Buoyed by Video Success, Zoom Explores Email, Calendar Services (theinformation.com) 40
Zoom Video Communications has had an astonishing rise in 2020, emerging as the go-to service for work meetings and family get-togethers during the pandemic. Now the company is considering whether it could replicate its success in video in an even more competitive market: corporate email [Editor's note: the link is paywalled; alternative source]. The Information: The company has begun developing a web email service and might offer a very early version of the product to some customers next year, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The company also is looking into building a calendar application, one of the people said. The efforts haven't been reported previously. According to people familiar with his thinking, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan envisions broadening the company's videoconferencing service into a full-fledged platform that would include email, messaging and other productivity tools. Yuan's goal is to figure out what the "next generation" of email will look like rather than mimic existing products, one of the people said. The projects are still in the early stages, and it is possible Zoom will decide not to move forward.
What? Why??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Zoom, you have a massive, massive boon here.
Take all of those profits and stuff you have learned from greatly increased video use during the pandemic, and make the video client truly amazing!
All you can do by venturing into the 'nam of email clients is lose focus, and lose the lead you have built up on other video competitors.
Now is the time to surge ahead in video, and take a commanding lead that will hold for years to come... not to make yet another email client.
Re: (Score:2)
Sad, but it's only the next reason to avoid using it and to look for alternatives. I never liked it anyway that they ask for people's age just for creating an account so one can use Zoom.
Re: (Score:2)
If they want to try something new they should get into VR meetings, like Second Life etc but without the flying phalluses. Sure there are lots of options out there already, but there's room for improvement and they've got a massive brand name recognition advantage, which is enough to overcome any technical shortcoming :-P
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. When VR meetings become the norm.. the executives will wonder how they missed it.
I want a virtual meeting controlled by viewer (Score:2)
If they want to try something new they should get into VR meetings, like Second Life
The problem with anything fully VR is that people control how you see them.
What I would really love to see, is a video conferencing software where you could take the faces of people talking and arrange them any way you liked.
Since the technology is already advanced about to cut people out of background really well, why not let the viewer take each face and arrange them in a size and placement of their own choosing?
It could b
Re:What? Why??? (Score:4, Insightful)
The one thing they have going for them is focus. This is why people are using Zoom instead of Teams or Meet. If they want to fill out a suite, they're going to have a mediocre offering and people may not even bother with the meeting portion if they try to force it.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Good move: noone is offering this "email service"! (Score:1)
A bit retro (Score:1)
Some thoughts:
* Email is so last century
* Could Zoom succeed where Google failed with WAVE?
Re: (Score:2)
Dumb (Score:1)
"Next generation" email? (Score:5, Insightful)
The "next generation" of email will look just like what we have now: asynchronous, largely text-based messaging. You can fool with the client interface, which has already been done to the N'th degree, but that's not really changing anything. You can make it easier to smoothly embed stuff like video and voice, which will make the result infinitely more annoying but won't add any actual value 99.99% of the time. (and where it might add value, asynchronous interchange is probably not the ideal channel anyway.)
If Zoom want to sink themselves, trying to supersede email is an effective but hardly novel way to do it.
Re: (Score:3)
The only way to come up with "next generation" is to create the protocol. And the only way to succeed in adoption is to open it up to everyone else. There's no money in that unless you're an established player who wants to reduce spam.
Re:"Next generation" email? [Sans spam] (Score:2)
Speak of the devil? So here's a copy (fresh off the clipboard) of the suggestion I just sent to Zoom:
Device Type? is misleading. I use a number of the options, including with Zoom.
Read that you are thinking about email. Unless you do something radical, you aren't likely to get me to switch, so here's my radical idea: Email without spam. Not this stupid Bayesian filtering "Live and let spam" garbage. But an email system that is serious about putting the spammers out of business. An email system that attacks the spammers' business models and scares them away. No need to search for false positives or be annoyed by false negatives because the spammers be gone.
My suggested approach would involve an integrated spammer-fighting mechanism. No problem with allowing for a "Report spam" option for the soft filtering approach, but you should also have a "Fight spam" option that would let us do more. I suggest an iterative analysis of the spam, with the wannabe spam fighter helping your system with identifying the characteristics of the spam while refining the targeting of the countermeasures. In many cases, fighting the spam will be much easier if we work together. But you can't let me near the trigger. You have to keep control of the trigger. People who hate spam as much as I do would blast away whenever there was a possibility of hurting the spammers. You need to control the actual attacks on the spammers--but I would love to help you aim the cannon.
