary. Oddly enough we were having …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":433,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/433"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40845"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40846,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40845\/revisions\/40846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}