Interesting that it was Salesforce that went after them
When I was there, we used Chatter in org62 and it was awful. Yet a lot of time and money was invested into trying to make it work.
With Slack, they have a very easy upsell for their enterprise customers to keep them away from Teams; as well as inheriting a huge userbase that is very familiar with Slack – imagine getting feeds from Marketing and Sales Cloud on a slack channel, taking customer requests directly on Slack via Service Cloud, etc
Note that these are mostly things you can do today, but by bundling it into the Salesforce suite of products they will greatly increase adoption by cross-selling.
It makes sense to me that they would want to own conversations in order to cross-sell and up-sell solutions in their portfolio, and also defend against Microsoft which has Teams.
Slack, don’t know, maybe it’s going to be the default communications platforms for Salesforce products and integrations.
For instance, this just went by on New: https://blog.zoom.us/start-using-zoom-apps/ Zoom, unsatisfied with being the dominant video chat app, now wants to be a "platform" for running apps.
While I understand the nominal business case, the business schools teaching MBAs to reach for this particular golden ring could probably stand to emphasize the importance of continuing to develop the core product as the foundation you expect to stand on in order to become this larger "platform"; seems like in practice, this sort of thing is also an announcement that their core product is now going to begin a long slide into a decaying buggy mess as it gets deprioritized internally in favor of the "platform" product, whereas the platform product usually fails, often non-trivially precisely because they got so excited about all that sweet, sweet lock-in walled-garden platform money that they let their foundation rot and all the wallets they meant to lock in their walled garden wandered away.
I think they started that in the late 2000’s and accomplished it by 2011 or so. Salesforce was the first business to prove SaaS was a viable business model and then launched themselves as a generic application builder that we now call PaaS.
I don’t disagree with your view, but to me, Salesforce isn't another wannabe platform. They’re the one who figured out how to make that path work. (Also, arguably AWS)
If zoom doesn't have a strategy to either diversify or get bought out, they are probably doomed to a slow death.
I've also started to hear Zoom as a noun in place of meeting, "let's do a Zoom", etc., even with people who don't work in tech.
They took over due to being the best offering. They seem entrenched to me now, but who knows...
Can you explain how? To me it seems like the most clunky option that largely became big because people used its name in place of the concept. Some adoption is for latency benefits, but it's not like it's great at that either.
- It desperately wants me not to use the web app
- The desktop app opens a bunch of separate windows, largely without much of a purpose
- The desktop app for some reason requires audio to be enabled separately
- Only the host can share their screen by default
- The "leave meeting" button seems to confuse many people due to its weird one-button submenu
By contrast basically every alternative is just a single click to join, doesn't require extra permissions for core functionality, joins audio by default and just leaves the meeting when you press the button for it.
I do remember how unreliable WebEx was (dropped calls, bad audio, bad video, etc). That was also a desktop app experience, but it was a few years back.
I have used Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts recently as well, although only in the browser. They seemed clunkier to me, but it looks like Microsoft Teams has a desktop app, so maybe the experience of that is better.
I've also tried Discord video calls on their desktop app, but the audio and video quality just didn't compare to Zoom, but maybe it's better with a better plan. Slack calls seemed mostly OK but that was just for a 1 on 1 call, and overall I still preferred Zoom.
In my experience it also seems like Zoom handles low connectivity well, although sometimes it speeds voices up to catch up, but again, I don't mind and then I feel like at least I'm not missing what other folks are saying. Anyway, in general, the experience of Zoom for me has been better than anything other meeting software I've tried.
I could see Salesforce approaching it from that direction. Good investment that gets them in the door of more companies.
Fly.io is a leap ahead, probably move there next. But what’s a better Heroku than Heroku?
Also, to their credit, they have kept the free tier still going, more or less. I'd have expected Salesforce to have killed that.
People don't think brand advertising produces sales, and it's impossible to prove for each individual transaction, but I'm sure it does work!