Proof of concept: The pump-and-dump stock-scam spam you no longer receive. It really is possible to break the spammers' business models and then that kind of spam will go away. After some academics proved this scam was printing money, they changed the rules, removed the money, and that particular kind of spam vanished.
Re: (Score:1)
The only way to come up with "next generation" is to create the protocol. And the only way to succeed in adoption is to open it up to everyone else. There's no money in that unless you're an established player who wants to reduce spam.
No? https://jmap.io/ [jmap.io]
Re: (Score:2)
Transport protocol, I mean. Client protocol is nearly irrelevant - IMAP is messy, but still fine.
Complete loss of focus! (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds like a terrible idea to me. This screams to me that the CEO and crew are either bored with this, or completely inebriated with their random success.
While Zoom works, its not the best and has a long way to go. Seems to me they should focus on their core business.
--
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes. - Oscar Wilde
So, the old in through the out door technique? (Score:2)
So, Zoom management feels like they can leverage their current video conferencing platform into email and calendar? What's next, they gonna announce word processing, spreadsheet and power-point alikes?
I do not see this ending well for anyone involved. Not for the company, not for the employees, and certainly not for the end users. Ah well, I guess success doesn't always breed success.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd disagree slightly. When the company fails the end users will be pushed into using better products, which is a win for them.
They will also need to add cloud services (Score:2)
Like cloud and compute/service instances to be exactly like everyone else in this space.
Re: (Score:2)
Add blockchain for a bingo...
Unix philosophy #1 (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features". (Doug McIlroy)
See MS Teams for example on how not to do videoconferencing tool. Bloated hell.
And then toss systemd into the mix, just for shits and giggles.
The real story (Score:2)
I agree that getting into email is dumb. However, unlike many other commenters, I think it might actually work. Why? The Chinese Communist Party has tons of resources to throw at potentially getting access to corporate email accounts. They can fund Zoom's email push pretty much indefinitely.
Re: (Score:2)
We'll quickly find out whether they manage to implement E2EE correctly.
Excellent (Score:2)
I shall immediately open an account and send out messages discussing the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Re: (Score:2)
We'll quickly find out whether they manage to implement E2EE correctly. Maybe?
Good luck Zoom (Score:3)
Are you going to continue lying about the security of your products? I wouldn't touch your crap with a 10 foot pole.
Yeah, because we don't have enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
... email and calendar clients!
Christ on a motorcycle, what have they been smoking?
More savvy business users are already switching much of company communication away from email, toward threaded communications via apps such as Slack or Teams. Email has its place still, but people no longer want to wade through a 50 levels of replies to get the gist of the communication.
Calendars? FFS, we have calendar software up the wazoo already - it's *everywhere* - and most of it ain't broke, it works and works well.
What the hell can Zoom do to make it better?
They would be better placed baking in the same functionality that Slack and Teams have, right into the Zoom video client.
How about releasing a *killer* whiteboard app? - that's one thing this pandemic has shown, how incredibly important the ability to scribble on a whiteboard is during planning sessions.
But no, Zoom want to go back in time and ... I despair, but really, I don't care.
Let them go ahead and do it - and fall on their asses.
And if history teaches us anything... (Score:3)
... it's that trying to support a swiss army knife application as a single company is a fools errand.
Make an app that does one thing very well, then provide an API so other apps can easily integrate with it.
That's what slack did - and it works brilliantly.
The core focus is the slack app - as it should be.
Let other people provide additional functionality via that API and focus on the CORE functionality that supports them in their endeavours.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, but it sucks. Compare it to something like Miro and it is left seriously wanting.
email and messaging? (Score:2)
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan envisions broadening the company's videoconferencing service into a full-fledged platform that would include email, messaging and other productivity tools.
They want to complete against Salesforce.com (Slack) and Microsoft?
The song that so many tech companies... (Score:2)
The song that so many tech companies can't seem to get out of their heads: I just want to be your everything [youtube.com].
Zawinski's Law (Score:2)
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail...
I bet it will be called (Score:2)
Zoom Teams
Zoom NEEDS to diversify (Score:2)
I'm sure that we will all continue to experience more video meetings than we did 5 years ago. But as society begins to open back up, some businesses will recall their employees back to their offices, and resume having in-person meetings. The net result will be less use of Zoom and other video meeting competitors.
Also, more competitors are vying for a slice of the market. Google Meet, MS Teams, Slack, Skype, they all want their share, making it harder for Zoom to retain their dominance.
Zoom knows they need t
Volume Control (Score:2)
How about adding client side per-user volume control first? That way my daughter can turn down the one kid that comes through super loud. Team Speak has had this for a long time.